This entry on ongoing mentions a new website called Topix.net. The site reminds me of Google News, though Google indexes more sites, but Topix has two features that I haven't found on Google.
1. Topics for a location - Sure, one could look for Chicago and find most stories, but Topix has a conglomeration of local news sources. Which I didn't think was that significant until I realized...
2. RSS feeds for topics - Each topic has its own RSS feed, which is really useful since the local papers I look at don't have RSS feeds (at least yet). Yay! Less sites I have to look at through a browser. Now if only salon.com had a RSS feed.
Though apparently it has been up for at least a year, I just discovered today an interesting public project - Durham Crime Mapper. As a resident of Durham, I think this site will be extremely valuable in forming a picture of the true nature of safety and crime in the area.
I viewed maps for the whole city and for a 1/2 mile around my address, and found the results interesting. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where there were only 36 crimes of the types listed for the last 13 months with none of them being homicide, rape, or arson - and only 8 were assault.
My only two complaints about the map are I wish on a mouse-over a message would appear describing the date and type of crime commited and that the the line graph used whole numbers instead of fractions on the axis. It would be easier to see there was only 7 of something instead of having to remember that 7 is the closest whole number below the 7.783 line, unless fractions of a crime are being committed.
Looking through past entries, I'm amazed at how long it's been since kissaboo posted a Weird Ohio story - I guess the authors have been concentrating on other things. However, we have to at least mention a very well-publicized Weird Ohio story. For those who didn't hear, a 6th grader was suspended for 3 days for reading this year's SI Swimsuit issue before class. I find this story amazing. If this was my child's first offense and he was ordered to an alternative school or suspension, I'd be causing quite a ruckus. While we can debate if this should even be an offense, no one should agree that the appropriate action is removal from school. When I was growing up, I think the only offenses that warranted such a hefty penalty were physical fighting and drug possesion. I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated for the better part of a decade before I went to college, and while I'm unsure at what age I received my first swimsuit issue, I know I could uncover Ashley Montana's issue in under 3 minutes if I were at home. Admittedly, it never dawned on me to bring it to school.
Forgot to post this last week, but one of our favorite research projects, MovieLens, called for more people to review movies. I have to admit that I have been lax recently in reviewing films, so I encourage everyone to join up or to go back and review some films.
Two catch phrases have come out of this weekend, I'll let the readers guess their origins.
Screamed loudly = "I'm Rick James"
Sung loudly = "Don't tell Scottie. Don't tell Scottie. Scottie doesn't know."
As a stop gap until we move to a better technique, here are some Quick Hits:
Links that need to be put somewhere, but won't get a full entry at this time.
I was surprised to learn that some readers of this site have not yet heard of the Grey Album. Search around (and perhaps post here) other sites that have a better description of the issues involving this work, but I learned from reading 90% Crud that there is a movement asking websites to post the album on the 24th. Now for legal (because they are muddy) and technical (because they are muddy) reasons the members of KissaBoo do not plan to participate in this manner (perhaps the site will be greyed out), however, in theory at least, Bit Torrent users could search suprnova and find these links [1, 2] to download the album. Of course, Bit Torrent is NOT anonymous, and though I have never heard of anyone being sued for using Bit Torrent, FreeNet might be a better way to go. Grey Tuesday suggests Illegal Art as an option.
Updated 2/24/04
Forgot to update the CSS to grey until right now. Looks a little crappy, but oh well.
Story this morning on wired. One thing I HAVE TO EMPHASIZE - Peer to Peer networks are not in and of themselves illegal. This architecture is not illegal, it's what you can procure from it that may or may not be illegal, so getting the album from a P2P or illegal-arts is no different. Now, if you go and share the album on a non-anonymous p2p, you may run into problems.
I went to one site (Team Good Guys) and saw they chose to not participate after receiving a C&D signed by J.Christopher Jensen - yeah, no way he prepared it.
Throughout the day I'll have to check to see what the other sites did.
Was going to post this story yesterday, but decided to spend my time in other ways. While /. posted that Yahoo was first with this story, Wired is actually where I saw it. While I think everyone can agree that the MPAA's tactics have been better than the RIAA on the copyright front, they both are WAY off base in trying to roll a boulder up the side of the Internet mountain. The odd thing about this case is that no one can deny the argument that this product has a significant fair use application - though admittedly I doubt the majority are using it for that purpose. While several readers of this site I am sure have read the DMCA in full, it's still on my reading list, but I thought one of its tenets besides allowing reverse engineering for compatibility was a fair use exception.
It is evident to this Court, as it has been to previous courts, that CSS is a technological measure that both effectively controls access to DVDs and effectively protects the right of a copyright holder
Yeah, it is so effective that no DVD has ever been posted to the Internet and there isn't a ~100 character PERL script out there that can do the job. The only thing less effective would have been if they had just switched the 1's and 0's.
I thought this was already posted on this site and unfortunately I forget the source where I saw this, but ESPN has been offering RSS feeds for a while now. At some point I'll link to some sources for the RSS uninitiated that read this site, but in summary it's important and will only become more so. However, though I am no master of RSS etiquette, what I saw today from these feeds was an example of what not to do.
I would email the beings in charge of ESPN's web presense, but oddly enough when you do a search on ESPN these RSS feeds do not appear. This leads me to wonder who is in charge of their feeds and what the policy is. Btw, here are the RSS feeds I've been following - I wish there was a college basketball one:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news - All News
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/nfl/news
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/mlb/news
One of the issues of RSS feeds is what information should they contain. Should they contain the whole story or just a summary to entice you to click on the article? Here at kissaboo we provide both links that do both (as several sites do), but due to laziness only Atom has everything while RSS has only the summary - this will be modified in the future. The problem with the latter is that people are lazy and instead of posting a specialized summary of the story their scripts just output the first n words of an article. Actually, this is technically what kissaboo does, but we encourage our authors to write in a manner where this isn't an issue. Using the second method, however, can cause the following two scenarios from this morning to occur.
1st Example: Title: Unhappy 'Skins campers: Ramsey
INDIANAPOLIS -- At St. Elmo Steak House, this city's most famous traditional downtown eatery, the challenge isn't so much devouring the artery-clogging, 24-ounce T-bone as it is surviving the notoriously incendiary shrimp cocktail that has become the restaurant's trademark appetizer.
Just one bite into any of the six tiny crustaceans and sweat glands erupt. By the time a diner reaches the final shrimp -- which has been marinating for hours at the bottom of the ramekin, pickling...
2nd Example: Title: Bracket Buster Schedule
...
By just taking the first X words, these RSS entries became rather useless. The first serves as an advertisement for some steak house without ever mentioning the QB controversy in DC. In the second, the entire article was a table containing a schedule of basketball games which their script could not handle.
While in most cases the easy way out works well, how much more effort would it be for the authors of these articles or at least the people who post them to the site to create an excerpt for feeds or other purposes (such as cell phone displays)? While one day computers could become better equipped to handle these scenarios by throwing in some AI, the current solution is good ol' human elbow grease.
In a not so subtle attempt to keep the recent trend of at least a post a day alive, I will give a belated congratulations to the Charlotte 49ers for beating a (at the time) #9 Louisville last Thursday. Yeah, everybody has been beating the Cardinals like a drum recently with their current swoon of 4 loses in 5 games, but it still makes Charlotte 3 and 0 when playing teams ranked in the top 10 at the time - Cincy and 'Cuse being the other victims. I'm not sure how many other teams have such a gaudy record and currently I'm too tired to figure out a way to find out. Unfortunately, RPI tabulations only show a team's record against the current top 25 and not at the time they played. Still, it's looking like an excellent season for the 49ers.
The game was actually televised on ESPN 2, so I had the rare opportunity of seeing the 49ers play on national TV. During the telecast one learned how rare it was when Dickie V. said he hadn't been in Halton Arena in 8 years. Perhaps he was mistaken and was actually there 7 years ago for a certain Charlotte - Cincy classic.
The most shocking about the game is that while Charlotte played horribly, they just had so much more talent than the number 9 team in the county - though admittedly that rank probably wasn't deserved. If one lined up teams strictly based on their talent, it would be hard to convince me that Charlotte shouldn't be in the top 15 - and I watched a game where the man who set the season Conference USA record for three point shooting didn't play due to legal issues. They have two great three point shooters (Brown and Plavich), an athletic 7 footer who is coming around (Iti), two quality swing men (Basden and Butter Johnson), and a power forward who should become a star (Withers). If this team still had Rodney White, they would be amazing.
Apparently both JLH and Chyler Leigh will be returning to the little screen. While I will support both these lovely ladies, their recent track records on television has not been exceptional. Chyler, who was born in Charlotte, already has been on 6 (?) shows that have been canceled in their first season with her on. Impressive to be on that many shows though. Love will be playing a single mother in her project, and for some reason that is a little hard and unsettling to picture. Good luck to both though.
Btw, the stars alligned the other night with Ashley Judd and Jennifer Love Hewitt appearing opposite each other on late night TV. I would have been so excited about that 6 years ago. Hewitt spent her Valentine's Day without male companionship, if only there was a single guy out there who was dying to go out with her.
If you're curious to see if you're in the right place for you, check out findyourspot (no, it's not porn)
I pretty much have the entire mid-atlantic snatched up with 80% of my suggestions being VA, NC, or SC, so apparently i am on the wrong coast...
Can anybody believe this? Apparently, Florida guard Christian Drejer--who, IIRC, had eligibility problems when he came in anyway--has left the Gators mid-season to join the Spanish club FC Barcelona on a pro contract. I can only hope that such a thing would never happen at Duke...
Well, my New York Yankees (favored by more discriminating authors on this site) have finally done it, locking up A-Rod to play third base. I formally request that George Steinbrenner (since I know he reads kissaboo) consider another signing to fill up that second base hole: Me. You don't need the bat, I'll keep my errors under 1 a game, and I'll work for the league minimum. Come on, you're not going to get a better deal...
In another vein, does anyone think that this is good for baseball? I know that maggette may have a view on this, and I'd be interested to hear his and others.
Hello, faithful readers - to steal a line. Hard to believe that the template has yet to be customized in 8 months, but that is how old kissaboo is. Since there has been an explosion of posts tonight, I thought I would post a few items about the site.
1) I already have 3 column CSS layouts from a couple of sites.... one will be used.
2) I hate comments popping up in their own window... that will be stopped.
3) Notice that the site has a Technorati profile that for some reason hasn't gotten verified. This will be used more.
4) Indications of categories with better groupings
5) RSS will be a big part of the site in the future. This will be customized.
6) Integration with del.icio.us
7) About a half to full dozen other little things
8) Eventually, the fun stuff
9) Feel free to add suggestions
Updated
I'll move my comments into the entry.
Need to add a recent comments sidebar.
Added links to some default feeds. Added Atom - one can learn more about it at AtomEnabled. I'm a fan because other people are, but I'll learn more about it one day.
Added a comment feed using Dive Into Mark's Template - hope this satisfies the Creative Common Requirement.
Still haven't created by own template, but I decided to switch to Gettysburg.
Though we (at least attempt to) value our anonymity at kissaboo.com, as owner of the site I'll let the veil slip a little and let the world share in my happiness. This past Valentine's Day, exactly at midnight - definitely not Friday the 13th, I proposed to my long time girlfriend along the Charles River, and though it wasn't a Harris Teeter (congratulations!), she said yes. Besides work, this is part of the reason I at least have not been posting to kissaboo. Thanks to the people at Jared for their help. Pictures of the ring and occasion to follow plus wedding plans.
On Cold Pizza this morning (one day I'll have to write THE review on the show), they had Ben Arthur on their unsigned artist bit. Really liked him. Sounds like They Might be Giants, but the content of his song was more Ben Folds. Check out his single Mary Ann at IUMA. Will I buy his album when it comes out? I will if he truly is on an independent label, but otherwise I am currently boycotting buying albums (including iTunes), but that is a post for another time.
Another kissaboo author actually told me about this first, but the news is out in the conventional (google) news (and Tough Crowd) about H-Bomb. I first read about it on The Crimson. H-Bomb claims to be the first university publication in the nation to feature nude pictures of students. No known direct link yet. Kissaboo will start the bounty at a $1 for pictures out of (perhaps morbid) curiosity.