l-dopa

For years I stood behind my view that NPR’s show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me was an exercise in self-important snobbery, rife with pretension and undue back-patting. But I’ve come around. Perhaps it is because I am a self important back-patter (true!). I started listening to it when I got a RadioShark and was looking for things to record. I scheduled it to record CarTalk (of course), Fresh Air (talk about snobbery), and I figured I needed something else to flesh out the schedule and fill up time on my commute, so I added Wait Wait.

Let me say this: This is still a show full of self-important snobbery, rife with pretension and undue back-patting. But I kinda like it. The deal was sealed when I discovered it is now distributed, almost ad-free via podcast (ps). No more skipping past station identification and fuzzy recordings.

I am sold.

Some day, perhaps I will even listen to This American Life. But dear God, the conceit of that show makes me want to throw heavy things at other things, and Ira Glass has a voice for print.

The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy is based on a real man named T.M. Maple, a.k.a. The Mad Maple, who submitted incredibly knowledgeable and obsessive missives to the letters pages of comic books starting in the late 1970’s. A small sample of his letters can be found here.

This is me doing the happy dance, tempered by the threat of him running for or being appointed to some other sneaky post.

What a beautiful piece of science fiction art. That guy’s only 43 cm tall.

Around the ldopa.net offices* we’ve found these 12$ (shipped!) Cyclone USB2 adapters to be insanely useful. If you have a bare IDE drive, what you used to have to do to scrape the data off or just temporarily use the drive would be:

1. turn off your computer.
2. set the IDE jumper to “top” or “bottom” or something.
3. open the case.
4. install the drive in the case.
5. plug in the power cable.
6. close the case.
7. turn on your computer.
8. pray everything worked ok; if not, reverse all these steps and change the jumper setting.
9. when done, reverse all these steps and remove the drive.

There’s got to be a better way! Well, now there is:

1. plug the IDE drive into the cyclone USB adapter (and the supplied power adapter if it’s a 3.5″ or 5.25″ drive).
2. plug the whole ugly mess into your computer.

…totally worth the $12 if you have any IDE drives lying around.

~jeff

* ldopa.net offices may contain trace amounts of non-existance.

Hold me close now tiny dancer! Pictured above is my very favorite chord, D# major 7th. But if you don’t yet have a favorite major 7th chord, you may want to check out the gorgeous and free Pianochord MacOS X Widget. Combine with the tabulature available from the OGLA and you’ll be fumbling through competently playing that Ben Folds song for that disinterested girl you’re hot for in no time.

UPDATE: Download it again. It’s been bumped to version 2, and now it actually plays the chord and receives MIDI events to get the root. Outstanding!

~jeff

I listened to these two downloadable talks (AAC format) about the physiological effects of stress on the human body about a week ago, and if you’ve got an hour of downtime in the car or the plane, I highly recommended you check them out. Sometimes listening to audio transcripts is a boring chore, but not in this case — Richard Sapolsky is a genuinely engaging speaker, and the insight he imparts about stress is something every working American should hear:

• What Baboons Can Teach Us

• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

…and kudos to Stanford on iTunes for such innovative and convenient use of the iTunes Music Store download model. This style of “open-source-styled” internet media distribution is without doubt the future of education, and any school that isn’t starting to think hard about how to integrate the web and downloadable course materials in their curriculum is already way behind the curve.

~jeff

Nifty! Unfortunately Police Chief Koopa was not amused.

~jeff

Dude, your shirt’s on fire! Seriously!

Seriously, look! It’s on fire! Right behind you! Better put it out! Or it will burn!

You!

Look! Look at it! Oh, boy, it’s really on fire now! You’d better look! It’s gonna burn you really bad!

Look!

Look!!