Simian Uprising by Jer Clarke

Great essay about understanding and wrangling your pet nerd by Rands In Repose:

A majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong.

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

While I really wouldn’t want this to all be true about me, there’s definitely a lot of plain facts layed out. Great read if you are or know some serious nerds (with a bent towards tech pros/programmers specifically).

(via. Lindsay, photo from Mental Floss)

(hit the banner to see their site, which tries to explain RSS for normal people)

RSS is what happens to the web after we stop wasting our time and get down to business. It’s like if we all got our news on differently shaped cue cards and someone offered us a magazine instead. At first you’d think “oh, but I like the colors on the cue cards” and “this paper is boring, it all looks the same”, but pretty quickly you’d realize how much more convenient it is to carry the magazine, and how much more time you can spend reading the stories in it rather than organizing your cue cards.

Info-junkies of the world REJOICE, today is RSS Day!

(I like NetNewsWire as an RSS reader for Mac, but I hear even the online Google one works really well. )

This is so good, but completely meaningless unless you’re in on so many nerdy internet things. For reference see Fail Blog, an example of Epic Fail (which is originally a D&D joke) and Unix Time, which sets it’s zero moment as Jan1 1970 (a.k.a. the Unix Epoch).

Is XKCD the best thing ever? Yes.

I hate to post things that are already on the front page of YouTube, but this is just too sweet, thoughtful and funny. I’m also a sucker for acoustic guitar and immaculately performed lo-fi camera tricks, both of which are excellently executed in this one.

Dan and Dan in “Requiem for a Wardrobe”

Candy Chang points out how the urban grind can make people lose sight of the bigger questions in their lives, and puts those questions on the sidewalk for people looking down:

(more photos at the link above)

This is an amazing idea. Artistic graffiti is beautiful and wonderful, but simple questions like these can be so powerful and visceral for the people who see them, regardless of how they’d normally feel about art or vandalism. I usually use chalk.

(Found via. Spacing Montreal)

I had to. Via lolbots.

Also on the subject of unnecessary electrical violence, this amazing techno/video remix of the original ‘Dont’ Tase me Bro’ student situation. The mix is just so catchy, I saw it a few months ago but still randomly get it stuck in my head. YouTube Link.

A friend of mine pointed out to me that today is the anniversary of the end of prohibition of beer so many decades ago (In the U.S.) Obviously, this is something we should all be happy about, only bad things happened during the prohibition of alcohol and people had access to it anyway (except that the high prices funded organized crime instead of the public trust through taxes).

I like to take holidays celebrating the legality of alcohol as an opportunity to reflect on the stupid, pointless and destructive laws we still suffer against regarding drugs less dangerous and more fun than alcohol. Marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms, for example, are completely non-lethal (unlike alcohol), not chemically addictive (and mushrooms aren’t even really psychologically addictive) and don’t make people into violent jerks like alcohol does, yet they remain illegal because a minority of our society cares about what the rest choose to do with those substances.

They are natural organisms designed by [INSERT DEITY] and springing from the earth, but which are illegal to cultivate, a crime against nature and ourselves. I look forward to a time when we can celebrate the day that crime could no longer depend on the masses consuming something safe for their paycheck, until then I’ll just thank my lucky stars I live in a country and province that are sane towards these substances, if inconsistent (by which I mean that we the majority aren’t in direct danger for our habits like we could be in more paranoid and anal-retentive societies, despite the official illegality of our actions).

[Illustrational photo by ashergrey]

Cool Robot + Cute Dog + Laughing Baby = Ultimate Internet Video

YouTube link.

(via. Tim)