In the morning I’m leaving to go to Burning Man, but this time I wont be merely attending. Some friends of mine have brought me onboard to direct one of two second-units for a documentary film called, at least tentatively, “As The Dust Settles.”
I’m totally thrilled to be working on another film project with Susan Buice, Arin Crumley and Joe Griffin, who I worked with on Four Eyed Monsters, as well as the producer, Mike Hedge who is a super amazing guy on many levels and is doing an awesome job putting together everything and organizing it all. And I’m also super excited to meet and work with all the other really talented people who have been selected as the core crew for this project. It looks like a really amazing team has been out together.
I know it’s going to be a bit challenging to work out there in that environment for a number of reasons, but if anyone can do it, we can! Hellz Yeah!
Oh damn, it hurts! I’m still mourning the death of Oink! Please, please, please, if you’re reading this and you can hook me up with the latest thing… [waffles?] …I’m dying over here!
Anyhow, back to the blogging.
I usually start off with a ScrapeTorrent search. It’s a meta-search that searches several of the top trackers like The Pirate Bay etc… There’s also YouTorrent.com, which is also a meta-search, but I have found that ScrapeTorrent.com has the better results… At least that’s how it seems to me.
Listen to that name… “Gorgoroth” …It’s so… Viking. So Dongeons and Dragons. The following are links to a 5-part documentary about the band, and all the controversy surrounding them, particularly their singer called “Gaahl.” You gotta love that name too. I guess he tortures people and drinks their blood and stuff like that.
At their shows they have been known to feature goat heads on sticks and other charming bits of satanic stage decor. This is a fun documentary to watch. It also gives some interesting background on the whole Satanic Rock genre, particualy the “Norwegian Black Metal Scene.” Hmmm. Fun stuff. I’d love to go to one of their shows.
Starting August or September, depending on the comments I get on this blog entry, I will begin ridding the street I live on of trash, Watertrough Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472. I imagine it will take me about a week of going out every day, for 2-4 hours on foot, and even occasionally picking some pieces of junk up with my minivan and hauling it to the dump or finding a way to recycle it. I want to clean Watertrough Rd completely of every last candy-wrapper and cigarette butt.
I would like to make a “movement” out of this. Let’s start here in West County, and the rest of the world can copy us.
I want to set up an infrastructure for helping other people do similar cleanup work along our country roads. Now that we have the internet, let’s put it to some good!
Please be interested in this. If you’re interested in helping in any way, please send an email to
For years, my good friend Chris Phillips has dazzled me with his countless stories about his adventures. He is Bipolar and/or Schizoaffective since his first psychotic break in his early twenties or so. Because of this, his stories are nicely sprinkled with demons and divinity, loonie-bins, jails, vagrancy, magic, intuition and desperation, but through his pleasant approach to looking at his life, and the down-to-earth, articulate and even comical approach to his story-telling, there is always a sense of hope or connection in his stories, sometimes directly, and sometimes through his observations about people and the forgiveness he has had to maintain (for himself as well as the world around him), I suspect in order to survive.
I’m bringing this up because he called me the other night and told me that he has begun to write his own life story. He’s blogging about the events of his life over at ChrisThomasPhillips.WordPress.com.
This stuff is so fun to read! One of the first ones he posted is about trying to have sex with his mother’s house plants. Really. It’s interesting stuff–strange, but also very funny and very relatable. You should go check it out.
I met Chris ten or more years ago at the beginning of one of his most recent manic episodes. He wasn’t fun to be around because he would never shut up about the shamanism he was pursuing and a bunch of other really annoying and over-done, overzealous baloney. I didn’t know at the time that I was seeing him in a manic state. I thought he was just an extremely high-energy person. He disappeared from our house for a while during during the peak of his mania and soon after, I observed the severe depression he went through on the other side of his cycle. He was sleeping on a couch in our garage, barely getting up to eat or shit, and having no desire to even talk to anyone for I guess, what must have been about a month.
Over time, I got to know him in his “normal” stage, in between the depression and mania he had been going through in 1-year cycles.
A year or two later, I reconnected with him at a “bad time,” and suffered through his unwanted presence in my life as his illness was beginning to take him over the edge. Truthfully, at the time, I was glad to see him go once his mania finally carried him off on some random adventure, leading ultimately to a mental hospital (rinse, repeat).
But a few years later, after he finally got put on an effective combination of prescriptions, I built a great friendship with him. I’ve learned a lot about him and his Illness and enjoyed his company and his beautiful songs and especially his stories. He has become one of my dearest friends and I wouldn’t trade him for anything. I regret that there was ever a time when I wanted him to disappear. If only I had known then what I know now, maybe I could have helped him. But at least we got more amazing stories out of him going nuts back then.
You know about using quotes to get an exact text string including spaces between words.
You probably already knew about -word to 86 any sites containing a certain word from the results.
And there’s site: url
And you may already know about Define: word to get a dictionary entry.
But there are tons of these things. You can use Google as a calculator, you can search for text in specific HTML tags and much, much more.
A good place to find many of these (if not all of them) is at GoogleGuide.com
One interesting example of this is using intitle: or inurl: to get addresses of security cameras that aren’t password-protected. Since the software that comes with these things is left to the default settings and someone wasn’t savvy enough to password-protect the cameras when they were set up, you can actually go to these cameras and control them as if you were in charge of them. You can peer into other places in the world in realtime thru the lenses of un-secure security cameras! And move them about!
Here are some example google queries from the post.
google - inurl:”view/index.shtml” - Axis Network Camera
google - SNC-RZ30 HOME - Sony network cam
google - inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis - Axis Video Server(cam)
google - intitle:”Live View / - AXIS” - AXIS Video Live Camera
google - intitle:”Live View / - AXIS” | inurl:view/view.sht - AXIS Video Live View
google - intitle:”The AXIS 200 Home Page” - AXIS 200 Network Camera
google - intitle:liveapplet inurl:LvAppl - Canon Network Camera
google - intext:”MOBOTIX M1″ intext:”Open Menu” - Mobotix Network Camera
google - intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page” Or inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” - Panasonic Network Camera
google - intitle:”QuickCamPro WebCam” inurl:webcam - QuickCamPro
google - intitle:”SiteZAP WebCam Control” - SiteZAP WebCam
I bet SEOs are going crazy over this with their dragon-chasing. Someone could spend weeks trying to figure out more about Google’s results systems using these more sophisticated queries.
My question is, why does Google effectively hide these tools from us? I have gotten so frustrated looking for something specific while only knowing a few ways to narrow my google results. These new tools promise to be very helpful. But why are they coming from some other random site? Why isn’t this right there on G’s results pages or something?
We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.
The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.
(Lately I’m realizing that good companies and orgs have watchlists so a post like this one serves as an open letter to the company, unless of course, they’re not listening, which of course is their problem, a big problem.)
I just heard this mentioned on one of my most favorite podcasts, Buzz Out Loud, from CNet, a rad daily tech news show.
For you unfortunate Windows users, I know it can be scary to remove things from your computer. If you run out of space on your C Drive, here’s one small way to get some back.
Go to add/remove programs in your control panel and remove all the old versions of the Java Runtime.
I googled around to verify that this is safe to do. The old versions are not needed. The latest one is indeed complete and non-dependent.
UPDATE: It’s also available as a Torrent via The Pirate Bay. Please consider seeding this. It’s a tiny, tiny file.
Here’s the Read Me info I just put together to go with it:
“LOGIN_EMAIL”
and
“PASSWORD”
and change those.
LEAVE THE QUOTES IN PLACE
Save the file.
Upload these two files to your server.
point your web browser to http://where-you-put-the-file-on-your-server/ms_test.php
and what will result is a CSV file of all your MySpace friends and their demographic information. Also included is the URLs to “send message” etc, and some other useful things.
View the source of the page and copy it into a PlainText text file
Name the text file with the extension .csv
Now you should be able to work with your myspace friends in Excel
There is nothing malicious about this simple application. No viruses, spyware etc. It only does what it’s supposed to do: scrape your friends so you can more easily work with your social network data.
If you are of the camp that feels that people scraping their own myspace contacts is unethical, I suggest that you consider that all the pages are already available and the data they contain is rendered in HTML which can be freely accessed already. This is just a tool to make it easier to get the useful data separated from the clutter.
Finally, this is possibly against MySpace’s Terms Of Service, so use at your own risk.
I wish it wasn’t necessary for developer to build their own APIs for these social sites like myspace. I wish there was just a comprehensive API to begin with.
I’m going to miss the cute frog I’ve gotten so used to relying on.
But what I’m not going to miss is VUZE or VUSE or whatever, the media portal that Azureus started making me look at a while back. There hasn’t been any settings for making it so Azureus launches into “advanced” view, so every freaking time I launch Azureus, I end up having to deal with that Vuze shit.
Goodbye Azureus. Hello Transmission!
Transmission is light-weight, user-friendly, smart, Open-Source… Do I need to go on? It’s just way better.
Sorry, cute, shiny frog. Goodbye. I doubt I’ll ever look back. But I will miss the froggy.
1. During the conference call, use some sort of mixing program so the moderator can see who is talking at every moment during the recording via an audio level meter and make adjustments as needed.
2. Whenever some body new starts talking, quickly talk over them stating their name (it only obscures what they’re saying for one or two syllables so it’s easy for the listener to understand what they’re saying while taking in the metadata too)
3. Have a rotating or otherwise changing schedule of guests like TWiT does. The occasional random apperence by a CEO or two, or other dignitaries of the Web might help to keep the discussion interesting.
4. Don’t be afraid to spend a few hundred pounds on a decent microphone and maybe a mixer or or whatever is needed to improve the quality of the audio. The audio of Talking With Talis has been piss poor since the beginning. It would really serve you guys to improve on that.
I think part of your mission is evangelism, so I hate to think you’re losing audience because of the poor audio quality.
When I was younger, I used to be really into mushroom hunting. My friend Wes and I would go out and look for mushrooms and then look up the ones we’d find. I always wanted to find a Fly Agaric because they’re so damn pretty.
I noticed a bunch yesterday when I was walking, and I was going to leave them alone until my desk got attacked today by some ants (for no reason. There’s nothing for them here and I even just cleaned everything too). The Wikipedia says Fly Agarics contain a natural insecticide. Maybe having these pretty darlings on my desk for a few days will make the ants go away.
Aren’t they beautiful? They’re like the quintessential fairy-land mushrooms. Big too!
Amanita Muscaria are generally considered poisonous, but are also ‘psychoactive,’ causing a delirium or dream-like state. Don’t eat them. Delirium is not a desirable form of intoxication, especially at the cost of the sickness these mushrooms also promise. These mushrooms are good for looking at, and possibly for killing bugs.
EDIT: Don’t buy it. Borrow it from one of your millions of close friends online. Rounder Records is a member of the RIAA. We need to boycott them!!
(EDITed) The end of Woman and Man goes in to what sounds a bit like what I remember hearing at the beginning of the song One by Metallica on And Justice For All… A woman screams along with the machine guns, not a man… Am i imagining this connection?
No matter what,
WEEN IS KICKING ASS WITH THIS RECORD! this one is up there with Chocolate and Cheese!!
From this demo vid, it appears that True Knowledge, a new search engine still in private “beta,” is programmed to understand components of natural language.
One of the video’s examples is:
“Is Jennifer Lopez single?”
I’d like to ask it:
“What is the best search engine of them all?”
and
“What is the meaning of Life?”
It looks like it might be partly powered by FreeBase or some other Semantic Data Store. FreeBase is in “Alpha” still, but apparently anyone can now sign up for it.
Oct. 29 - Digital distribution is being touted as a way for independent filmmakers to reach audiences and potential sponsors.London’s Film Festival staged a special event called “Power To The Pixel” which explored how internet sites like YouTube can help independent filmmakers.
Posted by Andrew A. Peterson
