Category: looky

something cool I found on the internets

Kah Rah Oh Kay

looky

Say the word karaoke.

Did you say “Carry-Oakie”? BAD! That’s how hick Americans say it.

The proper way is KAH RAH OH KAY. Short KAY- it’s close to KEH. Don’t stress any syllable over another; this isn’t French. Say it like a robot.

ka ra o ke .

Actually you know more Japanese than you think. You know the word karate? Not only does it sound similar, but the kara part of that word is the same word.

  • kara te is “empty hand”- a way of fighting that does not include weapons, which you hold in your hand

  • kara oke is short for kara okesutora which is Engrish for kara ORCHESTRA- “empty orchestra.” Like the music is there but the musicians are not.

You dig? Okay lesson over.

Publishing your own iCal

looky

I have a .mac account… but I don’t want to have to depend on it. The account costs about $100 a year.

The main thing I use it for is publishing my calendar (formerly I used Yahoo). So now I’m trying to solve one of the following:

  1. setting up my own server to let people view my iCal calendar
  2. sync the yahoo calendar with my local iCal

The WebDAV support for iCal only lets you upload the data… you could surf it, but it will just look like a bunch of .ics tags.

So you have to install a front-end to it, to view it online. Fortunately there is one already written called “PHP iCalendar.”

There’s some articles on doing this:

Hangin With The Doors

looky

Will someone tell me why you can’t just put in a door you buy from the store?

It’s weird, but every door frame is slightly different. When you buy a new door (which will run you a few hundred dollars for a solid wood external door), you have to have it shaved to the exact shape and possibly have holes drilled in it for the hinges, since every set of hinges is placed slightly differently.

Seems like a good argument for metal frames. I would buy a metal door, but knocking on a metal door makes me feel like I’m living in a freezer. And incidentally someone who installs doors is referred to as a “hanger.”

No Chicken Bun For You!

looky

I had a craving this morning for a steamed chicken bun for breakfast. Hong Kong Bakery in Mountain View has great ones… I called up ShaC and offered him one, and drove over.

Except when I got there, they didn’t have any that day. Only pork buns (which are still extremely good). Apparently the chicken supplier was flaking today… when I made a joke about Asian Bird Flu the counter girl just looked at me quizzically.

SHAC: they need to take the chickens off of egg laying duty and make them lay more buns

I don’t know why, but I’m compelled to pull apart the bun before I eat it. Maybe just to look at the stuff inside… I do this with a lot of different finger-foods.

This used to drive my roommate Richele insane. She would start screaming “STOP PICKING APART YOUR FOOD AND JUST TAKE A BITE OUT OF IT!! YOU EAT LIKE A LITTLE MONKEY!!!”

Face Filter

looky

This is just scary. It’s software that changed the facial expressions of the people in your photos.

But usually they end up looking very weird.

There is a “cool” filter and a “sexy” filter.
Web link of note: Face Filter
(At http://www.facefilter.com/)

WikiPedia Intervention

looky

Adding to WikiPedia is addictive…

I am constantly using my blog as a notebook. I will get obsessed with something and gorge on all the data I can find on the subject. Then, later when I’m looking for something, I’ll remember I scoured the net for something and annotated all the information in a blog entry, so I just run a search on my own blog.

So in that regard Wikipedia is like a blog for stuff you don’t really need on your own site, with entries maintained by other people.

There are no limits to participating. Periodically there are “edit wars” on some topics (e.g. the phrasing in controversial entries like Israel-Palestinian tensions). However the topics I look up / edit are usually so obscure that they are touched only rarely.

Shards of Glass

looky

Shard of Glass is the name of a fictional company that sells popsicles with broken glass in them.

It was a commercial aired during Superbowl 02004, and showed happy workers making these horrible things with the broken glass jutting out of the sides… The CEO in the commercial cheerfully tells the viewer that they realize broken-glass-related health issues occur a lot more in users of their popsicles, and that’s why they make these public service
announcements.

The tagline is “what if every company sold products like the tobacco companies?”

Web link of note: Shards of Glass
(At http://www.shardsoglass.com/)