l-dopa

Poetry by Taalam Acey from the film What Black Men Think.

Not safe for work link.

So the XBox 360 Elite is out, with a 120 GB drive and an HDMI connector. Did they take the time to fix the biggest issue, the INCREDIBLY LOUD DVD DRIVE? From the comments:

The DVD drive is still the same volume but the fans are a little louder.

Louder? Holy God! It’s already disconcertingly loud. I can hear if my 360 is on or off even in other parts of the house.

What the fuck, Microsoft; sometimes, I think you want to fail. This just goes to show you — Apple would never suggest that you put a loud, angry buzzing box in your entertainment center. Instead they give you a diminutive playback box with no DVD drive and no composite out, which admittedly solves the problem, but in a different way — a way that keeps me from buying it in the first place.

~Jeff

p.s. xbmc 4-eva

Who needs the “Forever” stamp when you’ve got this handy tip:

1. Write the name of the person you want the letter to go to in the return address, where you’d normally put your address.
2. Write your address front and center, where you’d normally put the recipient’s address.
3. Casually “forget” the stamp.
4. Your letter will be “returned” to the recipient and you, my friend, will have 42 additional cents in your pocket. Go nuts!

~jeff

NOTE: as pointed out (so obnoxiously) in the comments, this is only likely to work if you live in the same state as the recipient.

ALSO NOTE: this is probably illegal.

Once again, it looks like only Dennis Kucinich has the balls to take on the Military Industrial Complex in any serious way. I’d love to see Dean or Gore get up behind this. Obama, I’m looking at you. I’m not expecting much from Hillary. She’s made it pretty clear that she’s about as Left a candidate as McCain.

Ford pardoned Nixon and it polluted the political landscape for decades. Let’s show these supernational purveyors of oil and blood the door and make sure they remember it.

Now, I’ve gotten by pretty well without an HD TV. The issue really is that when i do buy one, it’ll be rather large. And require upgrading my main stereo receiver. And Tivo. And likely my speakers. So the whole thing quickly spirals out of control, and as a result, i stay pretty happy with what I’ve got.

But Planet Earth on Discovery has really, really made me think i should start pricing TVs. Lord, it’s pretty.

Incredibly emotional photo essay featuring Cyndie, a young mother, and her son Derek, who was diagnosed with neuroblastoma.

~jeff

Tim Dirks has written an excellent article on the most controversial films ever filmed. The list starts off slow (“Aladdin”?) but that’s only because it’s in alphabetical order. See how many of these films you’ve watched; I think I’ve only caught about 25% of them.

NOTE: this article spawns annoying pop-under ads.

~jeff

I’m always looking for new ways for mutating and molesting RSS feeds in interesting ways, and so in my travels today I discovered “FeedWordPress“, a WordPress plug-in that allows you to pull other RSS feeds into your existing WordPress installation. I imagine that using this you could make some kind of, I dunno, Super Blog or something.

As I’ve been accustomed to with all things WordPress, installation and configuration was incredibly smooth, and after a teeny bit of fiddling, it really does work as advertised.

~jeff

Here’s an innovative data visualization method — somebody has mapped values of housing prices onto a roller coaster animation using “Roller Coaster Tycoon 3″. This, combined with the New York Times’ recent advice* and excellent rent v. buy cost comparison, make me feel slightly better about not being a home owner right now.

~jeff

* A side note: I’m so proud of the New York Times these days. Check out that article — not only is it aesthetically well presented, but it’s seamlessly integrated with an interactive web/flash app and a discussion board. This is top-drawer, cutting-edge internet-savvy news presentation on display here.

I’m an RSS junkie, I’ll admit, so I’m pretty addicted to aggregation sites like doggdot.us, Google Reader and my roll-your-own solutions using Drupal and Yahoo Pipes. So I’m delighted that web rocket doctor Chris Amato is now working on a brand-new one: feedmashr. Feedmashr combines Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, the New York Times, and De.lic.ious feeds into one feed to rule them all!; even after only couple weeks out, Feedmashr is already shaping up to be a must-visit site.

~jeff

Not perfect but promising; TVShows is a very specialized aggregator (written in Ruby?) which delivers .torrent files of recent television shows to your Mac OS X BitTorrent client of choice. It’s a little buggy, but it shows a lot of promise, even at this early stage.

~jeff

Once upon a time, there was Old Man Murray, and if you wanted funny yet intrinsically correct video game reviews you went there. Sometime around 2002 Old Man Murray went away, and there hasn’t really been anything to fill that void, until now: I think Action Button is ready to step in. Hilarious and insightful reviews combined with a killer dithered black and white graphic style — highly recommended.

~jeff

I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t a Photoshop job, but it’s remarkable either way. This man worked out for 4 years and took a picture of himself once a month throughout the process. It’s interesting how many people in the comments are of the opinion he should have stopped about five or six months in, but clearly, this guy wanted to bulk up.

~jeff

Act One: a man sits alone, in a recording booth, and gives hard-earned and thoughtful pointers on how to improve storytelling abilities.

I love his quote “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap”. Amen to that.

~jeff

Creating modal interfaces on your web pages can be kind of a chore. Enter Control.Modal; it’s a nifty Javascript library that piggybacks on the top of Prototype.js and makes creating a modal window for your web page or form as easy as two or three of code. Cool stuff.

~jeff