The teams have been picked (with very little love for the Pac 12) and you can start filling out your brackets in the UtterlyBoring.com 2012 Bracket Pick ’em. It’s free to play and there are some nifty prizes. Share with all your friends and be sure to Sign up today! Brackets have to be filled before tip-off on Thursday morning so get crackin’!
Reading Material and Updates
Been slammed the last couple weeks working on personal projects, moving clients around from server to server (had one die last weekend), and doing the whole “attend every one of your kids function that you can” dad thing, and I’ve collected quite a few links here. On the bright side, I’m typing this all up on my new Sager 8150, still trying to get everything copied and setup from my other system, but boy is this thing fast.
Selection Sunday is today. Have you signed up for the NCAA Pick ’em? Why not?
OK, loads of links this time…
- TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless by Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners.
- normalize.css is a good alternative to a traditional CSS reset file.
- Splash Screens == sloth.
- Spider silk spun into violin strings. I’m sure those are nice and strong, as well as nice and expensive.
- A Texas Hold ’em Experiment: Ice Cold Decks.
- California removes all state funding for CA libraries (read the comment that’s highlighted, as that’s really what’s worth the read).
- Call of Apathy: Violent Young Men and Our Place in War.
- The Camera Obscura project mapped the journey of a disposable camera that was left in the middle of a park with a note to take a picture, relocate, and leave it for the next person. The picture map is pretty fun.
- If you need to test in old versions of MSIE, Microsoft has virtual images that should make it easier.
- If you’re looking to pretty-up your Facebook timeline, there are some great ideas here.
- Screw emoticons, Emojicons are so much better.
- Ideal City Design: Optimized by Transportation Layout.
- Social buttons done in CSS.
- This is why you should Google something.
- Awesome! YouTube and NBC Will Livestream the Entire Summer 2012 Olympics For Free.
- PHP vs Perl vs Python vs Ruby reference sheet.
- The world is ending, here’s what you need to pack.
- Hacking Hacker News.
- Frightening mashup of Toy Story and the Shining: Toy Shining.
- Making a fast website. Google takes this stuff into consideration now, so it’s important.
- NPR’s goal is the truth in reporting, not the “he said, she said” crap.
- phpVirtualBox is a VirtualBox interface written in PHP.
- Postcards Then and Now has a bunch of old postcards from the early 20th century compared to Google Street View today.
- Redesigning the Windows logo.
- The US is spending $120 billion per year to hunt down 50-75 terrorists.
- For the Zelda fans: Saving Zelda.
- Square is just a slick product, especially now that it has cash register functionality.
- Stop paying the jQuery tax.
- Best tips for speeding up your Windows PC.
- Star Wars saga suggested viewing order (note: Episode 1 isn’t even included, which I agree with).
- Apparently we don’t even need SOPA if the government can pull crap like this.
- WTF QR Codes.
- HP releases iLO app for Android and iPhone (that’s for the server geeks like me who have iLO on a couple servers).
- Ikea launches $86,000 flat-pack DIY home.
- Is antivirus software a waste of money?
- How OpenStreetMap handled Apple’s unattributed switch.
More Prizes Added to NCAA Bracket Pick ’em
Have you signed up yet? I just added some more prizes to the prize list (thanks Kina!), so get signed up today!
Join The 2012 UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Tournament Pick ’em
Selection Sunday is coming up on March 11 here and it’s time for offices all over the country to create office pools for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship (and for workplace productivity to grind to a halt). And it’s time for the readers of this site to compete for bragging rights (and some great prizes) in the seventh-annual UtterlyBoring.com Tournament Pick ‘Em. Last years contest info was here with final scoring here. TeamTopflite is looking to defend his title.
It’s free to play, and doesn’t require you to know anything about college basketball. So read on for the sign up information, prizes, and more!
Video Dump
You didn’t need to get anything done, and I need to get these off my plate…
Time Killer For The Day
You thought QWOP was frustrating? Try the two player version if you and a friend want to share the anger.
Free Concert: Cascade Winds Symphonic Band: Western Music
It’s cheap plug time again! I’ll be playing in the Cascade Winds Symphonic Band concert this weekend. The theme is Western Music. The concert is Sunday, March 4, 2:00 p.m., at Summit High School. The best part? It’s free.
This concert will feature music from John Philip Sousa, Ferde Grofe, John Williams, Gustav Holst and more! Concerts are free, open to the public and suitable for all ages. For more information visit www.cascadewinds.org. Or you can find the event on Facebook here.
If you’d like to print up a poster/flyer to distribute, we would greatly appreciate it. Below are some PDF files that should work dandy:
Look forward to seeing you there!
Reading Material
Few oldies but goodies here (new for me, at least…)
- The Transparency Grenade makes the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.
- Teller gives “his bastard son” a few tips on saving his career.
- How Web browsers work behind the scenes.
- escapes.js allows you to relive your BBS days. Its a small JavaScript library for rendering ANSI art.
- Boss breaks cover during “Undercover Boss” episode, shuts down restaurant.
- Great montage of Flash preloader graphics.
- Everyone’s trying to track what you do on the web. Here’s how to stop them.
- A hack you can perform (at your own risk) on Western Digital Green Drives to make them a bit less green but more server friendly.
- Kickstumbler allows you discover Kickstarter projects you’d never see.
- Will Slovaks walk all over Chuck Norris to Austria?
- Entypo is a set of 100+ carefully crafted pictograms available as an OpenType font, vector EPS and web font. All released for free.
- Tumblr Architecture: 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter.
- If I didn’t like the bullet-proof nature of MovableType’s static-page-building model, some of the plugins for WordPress are pretty dang cool. Latest example is WP Remote which is free and provides easy ways to monitor and backup your WordPress site.
- Download 128 pre-made Windows 7 shortcuts (finally getting a full-time Windows 7 PC for my self here soon — more details soon).
- Clever ways to secure your home from intruders.
- Five great tricks to get the most out of Wireshark.
- Nearly a year later, and the before and after pictures of the Japan Earthquake are amazing.
- Think you’re a good hacker? Play a bit of capture the flag.
Time Killer For The Evening
You have 10 Bullets. How many ships can you take out? I got 423 on my first whack at the game. How’d you do?
Update: Since that 423, I haven’t been able to get over 200-ish, so that must have been total luck.
Apple Confirms Data Center Plans for Prineville
I’ve been playing catch-up after a weekend of concerts combined with a couple days of flu-like crapiness, but this couldn’t wait: Apple’s moving in next to Facebook, plans on building a data center in Prineville.