I had a Twitter Moment this afternoon. It was communication that would not have taken place on any other communication platform, but Twitter made it work. For several months now, I’ve been following the Bad Astronomy blog. I visited it several years go when investigating the prime “skeptic” websites (Bad Astronomy has [...]

Last December, I participated in an international blogosphere Sandwich Party, put on by two lovely hostesses, Elsa and Jane, in which all the participants made and ate a sandwich and photo-blogged the process. This concept may seem very strange, but I am absolutely certain that this kind of thing will become more and more [...]

The other day, someone found my blog from google.bg. Rather than think, “Oh, that’s Bulgarian Google. I know someone who is moving to Bulgaria,” the first thought that I had was, “Hey, lowercase ‘bg’ has a rotational ambigram equivalent!” For those of you that are not typeface junkies and haven’t read Angels and [...]

You may have noticed some weirdness on this blog this week. On Monday evening, some of my coworkers, for solid business reasons, had to reinstall the server this blog runs on. They backed up the database, reinstalled the operating system, restored the database, and brought the blog back up. The only real [...]

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Google_Suggestions_Should_you’;Google is really funny sometimes, mainly because it provides an unbiased algorithmic mirror of society. While chuckling about people that find my blog by asking google 20-word complete sentences, I was going to run a search, for the sheer irony of it, for “Should I search with complete sentences?” But the [...]

Finally, some competition for TinyUrl! TinyUrl provides one of those services that is so useful that you slap yourself for not thinking of it first. You give TinyUrl a long web address, like “http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/” and they shorten it. The way they shorten it is to generate a unique code which they store [...]

During the recent Twitter outages, I checked the Twitter Status Blog a few times. I noticed that it was running on a platform called Tumblr, so I investigated a little further. Here, I plan to explain what Tumblr is, why its creators think it’s useful, what you can do with it, and what [...]

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at writing a Greasemonkey script for a while. For those of you that don’t know, Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets you run any javascript that you want as if it were part of the web page you are viewing. The main point of this [...]

I can’t recall the exact path I took through the internet tubes to find it, but I recently became aware of the immense library of free music available on archive.org, the Internet Archive. They have an incredibly long list of live music performances. There’s a special section just for Grateful Dead bootlegs.

Anyone who lives in Spain and has a television that they turned on this past Easter will have seen video of two celebrities kissing on a balcony under a McDonalds sign. I care zero about the Spanish celebrity gossip scene that overruns the broadcast networks day and night. I do my best to [...]