Category: looky

something cool I found on the internets

William Hung

looky

The most famous Civil Engineering major at Cal.

Would you have the guts to try out for American Idol? What if you can’t really sing? Your audition would be shown to the entire country.

Well, William Hung did. He even made it onto one of the “Best of the Worst” shows, and although he was painful to watch, his confidence and attitude were inspiring. I have a feeling Paula Abdul felt the same way.
Web link of note: William Hung
(At http://www.williamhung.net/)

Comic Book Tracking Software

looky

I need something to help me track my comic book collection. I have mainly trade paperbacks (they are less clutter), but I have a lot of them… it hasn’t gotten to the point where I don’t remember whether I’ve bought something or not, but it’s on the verge of getting there.

Also, since I live with Diane now, and she has many boxes of Wonder Woman, we need to rein it in ASAP.
At this point I’m favoring the following attributes:

  • web-based interface
  • backed by a database (pref MySQL)
  • open-source (I will be hacking on it)
  • some kind of support for sorting by artist or writer or both, or a framework that makes it relatively easy to add that support
  • the product MUST BE FINISHED, because if I wanted some half-assed program that was mostly broken, I could write it myself

All of these are from SourceForge, ordered by relevancy and potential.

  • LibDB is more generally for magazines, movies, and pretty much every medium you might own. They seem to be still active (Feb 4th 02004) and their home page is pretty impressive. The designers seem to be actual librarian/information archivists.

  • MangaDB runs in perl/CGI. It has a pretty complete home page and a running demo. As promised, it is very suitable for the front end of a Manga store. Bears future investigation.

  • PHPMyComic is one of the most advanced… however the home page for the site is mostly broken, and I couldn’t even leave a comment on the “Forums” section.

  • Odin aka “ACSoc Comics Library Management System” has a home page at sourceforge and a demo site up… however, every time I’ve visited the demo site, it’s been broken, and all the links are in Chinese. Cool site alias though- www3.to/cucomic.

  • JComics looks like it started as a personal project in 02001, came out with a single release, and then got dropped. The project home page is an empty directory listing.
  • CComicCataloging– released once in late 02002. No documentation, no forum comments.
  • myComicCollector is listed in the “planning” stage, is written in Italian, and last had activity in Jan 02003. Next!
  • phpCM is written for PHP and MySQL… too bad it never had a release, and was last heard from in august 02002.
  • I can’t even think of what the concept was for Comic Book Studio. Apparenlty something to do with publishing comics as well as archiving… No releases, no documentation, no posts, last updated Nov 02001.
  • PHP Comic Book Collector was just started in Jan 02004.

LoftCube

looky

Modular housing- a prefab rooftop apartment which bleeds cool from its every pore. Diane said this should be called “iLoft” and was looking into getting a reseller agreement from this guy.
Web link of note: LoftCube
(At http://www.loftcube.net/)

How Dare You Try To Help Me

looky

I took my car in for service this morning, and treated myself to Peet’s; a latte. On the way there I spoke to a homeless man holding a protest sign. I asked him what he was protesting, and he said something in a highly confusing way about misallocated city funds and 32 degrees.

So I asked him to elaborate. I had never heard anything about this.

Apparently the City of Palo Alto bought something for the homeless people to be used as a shelter, with specially allocated funds, and never opened it up… but I’m not sure, because when I asked for details he got really angry. He accused me of trying to “mess with him” and said it was really uncalled for.

Then I told him that I was just asking for information and he would be more convincing to people if he more patiently explained the situation. He angrily told me that he didn’t need my help and I could just go away! This is all within the space of about a minute.

So I went back to the garage, drove back, and ran him over with my beamer. Then I took his carcass and left it to rot inside the abandoned homeless shelter building… maybe he’ll be more polite to people in HELL.

Okay, so I made that last part up. But jeez, why alienate people who are interested in your cause?

It reminds me of young San Francisco liberals who turn every conversation into an argument and then refuse to tell you the basis of their opinions, and yes I have gotten into a lot of conversations like that. Hint: THAT IS NOT HELPFUL NOR CONVINCING.

I am probably one of the more politically active people that guy would have spoken to outside of Whole Fucking Foods market; most of the people outside Peet’s were Palo Alto professional types holding the leashes of their bizarrely shaped purebred dogs and talking about their architecture or legal gigs while they sipped at their $5 coffees.

I hope he remembers me when he’s locked out of his stupid shelter when it’s raining.

American Tilapia Association

looky

a cheap farmable eating-fish.

I think it may be possible to grow them in rice paddies? I’m still looking into it.

Sort of like a multi-phylum Companion Planting.

Aha- FISH-RICE CULTURE

One thing I’ve noticed that is usually considered a disadvantage of this system, which actually is a bonus- you can’t use pesticides on the rice when you grow it concurrently with tilapia.

In an article from the The lsraeli Joumal of Aquaculture – Bamidgeh 50(1), 1998, 33-42:

CULTURE OF MACROBRACHIUM ROSENBERGII
IN MONOCULTURE AND POLYCULTURE
WITH OREOCHROMIS NILOTICUS IN PADDIES IN EGYPT

They found that a high density (in 7,200 m² paddies) prawn polyculture with the rice gave a higher return than a prawn/tilapia/rice polyculture or the control rice monoculture. Their most successful density: 20,000 prawn juveniles per hectareWeb link of note: American Tilapia Association
(At http://ag.arizona.edu/azaqua/ata.html)

Eureka! “Enka”

looky

Finally someone figured out the name of the genre of music I was looking for- it’s enka ( 演歌 ) – the sort of lounge-y Japanese music you used to hear in sushi bars.

I have an 8-track of this stuff from my grandparents, and I’m trying to find who has the rest of their collection… also I’m betting some of the local Japanese churches will have some more (lots of old Japanese people in the bay area).

This genre is so goofy that the GameBoy game “Wario Ware” spoofed it in one of the levels- the decor is 1970’s samurai TV show, a genre of show about as hackneyed as the cop show here, and a enka theme plays which is indestinguishable from the real thing.

KAZUE: people loved it when Karaoke Box started
KAZUE: used to be Karaoke is just the thing people do at bar subby bar you know
KAZUE: and almost only Enka
BRIAN: what is Enka
BRIAN: is that a genre of music
KAZUE: it’s hard to explain….type of music only old people listen to
BRIAN: aha!
BRIAN: I think I have some of that
KAZUE: like country song in US?
BRIAN: I have been looking for the name of the genre
BRIAN: like the lady singers all wear kimono
KAZUE: yes
KAZUE: all sounds same though
BRIAN: I know!
BRIAN: I was thinking “hell, I could write these things myself!”

From Barbara’s Enka Site:

We Western music lovers might imagine it this way… Team up a songwriter who writes old-fashioned Gypsy music with a romantic lyricist of an American blues or country music background. Then translate the lyrics into poetic but old-fashioned Japanese and arrange the music for a band made of half Japanese musicians and half European classical musicians, plus a harmonica and electric guitar. Then find a Japanese woman to sing the song in full kimono, but choreograph her performance as if it were an operatic aria. That would give you something close to Enka music…