Category: Cool

Then send them a letter! Amy has posted a couple of form letters you can send to site publishers: one for the general public, and for journalists. I know I’ll be printing these up and sending them to a few places.

The official rules for everybody’s favorite game — like it wasn’t already confusing enough.

Don’t play this at work, otherwise you’ll keep trying it until you beat my score:

Good luck 🙂

Update: The above link is down, but one of the comments gave us a new link, which is where the folks posting comments are getting their higher scores.

Update, this time on 1/29: Looks like the guy who originally created this game has it posted here. The link in the update above was reverse engineered off the original with his logo added, but it makes it so the scores are really high (as you can’t get a very high score with the original — at least compared to above).

Update on 2/4: Another variation.

Update on 3/10: There are actually a pile of variations of this game. Many listed in the comments to this entry, but this site lists a pile of variants, as well as a history of the the game. Thanks Neil for the link.

Still to this day, this is by far the most commented on entry on my site, surpassing even the One Weekend a Month my Ass entry.

Update on 10/31/05: Simone sent me a new link for this game. Just so you know, however, you are no longer the most commented on entry on this site. That title belongs to a couple entries.

Update Some Time later: Here’s a good article that sums up the Smack The Penguin Phenomenon.

A guy buys a loaf of normal white bread. Takes it home to discover that it’s sliced horizontally instead of vertically. So he decides to make a sandwich fit for a king. That’s a thing of beauty, and even bigger than the monster I had at Lindy’s in NYC. Link via b3ta.

One thing that I like about the new version of HotBot is it’s ability to easily switch between search engine results from different providers. Queryster extends this concept, and takes it a step further. From a SearchEngineWatch article:This is where the fun begins. Queryster “stays” with you on the result page, showing up as a goofy looking “graph” with logos of the search engines in circles, connected to each other by lines. Click any of the circles, and results from another engine are displayed.

The Queryster interface is translucent, allowing you to see text beneath it. You can drag it around the page by clicking on one of the lines between the circles, and holding the mouse button down while you drag.

[…]

You can customize Queryster by selecting your favorite engines from a list of 25. The usual suspects are available, but there are also buttons for meta search engines, and multimedia engines like Picsearch and Singingfish.

There’s also a neat tool that allows you to read blogs like a slide show, as well as a few other fun toys.

I just got an email from an old friend of mine, and I told her I’d help spread the word to budding actors and actresses out there (assuming some of them actually read this blog). Here’s the text of the announcement:

We are having an open casting call for Gus Van Sant’s next film, in Portland, Oregon. This is a film about a Rock & Roll musician that will shoot this April in Portland. We are looking for males and females, ages 16 – 25 years old. We want to meet all types of people with interesting personalities and style.

The casting call will be held:

Sunday, February 29, 2004

10:00 a.m. – 4 p.m.

at C.S.C. – Child Services Center (Formerly Washington High School)

531 S.E. 14th Avenue

Portland, Oregon 97214

Info Hotline: (503) 248-6741

Prior acting experience is not necessary. We are interested in real people. Interested individuals just need to show up Sunday and be patient.

So there you go, Heather, you owe me a favor 😉

A pile of News sites out there require visitors to setup accounts or register to read the contents of an article. They have reasons for doing this, obviously, but it’s a pain in the ass to deal with. According to Amy, somebody has gone through the effort of going around to many of these sites, setting up phony accounts with a common username and password.

When you’re asked to log in to a news site, try the userID freethepresses. If an e-mail address is required as the userID, enter: [email protected]

Then enter the password: freethepresses

So far, it works at The New York Times, Wash. Post, LA Times, Chicago Trib, among others.

And if you come across a site where that user/pass doesn’t work, feel free to set it up.

A very handy tool that can convert bitmaps to vector formats like EPS, AI, SVG, PDF, and more. Link via Waxy’s Links.

The Orgulator is a silly little browser toy that allows you to play with the colors, size, and blur, smash, and do other fun things with any Web site. It requires MSIE 5.5+ to work, as it uses MSIE-specific DHTML stuff (if you try in something else, you’ll get this page). It also doesn’t work on any site that uses frame break out code (like mine) to prevent people from framing your site. That was a problem a while ago for me as somebody framed my site in an invisible frame, and then sent pop-ups flying out of that invisible frame. I might remove that code at some point, but I’m just keeping it there for now.

Fix those annoying pics of friends and family being grumpy, old, or just plain ugly with FaceFilter.