condescension.net

Does Destiny USA seriously think people are that dumb?

Destiny USA is a ridiculous concept of redefining Syracuse, NY. The currently named Salt City is trying to become known as the commercial capital of the north by building a gigantic shopping mall / random attractions. Here’s the problem No one wants to be here now. You need a curent attraction before you can bring people to a ridiculous shopping mall.

But here’s my beef with Destiny. Destiny has recently starting a ridiculous marketing campaign about how they’re going green by using recycled stel and having green parking spots. Whats the point! Shopping malls are nothing but a finely tuned machine for developing waste. Food waste, electrical waste, etc. Thats like driving your hummer across the street to the grocery to buy a pack of styrofoam cups but being environmentally conscious by using a canvas bag.

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Why no one listens to NPR

Its amazing how people waste talent. Milo Miles who is actually a pretty good reviewer was on NPR last night reviewing one of those things that should never be reviewed: Popeye the Sailor 1933 – 1938 DVD. I understand its on Fresh Air which is normally positve, but your making bad news look better when you give a review of a DVD compilation of Popeye airtime. Check out the NPR synopsis here. I’m sure you won’t, I just felt obligated to link to something.

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XBOX 360 120GB hard drive for $135 (friend required)

So Amazon’s DOTD (deal of the day) was the 120GB xbox 360 hard drive for $140. Well here’s how to get it cheaper. You need two things.

1. A friend who wants the 120gb hard drive
2. $135

and the steps of course.

1. Go to Toys r us. online or in store.
2. Get two of the 120 GB hard drives. Buy one get one 50% off right now.
3. Walk out with them each costing $135 each

Enjoy.

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Dear Sherri Shepherd,

After your recent performance on The View it has become quite obvious you could use a few pointers. I’m sorry you are having such a tough time trying to figure out how to feed the kids. Unfortunately, the Bible didn’t explicitly explain that. As I’m sure this is the only piece of literature you have ever read, please lodge this flow chart ever so gently somewhere between Matthew and Mark. I hope it will come in useful next time you’re flipping through the pages trying to figure out how to do it. Best of luck!

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Ctrl-Alt-Del makes solid-gold halo 3 puns

You need to read this. Its nothing short of hillarious. http://cad-comic.com/comic.php?d=20070914 (CTRL ALT DEL halo 3 comic)

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“It seemed like a good idea at the time”

That’s what they’ll be saying in a few years after Inida finishes dumping 20 tons of iron sulfate into the water. India in partnership with Germany, Italy and Chilie will begin dumping iron sulfate into the water to allow plankton to flourish. Looks good on paper but when you only look at the small picture you can miss a good amount of details. It could work awesome. Global warming solved. But I’m just a bit skeptical as dumping shit into our water has always seemed to have negative repercussions. In the mean time, go ahead pedal to metal with that Hemi. India has it under control.

Hindustan Times via TreeHugger via Gizmodo

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Special Editon Halo 3 XBOX 360

Any loyal reader of my blog (Google analytics tells me i have a number approaching 3) knows that my XBOX 360 recently died. The machine I waited outside all-night for under a tarp and some wool socks had been stricken with the red ring of death. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean it sings that Daisy, Daisy how does your garden grow song. If it did, I would probably buy it dinner and wouldn’t be writing this now.

So with the XBOX 360 that has ceased to be I trekked to bestbuy to cash in on my Product Replacement Plan. Now as an aside, I must mention that a Best Buy Product Replacement plan means that you are entitled to a gift card at the original purchase price. If you paid $400 for something and it now costs $350 in store you get $400 in store credit. Don’t let them tell you otherwise as Meghan with an ‘h’ tried to tell me because they are lying. So with my $400 i decided to splurge and buy a Special Edition Halo 3 XBOX 360. Partially because the Premiums were out of stock and partially because I like things that stick out like a sore thumb.

The Halo 3 XBOX 360 does just that. It is a sweet forest green with cool metallic orange. I won’t bother explaining more but instead here’s some high res shots from engadget. Anyways, I was going to unbox it seriously, It’s the same as any other XBOX 360… except everything is green… and theres a play and charge kit… and you do it real slow because you believe the guy at best buy who told you it would be worth more if you decide to sell it. I’d hope atleast $50 more or whats the point!

Anyways the console got all set up and when all is said and done you feel a bit cheated as you’re left with a hard drive that has only 10GB free and some stupid halo 3 themes. Which I refuse to use as I paid for my Tiger Woods Firestone CC theme (Only to find out its in game screenshots and not actual course shots but thats for another day(most likely never)). Anyways I’ll update this later when I get a chance to browse the content some more. In the mean time I’m just glad I can continue BioShock. The game which will ultimately be the best game of 2007.

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Review: Zune Car Pack

If you’re looking for a way to make long car rides more frustrating than they already are try the Zune car kit. This kit retails at just under $80.00 and is not in the slightest bit worth recommending or far worse, purchasing.

However, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Erie, PA at 1:30 AM is not the best place to find electronics. Fortunately, good ol’ Walmart was open. With a choice between that and some belkin FM transmitter i fatefully reached for the Zune car pack. Regretfully swiping my Mastercard and drawing some stars to suffice as my name I left the store excited to finally be listening to Lewis Black on my Zune. Jumping into the car I ripped open the package and jammed it into my Zune with Speck case. Quickly I realized that wasn’t going to work. But fine. the FM transmitter couldn’t be designed with every case in mind so a pried off the rubber speck case and attached the FM transmitter into the bottom. The FM transmitter auto searched to 88.7. Turn the dial to 88.7 and… instead of a comedian suffering from a bout of high-blood pressure and tourettes I’m greeted with the opposite. Classical music. Assuming maybe it just had a tough time finding a station, I find some static on the FM dial and tune the zune to that. Finally I’m greeted with what sounds like an AM station coming in from Boston on a cloudy night. I adjust the volume and still nothing. Just a slight bit of barely recognizable Lewis Black. I take my hand off the transmitter and back to static. I try two more stations and same results.

Now I know the car has good FM reception as I’ve used my iPod with accompanying iTrip so I’m left to believe this is just absolute junk. I called my roommate who confirmed it the next day. He never left the parking lot with his. I’m absolutely amazed that Microsoft would slap the Zune name on this piece of junk. This is absolutely bar-none the WORST FM transmitter I have ever used. I’ve constructed better transmitters with those little radioshack basic electronics kits. Seriously stay away from this or you’ll be sorry.

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Everyday things change, but basically they stay the same.

(DMB lyrics btw)
Those of my more eagle-eyed readers will notice that the format of my page has recently changed. Well nothing major just a few new icons at right. Lets go through them together shall we.

1. XBOX Live Gamercard – So there it is. Constantly updating with all my details. Note the “pro”. Yes, I am.
2. RSS – RSS is the best way to view sites. RSS files are sent to a reader and you only see UPDATES to the site. This means you don’t have to repeatedly check it for updates. Try google reader or adding the RSS feed to your google start page (click it in firefox to do so)
3. Microformats - Semantic Interoperability at its lowest common denominator. Microformats are an attempt to get you to start using the semantic web with minimal intrusion (technically RSS is too but thats really too much details for now). So basically This page has been metatagged with some sweet code to let microformats readers pull out authors, events, locations, bookmarks, tags and a whole slew of other things. How do you see microformats? Well like i said they just tag the content so you already see them. How do you use them? Use firefox and download Operator to get started. From there you can take any event i publish and add it to your calendar. Try it out here.
4. No-www.org – Basically this is a site dedicated to the extinction of the www prefix in webpages. It’s deprecated and dead. We don’t need it anymore but we can’t stop using it. http describes the protocol we plan on using and thats enough. we don’t need a redundant www tagged in there. i dont send mail to mail.gmail.com why should there be a www.gmail.com
   

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Hakia: Alright I’m impressed.

So maybe I was wrong. I looked more into hakia today. They actually have a pretty sweet search engine. It seems to utilize wordnet as well as some cool proactive querying. Hakia actually extracts queries from the webpage as its crawled. Thats pretty cool.

Additionally they use a SemanticRank which is allegedly better than popularity rank. This is actually a very useful concept. It seems to be similar to what Chris Anderson talks about in the long tail. While popularity is important in some cases it is generally geared towards the lowest common denominator. For example Amazon.com has information about a lot of things and is very popular. However its safe to say that if I want information about a new phone, a niche blog post dedicated to the phone will most likely contain more information as it is written by subject matter experts in the field they’re interested in.

So how well does it all work? I’m not sure yet. I’ve officially switched my quick search bar from google to hakia for a few weeks (or more if it goes well) I’ll let you (my 5 readers and whoever catches this on technorati) know how it goes.

UPDATE:
Christian from Hakia was kind enough to correct me. Hakia doesn’t actually use wordnet. Its actually ontological semantics. Pretty cool stuff really check out the link in his comment.

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