Where Americans Are Moving

While this is a few months old, this interactive map is a really fun toy to play with. Click on a county in the US, and it will show (based on 2008 IRS data) where people are coming from that are moving to that county, and where they're going if they're leaving, and more stats about the type of people that are moving. Deschutes County has by far the most activity in Oregon east of the Cascades, but it's fun the click on the massive population areas like Los Angeles and New York to see the country light up. It's also interesting to see the large amount of folks leaving areas like Detroit and the huge amounts of folks moving to areas like Portland.

Time Killer For The Day

Yes, it may be on a kid's site, but Whizzball is a fun puzzler that unfortunately has the stupidest username signup (you're best off just mashing the keyboard to find an available username).

I Don't Think This Guy Trained The Dog

I think the dog trained the guy to dance like this...

Bored?

Need something to do? This might help.

Because There's A Video For Everything...

...here's a dude speed-solving a Rubik's Cube in 31.5 seconds while free falling from 14,000 feet sitting in a rubber boat.

Reading Material

• If you gave a pan handler a free credit card, how would they use it?
• Logic and thinking is hard for some people.
• Eight Clever Ways To Take Advantage of Free Calling in Gmail.
• SpongeBob dubs the classics.
• Why are people in the IT field so insecure and territorial? Read up.
• MonaVie Blackmails Me?
• How do you search for back doors from previous IT staff?
• An SNL Set is Built in Seconds.
• Free Wordpress 3.0 theme for educational websites.
• Should you use that jQuery plugin or roll your own solution?
• Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium (I've always been for this kind of research).
• I'm looking into getting a new wallet, and these look interesting.

It's Snowing. In August.

It's August, and it's frickin' snowing outside. It was over 100°F last week, and this morning, it's cold, nasty, and snowing in many places. Here's what Mt. Bachelor's Web Cam looks like right now:

As usual, Barney's all over it.

Don't Try This At Home

Seriously, how in the hell would anybody think this is a good idea (mildy NSFW)?

Time Killer For The Day

Treadmillasaurus Rex is...well...I'll just take the description from Reddit:

You are a T-Rex running on a treadmill avoiding lasers and saw blades during which the Wheel of Awesome relentlessly spins and doles delights such as +1 Confetti or dishes determents such as +1 Obstacle. There's also unlockable top hats.

Reading Material

• Where's my red turtle shell for that guy that just cut me off? Mario Kart Symbols appearing on bike lanes in Portland.
• If you have an iPhone 4, here's a pretty good collection of wallpapers.
• I'm doing a bit of research on creating a iPhone-friendly version of a site for my day job and the UiUIKit CSS and HTML framework is going to help out quite a bit, I think. PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Sencha Touch also look interesting as well. Booking marking that all for my reference.
• I'm terried of older web developers because I'm becoming one.
• Introducing JITB. a Java-based Flash player that runs pretty dang fast.
• Because you never know when it will come in handy: File I/O in Every Programming Language.
• Looking for a way to compress JS and CSS? Convert it to a PNG.
• Great list of Lifehacker's best Android apps.
• What's my computer doing? is a simple way to figure out what programs are thrashing your CPU and hard drive.
• A graphic illustration of music industry licensing madness. That flowchart makes my head hurt.
• How to disable Facebook's new "Places" feature.
• 12 Great Ways to Customize Your Facebook pages.
• Need to see if a site is safe for work before visiting? Variably Safe For Work might help.
• 100 Quality Wordpress Themes.
• That's going to sting a bit.

How Big Is It, Really?

One of the coolest sites I've seen in a while, this BBC project puts a dimension onto current events that makes the news much more interesting. For example, here's how big Burning Man would be if it were held in Bend.

Really Bad Movies

You they're some of the worst of the bunch when Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel tore into them like they did.

Time Killer For The Day

Wear out your mouse button with One Button Arthur.

A New Generation Of Yo Yo Man

Tommy Smothers had nothing on this guy:

Updating The Archives

You may or may not know, but when I first started blogging, I blogged on the jake.orty.com domain. I started this blog back in '02 during a brief time of unemployment. Once I found work, I neglected the blog for several months, until I finally got around to posting again (was still at jake.orty.com back then -- hadn't moved to utterlyboring.com yet). When I got back to posting again, I had bulldozed the previous archives from the brief blip in May that I was posting here.

I finally got around to getting on the Web archive and getting my old archives, and now have May 2002 back in my archives. Most of the links in those old entries are long dead, but at least they're back in the database.

Now I just need to get my dozens of old dailyemerald.com columns into this database, since they're not accessible on the Web anywhere. I was an online columnist back before "blogging" was all the rage. I've been writing online since the 90s, you young whipper-snappers (get off my lawn) and it'd be nice to have that all in one place. But I figured I should probably ask the Emerald's permission first. so that's coming next.

Time Killer For The Day

It took me 22 throws (and a good majority of my lunch break) to save the peasants by catapulting one of them 50,000 feet. How long did it take you in Catapult Madness?

Update: So I played it again today on endless mode, and got up to 86465 feet. Somehow. No idea how, the fat king just kept bouncing.

A Proper Car Review

I love Top Gear. Offended by a fan having written in to complain that Top Gear doesn't do proper car reviews anymore, Jeremy Clarkson takes the new Ford Fiesta on a 'serious' road test.

Reading Material

• Is Wikileaks protected by shield laws?
• The secret histories of those oddball computer symbols.
• Yet another reason to ignore everything Rush Limbaugh says.
• Infuriating wheelchair ramps (I don't know how any both in a wheelchair could navigate these).
• 35 essential social media resources you may have missed.
• Claws Mail is another simple e-mail client out there that looks pretty dang cool (as are some of its plugins).
• Ned to convert a video, audio, image, ebook, or other document to another format? This might help.
• What happened to Yahoo?
• A man who only tweets when he poops (probably inspired by this comic that I linked to a while back).
• If you're buying a phone of eBay for Sprint, Boost, or Virgin Mobile, you might want to check the ESN/MEI to make sure it's clean, otherwise it won't activate.
• God's number (in relation to the Rubik's Cube) has been proven to be 20.
• Great list of free online apps and services.
• Unicorns are such jerks.
• Gorilla plays the Game Boy (full story).
• For my reference, a few programs to get thumbnails for your movies on your WDTV box: WDTV Image Grabber, MetaX (edit: Fixed Link), and Thumbgen.
• ITA is yet another flight search engine to try to find the best deals.
• Turning terrible business jargon (like "bucketize") into unsucky words (like "categorize").
• Be sure to print up these Journalism warning labels and stick them on your local newspapers.
• Netflix is getting a bunch more movies on its streaming service (which is why I love my WDTV Live Plus and its Netflix support -- if the thing had Hulu, I'd probably cancel my cable).
• Five freeware apps for extreme file management. There are some good ones there for some handy (but usually very specific) purposes.
• If you have guests staying at your house frequently, this guest information packet might be very handy (I could see this being re-worked for a vacation rental homeowner very easily).

• The Web Is Dead. Or not.

Time Killer For The Day

It's a quick little game, and really simple controls, but Flabby Physics is quite fun. Play it after the jump, if you'd like.

4Chan Founder Gives Palin Courtroom Lesson In Internet Slang

You have to love the lack of tech and Web knowledge shown in the modern day judicial system (I honestly don't have a clue as to why some of these questions needed to be asked).

Q: And the term “rickroll” you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going to be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, is that right?
A: Yes.
Q: He was some kind of singer?
A: Yes.
Q: It’s a joke?
A: Yes.

Why The Subtitles?

Because the guy can't speak English...

This was apparently from an Aussie sketch show called Comedy Inc..

Making Of Music With Cars

You may or may not have seen this fairly impressive video:

But what's far more interesting is how they did it.

Congrats To Central Oregon's Best Blogs

The Source's "Best Of Central Oregon" is out, and congratulations go out to Jon at Hack Bend for winning (again) and my ol' buddy Josh at Central Oregon Athlete for taking the honorable mention prize.

Congrats to both of you, and as soon as I can find the mention online, I'll link to it (I just checked this in this morning's print edition). Their "Best Of" URL still goes to the 2009 edition.

Update: Looking through the "Best Of", there was mention of the "Best Bend Stereotyping" and I honestly had not seen this:

The Building Is Possessed!

Can you imagine walking down the street and seeing something like this?

More over at wimp.

Too Bad They Missed

Justin Bieber has some pretty good reflexes and manages to avoid getting clobbered head-on by a water-bottle:

E=mc² Is A Liberal Conspiracy

A least that's what the Conservapedia founder thinks.

Time Killer For The Evening

Can you complete all the mindless achievements in Achievement Unlocked 2? If not, there's help (which I needed before I could get to 100%)

Reading Material

• A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.
• An interesting way to look at the world: Google Maps without the Maps.
• Need special paper (like line/graph paper) but don't want to buy it? Print it up here or here.
• He was touting family values during the Clinton impeachment, but Newt Gingrinch likes to play around, too.
• More songs are covers than you might think.
• 40+ billionaires pledge to donate half of wealth via the Giving Pledge.
• Now this is stupid: Man who gives free rides home to drunks was arrested for operating a taxi service without a license (related: watching your neighbors' kids before they go to school could get you fined for running an unauthorized day care).
• Want to generate a URL that will failover automatically to a mirror should the original site go down? I Can Has Mirror might be able to help.
• 10 free web UI kits and resources for designers.
• Everybody acts like photo tampering is a new thing, but it's been around for over 100 years.
• A hilarious visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin.
• Want to be notified when a web site is sending data to Google? Here's a nice obnoxious alarm for you (please note: many sites out there, including this one, will trip the alarm, because they use either Google Adsense for ads or Google Analytics for web stats).
• CCleaner Enhancer makes the best system cleaner even better.
• If you're the exercising/fitness type, here are a bunch of great mobile fitness apps for your phone.
• That's gratitude for you: The man who made iPhone 4 has been ousted at Apple.
• It's amazing what you can do with 1KB of Javascript or 10KB and some libraries.
• A stupid-simple way to hack change a Windows XP password.

Wave Goodbye To Google Wave

It was an interesting experiment, but Google's killing Google Wave. Too bad folks went through the effort to write books on it, and obviously the author of said book is dissapointed.

Portland Man Does Quarter-Mile in 10.4 Seconds -- In An Electric Car

What's even better is it's a hideously ugly (but pimped out) Datsun:

Story over on Wired, with more details straight from the guy who did it. To put it in perspective, that's super-car territory.