Brian2Brian

A total disaster

2006-11-19T01:34:00.000Z

OK, it has a Trader Joe's, for which I am grateful, but other than that, the newly renovated Bayshore Town Center is a total disaster. The incompetent developers seem to have overlooked some basic facts about the Milwaukee area:

It's cold here. Nobody wants to walk outside at the mall.
Bayshore used to be an outdoor mall, and spent lots of money decades ago to enclose it. Did they tell you that before you reversed this?
People here don't like parallel parking or parking garages. They tolerate it downtown, but lots of people avoid downtown because they don't like anything that's not a big suburban parking lot.
Milwaukeeans love cars and suburban sprawl. An urban center where people can walk among apartments, offices, and shops? Maybe if some refugees from Chicago head up this way.
Narrow little streets are bad for pedestrians and drivers. Pedestrians don't like getting hit, and drivers don't like slowing down for pedestrians.
If you are going to build a shopping center around narrow little streets, maybe it would be a good idea to have separate truck entrances so the narrow little streets don't get completely blocked every time a store gets a delivery!

This story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel illustrates the problem well. The new mall has only been open for a few weeks.

SATURDAY, Nov. 18, 2006, 1:38 p.m.
By Annysa Johnson
Parking lot rage incident reported
Glendale police are investigating a report of parking lot rage today after one woman bumped her car into a pedestrian who refused to move out of a parking stall outside Boston Store at Bayshore Town Center.
Glendale Police spokesman Joel Dhein said the pedestrian was saving the stall for a friend who had yet to arrive at the spot when another driver approached to pull in. The driver asked her to move, but she refused, prompting a standoff that ended when the driver nudged the pedestrian with her car.
Police have yet to make contact with the driver to hear her version of the story, Dhein said, but at this point charges appear unlikely.
"It's a case of poor judgment on both sides," he said.

I am a grammar god

2006-11-03T06:12:00.000Z

As if there was much doubt.

How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

Congratulations! If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. You can smell a grammatical inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is revered by the underlings, though some may blaspheme and call you a snob. They're just jealous. Go out there and change the world.
Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Thanks, Liza!

Choke on a Pretzel

2006-10-22T03:52:00.000Z

It took a while, but the Choke on a Pretzel song is finally done!

1. In California and in New England
'Round the Great Lakes proud and blue
In the big cities we hear the people
Listen, and you'll hear them, too
The first time wasn't far enough
For someone known for standin' tough
We're waiting for the moment when
Your chance comes 'round again
Chorus:
Choke on a pretzel! Choke on a pretzel!
Bash your head against a chair
Choke on a pretzel! Choke on a pretzel!
'Til your lungs run out of air
It seems our only sure defense
Is hoping for more accidents
Can't happen to a better guy/at a better time
This twisted way to die!
2. Not by a missile or an explosion
Or from some birds with the flu
Not by some water, flooding or poisoned
Or air with too much CO2
The irony would just get lost
And snack food has the lowest cost
The greatest chance of getting through
This wish we have for you

Update: Choke on a Pretzel is now available on iLike!

Bach a teenage virtuoso

2006-09-05T04:46:00.000Z

The music world seems surprised to discover that Johann Sebastian Bach displayed a talent for music even as young as age 15, according to recently discovered manuscripts.

Duh. We know he wasn't spending all day chatting on the cell phone, because that hadn't been invented yet.

And we know he wasn't cramming for his AP calculus exams because AP hadn't been invented yet, either.

And neither had calculus, for that matter!

And don't get me going on all the TV shows Bach didn't watch after school. Watching Happy Days...transcribing Buxtehude...who do you suppose ended up the better musician as an adult?

Remix: Star Trek and The Simpsons

2006-09-03T22:29:00.000Z

Video of a Star Trek and The Simpsons theme song remix.

Pluto demoted!

2006-09-03T22:02:00.000Z

The International Astronomical Union recently stripped Pluto of its planetary status it has enjoyed for over seventy-five years. Proponents of Pluto respond.

Daily Bugle: Spiderman revealed!

2006-09-03T21:52:00.000Z

Perhaps Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is more appropriate.

Drivemocion

2006-09-03T21:47:00.000Z

Drivemocion, an illuminating car message sign "helps you improve communication with other drivers." This widget reflects a recent Kaiser Permanente radio advertisement informing listeners hand gesturing to other drivers is not considered exercise.

Ghost Ride Da Whip

2006-09-03T21:34:00.000Z

Ghost Ride Da Whip, a new method to help you get nominated for the Darwin Awards, involves performing some fancy footwork upon exiting your moving vehicle. Insurance clauses will reflect this new trend.

Infographics - visualizing data

2006-09-03T21:25:00.000Z

The International Networks Archive collects a variety of data to produce a series of infographics showing various aspects of globalization, including the popularity of the bicycle and the dominance of McDonald's over Starbucks.

Guitar tab download controversy

2006-08-27T05:30:00.000Z

It has come to my attention this week that the music industry has started to crack down on websites that post guitar tabs for popular songs. It has also come to my attention that Weird Al Yankovic has a song on Myspace about music downloading.

There is longstanding precedent in copyright law that a chord progression cannot be copyrighted because so many songs share the same chords. To wit, "Don't Download This Song" has almost the same chords as "We Are The World."

So what follows is my exercise of my rights to share my music scholarship with others.

Don't Download This Song intro G C D Bm Am C D / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / verse G Am7 C D7 G Bm/F# |: / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Em7 Bm Am7 C Dsus4 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / :| first time chorus G Cmaj7 D G C Dsus4 / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / C G Bm7 C Am D G / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / :| break Eb C Eb C / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / G Em C D E / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / chorus A Dmaj7 E A D Esus4 |: / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / D A C#m7 D Bm7 E / / / / / / / / / / / / :| and fade

The Generator Blog

2006-08-21T18:51:00.000Z

This blog is not about those machines used to change mechanical energy into electrical energy. It's about software that creates software. Software to play around and have fun with.

25 Ways to Die

2006-08-21T04:24:00.000Z

Synopsis: Crazed, college cartoonists collaborated cross-continentally to confer this catastrophic collection of casualties

David Attenborough: The Lyrebird

2006-08-21T04:20:00.000Z

In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist David Attenborough's 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favourite of his television moments. This clip of the lyrebird was voted number one. A Lyrebird is either of two species of ground-dwelling Australian birds, most notable for their extraordinary ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their environment.

Review of Chain Reaction Bicycles

2006-08-21T04:16:00.000Z

"I just saw . This explains why put up a link to this page. There are 81,792 characters in the HTML source, which is a fantastic length for search engine bots. Thumbs up. The URL has 28 characters. Just the perfect length. It must have taken a decade to complete the page. Magnificent. The color scheme is influenced by Eastern art. Seeing Chain Reaction Bicycles, I'm simply speechless. Well, I expected the creator to create something superior. The page is standards-compliant. If only my own company would have an awesome page like that. What a great page! The page contains 84 links, a well-calculated amount. Kudos." -- Gunther Young, Hot Site of the Week

How I got bird flu (or salmonella)

2006-05-18T07:07:00.000Z

What's worse: chicken from Southeast Asia, or eating it with a runny egg? What can I say? It's hard to find bibimbap in Milwaukee.

Singapore's latest superhero?

2006-05-18T06:50:00.000Z

It's amazing. You press the button and Green Man appears! Only problem is that Green Man is a flasher.

Save us!

2006-04-28T04:44:00.000Z

Hurry, FEMA, or they will soon be calling it the Katrina of the Great Lakes:

Experts have warned for years that the [Midwest] was overdue for a disaster of this kind, saying that decades of poor grease management and a culture of fried and heavily buttered food created a highly incendiary "grease core" spread across thousands of homes, restaurants, and offices. Landfills overflowing with greasy waxed paper and cardboard only added to the danger.

Expensive pennies and catching up with Japan

2006-04-22T06:01:00.000Z

It almost costs more than a penny to make a penny.

In Japan, people deliberately hoard one yen coins (worth about a penny) to protest sales taxes, because the one yen coins have cost more than one yen to make for quite some time.

I'm just sayin'.

Italian cooking is easy

2006-04-12T03:07:00.000Z

In Brian's new cooking video, you can see how easy it is to make exotic Italian food. The jury is split on whether Brian looks like Alton Brown or not.

The reason for this video was to test out my new camera. I don't know what I was worried about. MySpace is full of examples of how today's digital cameras are so easy to use, even the completely drunk among us can use them to make videos.

iSync, iCal and Address Book are still awful

2006-03-15T04:13:00.000Z

I usually have more than 100 To Do items, and I have 750 contacts, so it was probably a mistake to use toy demo software like the free software Apple provides with OS X.

When I got my iBook this summer, I liked the printouts you could make with iCal. It was buggy, though, especially the To Do items, which are apparently an afterthought. If you use the keyboard shortcut to start the To Do item, you have to press Enter at the end of the text. Otherwise, when you click on the panel where you enter the date, the text disappears. I know this, but still maanged to do it accidentally. This was frustrating a few times--I type in To Do items so the computer can remember them for me. I have finished a list only to find a few items that reverted to "New To Do" instead of what I typed. I completely forgot what it was I was trying to remember.

That was bad enough, but I plodded on, hoping with each new tweak to OS X, Apple might improve the UI for To Dos. I even bought an iPod, which would be my new PDA, containing my calendar, my To Dos, and my contacts. When I discovered that the iPod calendar was useless because the only order you can have it sort on is alphabetical. Can you think of a more useless sort order than alphabetical? Any other possible sort would be an improvement: order I entered it, date due, priority, calendar it's associated with.

I tried writing an AppleScript script to sort the To Dos in an iPod note, but AppleScript doesn't really have date parsing and string handling. I could have used Perl, but I wanted a one-button approach to get my To Dos synchronized.

So I went to paper, printing out my To Do list on a legal size printout every few days. It was a pain to do the data entry on the iBook to keep everything current.

So I am back to a Palm, a Palm TX. It is a great little device. It has WiFi, which I first thought was superfluous, but it lets me check the weather forecast before I'm out of bed, so I like it.

The Palm has exposed even more flaws with iCal and Address Book.

First, iCal. The first time after I synced it with the Palm, iCal crashed when I tried to print, never to recover. So I decided to use Palm Desktop for my Calendar and To Dos, and removed iSync from that loop. iSync doesn't really make it easy to figure out how to do this, but at least I have a degree in Computer Science. I still find it hard to believe that people without CS degrees get more benefit from computers than the time they waste.

I kept iSync in the loop for my contacts, since I liked having the addresses available in mail, and thought it would be useful to use my iPod to look people up in a pinch.

Yesterday, Address Book decided to crash. Upon recovery, I had no contacts. So syncing with the Palm erased all my contacts.

Fortunately, I had a backup, so I've only lost two weeks of phone number updates and about a dozen people from work who I hadn't added yet.

I tried all kinds of methods of tracking my contacts, calendar, and to do, but I am back to the Palm, which is the only thing that I have managed to stick with for more than a month, and I guess I am up to about seven years now with it. It should be fine as soon as I take all the buggy toy demo beta Apple crud out of the loop. It's nice to have my brain back.

Note: All my Apple software is up-to-the-minute: OS X Tiger, my iPod nano update, iSync, everything.

Spring is nearly upon us

2006-03-06T20:26:00.000Z

Now is the time to rid yourself of the clutter in your life—those things posing a hinderance to living. As one Brian suggested to the other, to do lists are not only for determining what things need to be done immediately. They are also helpful in understanding what things time will not allow. Writing it down gets it out of your mind. I discovered this approach was also effective in uncluttering life. Lifehacker posts numerous suggestions on ways to manage your life.

Better late than never-—North American Ferrari driving school

2006-02-27T06:52:00.000Z

$8200 will get you a chance to be one of fifteen drivers at the newly opened Ferrari driving school in Canada. Perhaps Ford should seriously consider a similar school.

Memo: Ohno

2006-02-13T04:00:00.000Z

Don't worry, Apolo. Once upon a time, Lance Armstrong was a brash young racer who wasn't content with second even though second was all he might have needed to advance to finals. (I was worried about you earlier in the race when you attacked to take the lead. Why did you do that? You had plenty of time to get to the front. Didn't you watch the other qualifying rounds? They weren't really races--the favorites (of which you were one) didn't have to fight for the lead when they finally took it.)

Anyway, you're only 24. You still have time to get a life-threatening illness, make a miraculous comeback, dump your girlfriend, get married, have three kids, dump your wife and kids, shack up with a rock star, retire, get dumped by the rock star, and embarrass yourself when you unretire after a winter of eating donuts, motivated by the less noble parts of human nature: proving your exes and the French press wrong.

Not to mention the other skating events this week...Good luck!

F.P.E.S. v0.0

2006-01-24T07:21:00.000Z

Boone tests a prototype of the Feline Protection and Enhancement System.