Towse: views from the hill

May 4, 2009

Microwaving a cellphone (better than Peeps!)

Filed under: timewaster,video — Towse @ 5:36 am

September 4, 2008

You have perfect color vision!

Filed under: art,fun,timewaster — Towse @ 10:36 pm

Test your color IQ

Drag and drop the colors in each row to arrange them by hue order.
The first and last color chips are fixed.
Click on “Score Test” when done.

Interesting exercise!

“You have perfect color vision!” they told me.

[via tweet from Tim O’Reilly]

August 7, 2008

Twitter StreamGraphs

Filed under: timewaster,web2.0 — Towse @ 5:00 pm

Twitter StreamGraphs

Oooh. Pretty! Then take one of the ribbons and click on it.

Say, search for “Obama” and click on “jobs” and see how the ribbon runs through it, what the tweets say, &c. and forth.

If you check “towse” (why would you?), you can see tweets I’ve deleted and re-written and you can get a feel for just how compul^H^H^H^Hnscientious I am.

November 14, 2007

When I’m 64 …

Filed under: books,culture,music,timewaster — Towse @ 11:41 pm

Talking with an old friend, well, exchanging e-mails and mentioned that I was feeling old.

His nibs and I’d had dinner a week or so ago with a friend who’d turned eighty in August. Eighty-year-old friend is looking good and, really, looks not that much different than he did when I met him thirty-two years ago. He’s involved with crafting little technology whizbang solutions for folks at the VA hospital. He’s a Maker. He hasn’t slowed down much if any at all. He’s just pretty darn cool.

I wrote to the e-mail friend, “I’m seven years older than he was when I first met him. Yikes, I’m feeling old.”

Then I found this test: Are you a hippy?

which gave these stats on the folks who had taken the test:

54% of test takers are Male, while 46% are Female.
93% of test takers are under the age of forty, while 7% are over forty.
78% of test takers have hair shorter than 6″, while 22% have hair that is longer.
7% of test takers were at Woodstock in 1969, while 93% were not.
[That in itself is astounding when you consider only 15% of the test takers were even =alive= in the 1960s. That means that ~50% of the people taking the test who were alive in the 1960s were at Woodstock. Is that even remotely possible?]
54% of test takers prefer John over George at 12% as their favorite Beatle.
15% of test takers were alive in the 1960′s, while 85% were not.
21% of test takers are vegetarians, while 79% are not.
11% of test takers have lived in a commune, while 89% have not.
10% of test takers voted for Ronald Reagan, while 90% did not.
[They forgot to ask how many had even had an opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan.]

The questions hit me with pangs of nostalgia: “Do you smell like patchouli?” “Do you own an incense burner?” “Do you have a brownie recipe with ingredients you can’t find at the A&P?” “Do you think Bob Dylan has a good voice?”

Do you feel old?

Update> and the doorbell rings. By the time I get there, the doorbell ringer is gone, but there’s an Amazon package under the doormat. “Thank you!” I call. “You’re welcome,” comes the reply from down the path. The package contained a couple books and Kristofferson’s latest.

Earlier this month we’d been at the Fillmore for an AIM benefit. I was reminded again how much I like his words and his voice. A few days ago I put an order in and here it was. I put my new purchase into the CD player. First song was the title song, This Old Road.

Yeah, feeling old. And that’s okay. Kristofferson, after all, is only ten years younger than our eighty-year-old friend and he’s still kickin’.

June 2, 2007

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ?

Filed under: timewaster,URL — Towse @ 8:44 pm

Talk last night turned to timewasters. e.g. the way a click at Grapes2.0 to an amazing YouTube video (a masterpiece of morphing called Women in Art) can lead to a similar morph based on Caravaggio work and then on to Picasso and then Matisse (all justifiable because they are art and educational) and from there to GeorgeW and (a couple wasted hours later) you come out of your zombie state to find you’ve wasted how much time? watching Barats and Beretta YouTube videos and the like.

“Happen often?” I was asked.

“Oh, hardly ever,” I answered. “That’s why it gave me that oh-shake-it-off-yick feeling that I used to get years ago when I’d overdosed on Barbara Cartland.”

So what do I do today? I hied over to popurls (which I mentioned a while back — Wednesday, to be exact) and starting poking through Digg’s hot hits.

… and found a click to Schrodinger’s LOL cat which led me to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ?, the weirdest collection of LOLcats I’ve ever seen.

[as defined on Wikipedia: Lolcats, a compound of lol and cat, are photos of cats with humorous captions]

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ? has seventy-five pages worth of pictures with captions (not all cats). With, perhaps, ten pictures with captions per page, we’re talking a lot of pictures. I started to get that queasy overload feeling long before I got to page #75.

What kind of pictures are we talking about? Something like ALICE CAT FELL DOWN

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Sweet!

His nibs came over and was standing behind me to see what I was snickering about.

“Remember the conversation last night about time wasted on the Web?” I said.

[note: As I was rummaging through Grapes2.0 to find the link to the "Women in Art" video on YouTube, I realized he'd covered I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ? recently ... like just this immediate past Wednesday! That's three days ago! Guess I should pay more attention to the plethora of entertaining links he collects on his blog. I could've been wasting time earlier this week, instead of today.]

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