Looks like Dear God Damn Diary has collected a cease-and-desist letter from one Angela Gordon, representing United Features Syndicate, for posting the execrable earworm ‘Hey Ya.’

While we at mike.whybark.com applaud the effect of this letter, which is to minimize the possibility that we’ll experience the inescapable urge to perforate our eardrums with the tiny little pencils once distributed by national magazines with appeals to subscribe (back in the seventies, when every day was like a rotting tooth in the mouth of a week-old corpse), we are sadly constrained to note that Ms. Gordon’s thuggish eviction notice was intended to protect not the innocent listener (oh, how we mourn for the pursuit of the public good in our vaunted corps of legal professionals) but rather to protect the valuable intellectual property created by the happy collaboration of Charles M. Schulz and Bill Melendez in the form of an animated television special celebrating the birth of an important religious figure as reflected in the lives of a group of children originally seen in the comics section of nationally distributed newspapers but which I do not refer to by name out of my deep concern, (undoubtedly only expressed with greater assiduity by Ms. Angela Gordon on behalf of United Features Syndicate) for the protection and maintenance of the property rights of United Features Syndicate, as the name is clearly marked in the cease-and-desist letter with the registered symbol.

It’s my sincere hope that while this deserved slap in the faces of all callous underminers of our nation’s and the world’s regime of intellectual property rights will in no wise distract B²‘s mission of providing us with informative, sober, thougtful insights into the current high-powered primary battle.

How I PC’d an Apple G5 turns out to be a practical joke spun out of control, says the 1/27/04 update to the original cringe-inducing post.

Rest easy, America. It will be at least a few years before someone does something like this for real.

I still think duct taping a laptop drive to a transistor battery inside a cheese grater with a circuit board and illuminated flashlight bulb would make a swell mod. You could even cut off the bottom of the grater and made a down-market G5 Cube.

Linkblog?, wonders Eric S. at Wiredfool. He wants a centralized online bookmark storage facility that he administers and hosts so that the data is non-dependent on the vagaries of free web services.

I knew I’d just seen an extensive discussion of varieties of solutions to this problem; naturally I hadn’t linked to it in a way that was accessible to me.

The discussions were on Ask Metafilter, but site-googling was unproductive because the key words – ‘bookmark,’ ‘link,’ etc., – are too meta, even (or perhaps especially) on MeFi, to produce a parsable result set.

To summarize the discussion, there are a variety of open-source tools and projects underway to provide this functionality, using everything from Perl to PHP/MySQL.

Another Eric pointed out that a paid .Mac subscription provides seamless virtual desktop integration, which leads to the same bookmarks appearing in-browser for Safari users when roaming.

The NitPicker’s Guide to the Lord of the Rings. Eighty-one points whereby the Jackson film differs from holy writ.

victor is dead slash luna presents:

The Terror Alert Banana

Source here. That is all.

The Mac lovers of Microsoft: these ones haven’t been fired.

Kidding, Mac BU! This P-I story looks at the people that make software for Macs up Redmond way. It’s by Todd Bishop, who I’ve linked to far too much this week.

I recently sprang for an iSight, sold on it by a demo conducted by Eric. The product itself is a classic Apple widget; the very experience of opening the packaging is satisfying.

Alas, a bit more time spent with the product reveals some shortcomings.

• The default video chat application, iChat AV, is not cross-platform, limiting the user base. I do wish to note that the ease of use and quality of signal for iChat AV is astonishing.
• The iSight’s default video settings are not well suited for low-light situations (such as my desk area).
• The iSight’s video settings are not adjustable from within a stock install of iChat AV. Frustratingly, they are readily available in a range of other software applications, including Apple’s own Quicktime Broadcaster. You can brighten the image and fix the color balance, but the settings will not be saved when you switch over to iChat AV.
• The three clear acrylic mounts that come with the camera are of limited utility, being very specifically designed to meet mounting requirements for current Apple products.
• iChat AV does not ship with the camera, but rather is available either as a bundle with OS X 10.3 or as a standalone application available via $30 purchase only.
• The lack of a large installed user base makes searching for reliable solutions to these irritations quite time consuming.

Fortunately, all of these shortcomings are addressable, with the exception of the unbundled iChat AV. Formerly, Apple offered a demo version that operated on older systems. That demo expired on January 15, and there’s a storm of controversy on Apple’s support boards about the already-premium priced camera coming without the basic software required to use it. Judging by Apple’s previous solutions to this sort of thing, I would be unsurprised if Apple decided to make iChat AV available online to registered iSight owners for free, sometime soon.

There are a few third-party mounts available (the SightFlex looks particularly cool) for the camera, and of course many hacks to improve the flexibility of the stands as shipped.

Personally, I built a little box-like shelf out of cardboard and velcro to attach to the front lower bezel of my monitor. Eventually I’ll refine it a bit and publish plans and instructions here.

A third-party program called iChatUSBCam ($9 online only) enables fine-tuning of the video image in iChat – and, more importantly, I think, enables USB-based web-cams and video-inputs to operate with iChat AV, which otherwise only accepts firewire video input. Considering that the iSight – and other firewire-enabled video solutions – generally go for well over $100, while USB web-cams can be picked up for a song, interested parties might wish to pursue this route as an alternative to obtaining the iSight proper.

So that brings us to the toughest problem, the lack of cross-platform opportunities for iChat AV. A well-informed friend notes that given Apple and AIM’s partnership, now that AOL is not embargoed from producing a video-chat application, we should expect to see an interoperable video-conferencing application in the next release of AIM for Windows, and possibly in AIM for the Mac, if such a product is being maintained.

But what about right now?

There appear to be three options. Two are dual-platform video chat applications, iVisit and iSpQ. I noted messages from users of both applications noting that they functioned, and messages from users of both applications discussing the difficulty of setting the applications up.

A third option explicitly supports not only cross-platform video-conferencing but video-conferencing with users of NetMeeting, Microsoft’s video-conferencing application. What prodigy is this?

It’s the in-development open source project XMeeting. The application looks like it might be even harder to configure and set up for non-technical people than the two mentioned above, but the Holy Grail – interoperability with the de facto business standard – might make it worth swimming upstream for.

B²‘s Dear God Damn Diary brings it with the nimbly titled “Kerry Wins High Score in New Hampshire, Advances to Challenging Stage.”

Oh, this this the best primary season ever!

Non-otaku observers had been wondering: “What is the secret name and power of the current Prez?”

Otaku76 comes through: “George W. Bush and the Twilight Idol Republican Administration” are the collective target of the Supa-Dems this year. As a bonus, there’s some “hastily conceived and constructed wallpaper.”

You know, if I actually spent eight hours scouring the net, I bet I could find enough primary satire sites that I could reconstruct actual news from them. Hmm. Interesting experiment.

Seattle-area readers may already know about the P-I’s relatively new blog offerings: seattlepi.com Microsoft Blog is written by Todd Bishop (who appeared on KUOW’s new biz show, Wi-fi Networking News writer Glenn Fleishmann.

Sometimes I find Bishops’ blog a bit dry and newsy, but he seems to be finding his blog-legs as in this post providing some context for a recent story about Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham coming aboard the mothership, or when he posts background and links for today’s examination of recently-published Microsoft marketing touting a lower total cost of ownership for Windows than Linux.

the P-I’s senior online producer, Brian Chin, also blogs in Buzzworthy, a wider-net variety of blog. Today he’s linked to a story about the Creativity Machine, a study about the problem of obesity in an affluent society, and a P-I feature by traveling correspondent Winda Benedetti (I believe Chin’s ex-colleague, now taking a trip around the world with her husband, as I recall) on the mystery of international toilets.

There is also a blog on the Mariners and consumer news, neither of which I’m currently familiar enough with to talk about.

Both of the blogs I cite in detail have open comments on entries, only infrequently garnering input, and neither posts trackbacks. I’m pretty sure they are using Movable Type. I’d like it if they would expose trackbacks but I can imagine there might be some infighting about outbound links at the paper.

One of the interesting things about the comments that do appear (troll-fests aside) is that they reflect the demographics of the P-I’s online readership, and therefore tend to reflect a distinct sensibility from comment threads seen in the rest of the blogosphere. I hesitate to characterize that sensibility (I haven’t seen enough of the comments to really be able to pin it down). I do look forward to watching that sensibility evolve to reflect the immediacy and bidirectional nature of the medium.

I noticed I was getting an uncharacteristically large number of site visitors from MeFi yesterday – not server-buckling numbers, but more than I’d expect from a random trackback.

As may be seen in the link above, my favorite information magpie chez Mefi, none other than the musically-knowledgeable and my apparent neighbor, the redoubtable (if war-cranky of late) y2karl cites this blog in a response to the original post.

Look ma! I’m an information resource! Of course, it’s a throwaway post that just links to a single TV-news story about wild parrots in Seattle (inspired by TFG).

So here’s some better data.

Since that time (nearly a year ago), Viv and I have become friends with a couple who lives near Seward Park, in Columbia City, and they confirm that yes, there is a loud band of parrots that will occasionally swagger around the neighborhood knocking down little old ladies, frightening children, and chucking rocks through the windows of abandoned buildings.

NBC affiliate KING 5 has done a story about the birds (auto-redirects to registration page). Dated February 2003, this may be the origin of the national ABC News story linked by Scott. Friends of Seward Park mention the parrots on their ‘Birds’ page.

In December 2002, the Lake Forest Park Enterprise covered a householder’s experiences with some of the birds, and here are some photos of the apparently burgeoning Maple Leaf colony that y2karl refers to in his post.

That’s better.