Philonoist.net

Turns out that there’s a sweeter reason than just “saving energy” in Congress’s move to extend Daylight Saving Time by one week:

The candy lobby also played a significant role in pushing Halloween into daylight saving time, believing that extra hour of trick-or-treating in daylight would spur more candy sales but arguing that it would decrease deaths, according to Michael Downing, the author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, an amusing book about the myths and realities behind daylight saving time.

Color me impressed. The talking M&M’s have more power than we could have ever imagined.

Technorati Tags: candy, Halloween

Tagged with: News

Filed by Adam College at 4:25 pm under Everything Else
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“This is the kitchen, which contains probably some of the most technologically advanced equipment on the ship.”

Tagged with: Videos

Filed by Adam College at 3:50 pm under Movies
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What an absolute crock of crap:

“Next, below, is what President Lincoln could have said, if he had
decided that his speech was not only for Americans, but targeted the
whole world. With this Globish wording, his impact would have been
greatly improved.Anglophones can hardly feel the difference. Non
Anglophones observe that they understand better. This is the main
purpose of Globish.”

Our fathers came to this land eighty seven years ago. They brought to
this land a new nation; it was formed in freedom, and was committed to
the belief that all men are created equal. Now we are involved
in a great civil war; it is testing whether that nation or any nation
so born and so committed to that idea can long live. We are
meeting today on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to give
a small piece of that field, as a final resting place for a number of
our sons: those who gave here their lives so that that nation might
live.It is completely fitting and right that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not give– we can not commit — we can not make holy– this ground.The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have made it holy. They
have made it, far above our poor power to add or take away. The world will little note, and will not long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.It
is for us the living, rather, to be committed here to their unfinished
work; the work so greatly brought forward by the people who fought here.It
is rather for us to be here committed to the great task remaining
before us — that we take increased commitment to that cause for which
these honored dead gave the last full measure of commitment — that we
here highly decide and declare that these dead shall not have died for
no purpose — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not pass away from this earth.

Oration is more than words, more than language, meaning or tone. Excellent oration commands - and draws power from - audience and timing. Without being fawning of Lincoln, it’s clear he knew his audience: he spoke that day not to the world, not to the nation, but to those war-tired survivors who congregated on that field. His words would surely have been different had he spoke from the steps of the White House or after the close of the war.

The Gettysburg address has long endured not because of its global appeal, but
because of its national and local. Any attempt to improve or alter his speech would result in a product that omits the timing and the audience, because we cannot view - we cannot lay claim to - those times and those people. Such an alteration would, like the above, ultimately seem hollow.

Technorati Tags: Globish, Gettysburg Address

Filed by Adam College at 2:04 pm under Web
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Looks like it’s a rough day across the Atlantic. “Suitable Node” errors occur when there’s a problem with the ExpressionEngine database, and are repaired through a reoptimization of database tables.

Edit: Obviously, BBC News is back up, within mere minutes of going down. I was more interested in their lack of graceful error handling than their lack of database management skills.

Technorati Tags: Suitable Nodes, BBC

Tagged with: News

Filed by Adam College at 1:24 pm under Web
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From the LA Times:

“When they ignore Veterans Day and Memorial Day, I think they’re telling us something about the way they view America,” said Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily.com, a conservative website that has criticized Google’s logo decisions.

Boo hoo hoo, WorldNetDaily.com. You’d be in a position to talk if your website was full of American Flag GIFs and weeping bald eagle JPEGs. Instead, your website is full of 1997-era GIFs that just make me weep.

Technorati Tags: Google

Filed by Adam College at 9:41 am under Fast Phile, Web
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Sometimes I think I could be a hotshot Hollywood producer. Though I usually come to the realization that my talents would be totally worthless and wasted.

Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead”. This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster’s The Brave One (even though she’s had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman’s The Invasion (as if three different directors didn’t have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently.

Technorati Tags: Hollywood

Tagged with: News

Filed by Adam College at 7:05 pm under Fast Phile, Movies
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It’s been a while since I wrote about something truly awesome that adds value to my life . I’m reversing the trend today with Expensr, an excellent finance webapp that helps keep track of finance records online.

Now, it may not be mint, the oft-buzzed about web application that took top honors (and a healthy chunk of change) home at this year’s TechCrunch 40. Mint, in my opinion, is for those who are totally fearless about merging automatic screen-scraping and finance: a lack of online banking APIs (for obviously good reasons) makes you wonder about mint’s long term prospects.

While Expensr doesn’t have the automatic transaction downloading bells and whistles (…yet), it’s still a very snappy location-independent way of keeping track of how much I have in my accounts and how much I’ve spent this month. There’s plenty of other features that a good web2.0 app should have: community-centric, a blog, and founders who get back to me on bugs and feedback within the day, but it’s the relative ease-of-use and charting features that keep me coming back instead of jumping to Excel or Money.

And it’s free to use, of course.

Technorati Tags: Sweetness of the Day

Tagged with: Productivity

Filed by Adam College at 5:57 pm under Web
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From Brandeis University’s Library and Technology Services:

Second, we develop the “vaporware” that allows robust and maintainable interaction between core systems like PeopleSoft, myBrandeis, library systems and others.

How’s that for some marketing?

Technorati Tags: Software

Filed by Adam College at 10:25 pm under Fast Phile, Web
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From Variety

It plans to turn “The Office” into a humorous game in which players have to handle jobs and play pranks at Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch.

Wow. There’s only so many ways to make a stupid.

Technorati Tags: The Office, Sellouts

Filed by Adam College at 9:42 am under Fast Phile, TV, Web
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From NPR:

Phoenix is the city most at risk for identity fraud, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Their new survey shows writing a check is not safer than banking online because of a scam called “check washing.” The thief erases the ink on a check and fills in whatever he wants.

Fairly obvious, but it doesn’t mean you should never write a check. Only write checks to people and companies you trust (making a photocopy of the check if you can), and for other transactions use credit/debit cards.

If you’re making a deal with another person (say, for items from Craigslist), be sure to use cash.

Technorati Tags: finance, identity fraud

Filed by Adam College at 9:16 am under Fast Phile, TV, Web
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