I likes it, I tells ya.

You’d think that Vimeo would have some kind of if/then/else thing there to change the tense of what’s written depending on who’s looking at it and at what time. I know, I know — it’s pronounced “pedant.”

For the record though, I do likes it.

The Surfaris — “Wipeout”

I have a story for this one.

Basically, the high school Stage Band (we played jazz-ish standards) was playing a show and the next song was “Blue Train.” My friend, the drummer at the time, had his sheet music in the wrong order, and so he thought the next song was “Wipeout.” When the bandleader counted the band in, most of the band started playing the head of “Blue Train” — “ba-da-ba-da-baaaaah…” My friend, however, did not. He started playing the drum solo intro to “Wipeout.”

It was awkward.

The State — Sideways House Family

My boy is dead and this house killed him AS IT WILL KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF US!

Too funny. For the record, Thomas Lennon has quite a few funny things to say on Twitter.

15,000? In a row?

So I had an idea. It was tentatively named “Wasn’t She In?” and it was going to be a web app with two text fields and a do-button. In each text field, you’d type the name of a movie or TV show. When you hit Return or clicked the do-button, the web app would tell you what cast members those two films/shows shared.

The idea is that you’re watching a TV show (say, oh, I don’t know, an episode of The Big Bang Theory) and you recognise one of the cast members (Sara Rue, maybe) from somewhere. You wonder, “hey, wasn’t that person in Movie X?” (in this case, Idiocracy, and yes she was).

Normally, you’d go and find out the person’s name from the IMDb page for the TV show that you’re watching and then do a ⌘+F for that name on the cast list for the movie you thought they were in. “Wasn’t She In?” was going to be a way to streamline that process.

I say was because accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

Let me say that again.

Accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

So, yeah. I don’t think I’ll be following through on that idea.

(btw, Boxee pulls in metadata from IMDb for movies and TV shows, but they don’t pay that $15,000 annual fee. They screen-scrape.)

The Specials — “Little Bitch”

As seen in the dance scene from Sixteen Candles.

From later in the dance: “Wild Sex (In The Working Class),” by Oingo Boingo.

If the number of cannons fired or the number of 50-foot-high inflatable women there are riding a life-size steam train with fireballs shooting out of it are criteria for how good a rock show is, then AC/DC were pretty good last night.

There you are at the airport. You want to read Hacker News, but you’re about to get on a flight. Why not catch up with HN while you’re on the plane?

instahn is a Python script that adds every story on the front page of Hacker News to your Instapaper.

Get it here.

Ideally I’d like to get it to add the stories to an Instapaper folder called “Hacker News” or something, but the Instapaper API doesn’t appear to support adding things to any folder other than “Read Later.”

instahn was written at an airport.

All The Books Are About Old Apple

I own a couple of books about Apple. I have Apple Confidential 2.0 and Steve Wozniak’s autobiography, iWoz. I’ve also read Andy Hertzfeld’s folklore.org series of essays that got turned into Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made. I think I have another one floating around somewhere, but the ones I mentioned are the good ones.

As a computer enthusiast and software maker person, I freaking love the stories that are in these books. I know this sounds dorky, but some of those stories have actually inspired me. Literally.

Here’s the thing — all of these books deal with the earlier (pre-Steve-Jobs’-return) Apple. I’m yet to see any books or whatever written about the internal workings of Apple since, I don’t know, the iPod. I would love to see books about the recent Apple stuff. Stories about the design decisions around the iPhone? Pfft, sold. I’d buy that book in a heartbeat.

Now, I get Apple’s whole cloak-and-dagger deal. I get why they stay quiet about product development and why they don’t comment on rumours. I’m fine with that, and I honestly think it helps them to make great products. I just really hope that Apple’s penchant for secrecy in recent years doesn’t prevent those stories from being told.

I get the feeling that one of two things is true — either

• Apple was just as secretive back in 1984 as it is now, and it’s just that enough time has passed now that tell-alls can be written about ca. 1984 Apple. If this is true, then we’ll probably get the Apple 2.0 tell-alls some time in the next decade.
• Apple is more secretive now than it was in 1984, and we’ll never get books about recent events written by Apple insiders.

I can’t be sure which is true since I wasn’t around in 1984 to see how Apple was back then. I hope the former is true though, because I feel like there are some great stories to be told about the development of recent products like the iPhone and the Apple TV.

It’s been seven years without a byte… and he’s hungry. Kate Libby, handle Acid Burns, has a souped up laptop that can do 0 to 60 on the infobahn in a nanosecond. When the two collide, the battle of the sexes goes into hard drive.

— The blurb on the back of Hackers (1995). I hope that the guy that wrote this copy was sent to the punitentiary.

Let me tell you about my high school rock band.

I just found a CD. It’s about an hour long, and it contains the only recorded evidence that I was in a band in high school.

The choice performance that I’ve chosen to share with you is a cover of blink-182’s “Dammit.” Please, don’t expect a good music-listening experience going into this.

From an engineering perspective, it’s bad — the single mic we had was misplaced in the room, so the drums are way loud and the vocals are barely audible. From a musical-proficiency perspective, it’s even worse — we sucked. Ignoring my friend’s one-beat-off fuck-up at about 1:10, I was into year two, maybe three, of playing drums. My musical influences ranged from older Lars Ulrich to Travis Barker to newer Lars Ulrich. My playing wasn’t exactly nuanced.

Still, I wanted to publish this, if only so that I could chronicle how great we weren’t. Were any high school bands great?

Some other smash hits from the CD:

• the first few minutes of Metallica’s “Seek & Destroy,” as well as the opening minute of “Enter Sandman”
• approximately three Ramones songs
• Green Day’s “Hitchin’ a Ride”
• the obligatory “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
• about twenty-five minutes of dicking around

I guess this is growing up.

D E N N I S

PROS

• basically nice
• takes good care of his feet
• makes good chili
• remembers my birthday
• rarely wants to do it
• it’s funny when he goofs on his friends
• doesn’t care about money
• loyal
• too lazy to cheat
• would increase likelihood of blue-eyed kid
• loves The Simpsons
• has good hair
• has already seen me throw up two times
• fixed TV
• Jack likes Dennis

CONS

• not super smart
• listens to Winger
• dental hygiene
• wears acid-wash denim
• always wants foot rubs
• not much money
• catholic
• doesn’t like his mother
• I don’t like his mother
• his mother doesn’t like me
• loves Family Guy
• reads The Post
• insists on spending holidays with his mother
• has already seen me throw up
• attempted threeway
• racist
• wears Italian ???? even though Irish
• Jack likes Dennis

From “The Break-Up”, Season 1 of 30 Rock.

The Exif standard has no provision for video files.

— Wiki. Bummer. I was hoping that, like photos, videos had some meta-data built-in that could tell you what kind of camera a video was captured with.

Good video shot on a Flip?

Help me internet, you’re my only hope.

I’m looking for an example of a real video (not a “this is just a test” video or a “here is my baby” video) shot on a Flip MinoHD. I get that you wouldn’t want to go make a feature-length movie or anything with it, but has anyone ever made a good-looking short film on a Flip? Maybe a music video? Anything other than cat videos? Searching for the appropriate terms on Flickr gives me a bad signal-to-noise ratio. Doing the same on Vimeo wasn’t much better.

So. Anyone know of a good video that was shot on a Flip? Answers enabled.

Idea

Just need to capture this real quick.

Idea: a Tumblr theme called P ’n’ V that makes your Tumblr look like a poker-and-viagra-ad-covered robo-blog.

http://www.bestsoftware4download.com/download/t-free-ipad-download-pcfgiqoy.html →

This is possibly the spammiest-spam-spamspam webpage in the world.

Apart from the hideous, link-filled poker-and-viagra look, the cherry on the top is the file that your computer automatically starts downloading when you visit the page — iPad.zip.

I’m sure there is nothing malicious at all about that.