Category: Cool

It all started with Mr. Bill making some comments on his show on Fox News. He commented that some Web sites had picked up a San Francisco Chronicle article about a local station dropping his radio show — which was wrong, he said, because the show was merely moving to another Bay Area station.

But then he got angry. Quoting the rant:

“All over the country, we have people posting the most vile stuff imaginable, hiding behind high tech capabilities. Sometimes the violators are punished, but most are not. We have now have teenagers ruining the reputations of their peers in schools on the Internet. Ideologues accusing public officials of the worst things imaginable. And creeps gossiping about celebrities in the crudest of ways.

“The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes. For example, the guy who raped and murdered a 10-year old in Massachusetts says he got the idea from the NAMBLA Web site that he accessed from the Boston public library. The ACLU’s defending NAMBLA in that civil lawsuit.”

Them’s fighting words.

So damn near every respectable blogger responded, as quoted in this article.

There is one thing that Mr. Bill has that other folks don’t have is that he has a megaphone to spread his voice. The problem is that the minute he starts bad-mouthing the ‘net, his megaphone is no louder than anybody elses.

If you hadn’t heard before, police in Naples, Florida, were forced to shut down a lemonade stand that Avigayil Wardein — a brown-haired, 6-year-old who just lost two front baby teeth — had been running. Someone reported her, saying it was against the law for her to sell lemonade with out a permit from the city. And the city shut it down (though offered her a free permit as the Mayor of the city was a client of hers, saying it was good lemonade). The girl’s lemonade stand is back in business, after it made national headlines and talk shows and hundreds of people offered to pay for the permit. There’s even a college scholarship fund setup for the little girl at a local bank.

But the greatest part, and I’ll quote the article, is that the little girl is famous, but doesn’t seem to realize it.

She’s still a normal 6-year-old who wants to spend what little money she has on candy, art supplies and dresses she can wear when she practices her ice skating moves. She likes to show off her fingernail polish — blue on one hand and purple on the other — as she fills the plastic cups with her mother’s homemade lemonade.

But she doesn’t realize how many people know about her. She bases fame on how many coins and dollar bills are in her tip jar ? a glass vase with a sign taped across it letting customers know spare change can be tossed inside.

Since news of the lemonade stand began spreading earlier this week, she expects to be “famous” for a long time.

“It makes you get lots and lots of money,” Avigayil said, while holding her tip jar. “It’s really fun.”

Avigayil, we salute you, and if I were anywhere near Florida, I know I’d be buying your lemonade.

Actually, it’s all called Super Mario Advance 4, but it’s actually (for all intents and purposes) Super Mario Brothers 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System ported to GBA. This was the game that killed most of my younger days. I still have my old Nintendo Power strategy guide for the game. It’s beaten up, but it’s there, right next to my equally beat up guide for the original Final Fantasy for NES. Full story, with screenshots..

From Media News: “Faced with drooping enrollments in the region with the state’s highest unemployment rate, the school board slashed the budget by 20 percent this year. Several teaching positions disappeared, the school week was squeezed into four days by extending the school day and all funding for the high school yearbook was cut. But Kevin Graham, a senior with a 3.5 grade-point average who starred in the school play and worked nights after school at a local cafe, promised his 110 high school classmates they’d get their yearbook, even if he had to do it all himself — which is exactly what he has done.” Full Story.

Why is this cool? One, this is local (over in Joseph, Oregon), and two, I was an editor on my high school year book and I know it’s not easy to produce one, let alone by yourself. A yearbook is a big deal for many high school kids, especially in a small town.

I do a lot of desktop publishing and Web design, and this online font browser will come in REALLY handy. It’s faster at reading my local fonts than most offline browsers. This, along with EasyRGB and ColorMix and I’ve got all the typography and color tools I need. Thanks to Chris for the font browser link.

If you were to work with a bunch of strangers to build a high-rise building, with everybody designing their own floor, you’d end up with some interesting results. That was the idea behind this project, and the results are very cool. This and previous link from b3ta.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Comic Sans typeface from Microsoft. It has its uses, but people use it far too much. Apparently there’s a group that hates it so much, they’ve created nice little stickers for you to paste onto signs who use the typeface.

A few days ago, I posted that the Chubby Jedi had been identified. Now, there’s a fund raising effort that has been started to give the kid some cash for entertaining us all. The effort and the kid is now receiving national attention from all sorts of places (though the NYT’s source for the image on the story is “http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/05/19/business/19DORK.jpg” — real professional guys).

One word: Ouch. That’s 1.019 push-ups per second.

OK, we all remember the game 20 questions where someone has to guess object you’re thinking about by asking you up to 20 questions. But have you ever played it against a computer? The software’s AI is pretty good, so good luck tricking it.