Keith and The Girl, the amazing incredible comedy podcast, close to starting their 5th year and 1200th episode are in the middle of doing a 76 hour marathon show. Last year they did the infamous 74 hour podcast where they broadcast live for 74 hours straight with all the best guests rotating in, prank calls, and awesome entertainment. Now they're doing it again for 76 hours straight. It ends March 3rd in the evening EST.

The reason for the marathon is that Keith and Chemda just got their relationship book published which you can and should pre-order on Amazon.com. They're trying to get onto the best seller list on Amazon, and are already 120th and moving up fast. Buy the book now from the American Amazon.com site to help push them over the edge. All the pre-orders count to their ranking and getting on the best seller's list. Keith and Chemda have literally done easily more than 1500 hours of high caliber hilarious content and it's all available free. An hour+ show every weekday, aftershows, and weekly video podcast, and so much more they deserve the world so buy the book and help them out.

A lot of hardcore fans are making deals if the book get's past certain rankings on the Amazon daily sales list. One guy promised to put up video of himself stapling his balls to his desk while ordering another book if they get to #1, and like the original 74 hour podcast a few hot fans agreed to strip down and post nude pictures if they pass certain books or get up to 100 on the list.

At 4pm EST today make sure you tweet with hashtag #whatdowedonow and #katg with everyone else to get them as a trending topic on Twitter, and continue to tweet, facebook, buzz, email, and tell everybody about the book. Order 5 copies now and give them out for birthdays and holidays.

Chemda just announced as I write this that they past the Twilight book in ranking, and one of the girls just sent in her racy pics to support the show. http://www.keithandthegirl.com/forums/f6/marathon-pictures-thread-14774/#post637821

Watch the marathon now at http://katg.com/chat, or at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/keith-and-the-girl. Listen in itunes http://liveshow.keithandthegirl.com:8004/. Download the Keith and The Girl iPhone app from the app store, or listen on the KATG Desktop App from here http://innovate.chalk-it-out.com/katg_desktop/download.php. Right now Chemda, the great Victor Varnado, Liam McEneaney, Newsy, Matt B, Jeremy, and McNally are live, go listen.

Digg: http://digg.com/comedy/What_Do_We_Do_Now_Keith_and_The_Girl

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/b87cc/what_do_we_do_now_keith_and_the_girls_smart/

StumbleUpon: http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/5OdDHH/www.keithandthegirl.com/book/t:4b8d05c59cbeb;src:all

Everything About The Book Here:  http://www.keithandthegirl.com/book/

They also put one of the chapters up for free that you can see at KATG.com/book

And like 12 commercials on youtube that are really funny, featuring Lauren Hennessy and Brother love. Watch them all here http://www.youtube.com/user/keithandthegirl

 

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Visit the above link, a brilliant essay on productivity derived from programming.

It's strange thinking of how drastically my life has adapted to writing software over the years, especially the last year, compared to people I know who don't[read: everyone I know]. But this guy nails it. I guess there's something about programming that just moulds you into a certain behaviour set. It's like if I broke a chunk off Canada, floated it out into the middle of the Atlantic and started a civilization - leaving it for a few generations. Then mailed them an essay on small island civilizations they'd be like "Oh shit! Hey guys, someone wrote an essay about us," and you wouldn't actually have to visit the island to write about it.

What you should take from the essay is that it's all about context. The more context you can fit into your head about a given anything, the better you are at innovating. And when the technological advantage is even - meaning using a computer vs. using a typewriter, brilliance can only be judged on context.

via @AndrewWarner via news.ycombinator, via paulgraham

The origin of the word 'hello' from Answers.com, I just think it's weird that we used to engage regularly in "long-distance shouting" and probably weirder that we don't anymore.

Origin: 1885

 

Alexander Graham Bell's much-talked-about invention gave us not only the new word telephone (1876) but also the greeting hello. To be sure, something like hello had been with us for a long time as a shout that the English had learned from the French in the Middle Ages. Ho là! they would say. It meant both "stop" and "pay attention," or in the words of an early translator, "hoe there, enough, soft soft, no more of that; also, heare you me, or come hither." In various English shouts and reshouts over the centuries, this became holla (1523), hollo, hollow (1542), and hillo, hilloa (1602). For long-distance shouts the ending was lengthened to -oo, leading to halloo (1568) and hulloo (1707). By the nineteenth century the variants included hallo, halloa (1840) and hullo, hulloa (1857).

It is not surprising that a call to stop and pay attention should become associated with the first telephones. But with all the possible ways of saying it, why should telephones call for a different pronunciation, that of the present-day hello? Because it is rude to shout, and hello discourages shouting. The short e keeps the mouth more closed than o or a, and -lo makes a quieter ending than. -loo. Telephones badly needed this civilizing because the first ones required people to shout and the first telephone exchanges were manned by boys who enthusiastically shouted right back. "Nothing could be done with them. They were immune to all schemes of discipline," noted one author. So within a few years, in the mid 1880s, "In place of the noisy and obstreperous boy came the docile, soft-voiced girl"--often called a hello girl in recognition of her civilized calling word. In 1889, Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court included this tribute: "The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land."

The telephone hello soon became a face-to-face greeting too. It could take the place of How are you? and How do you do?, although it did not replace the informal hi and howdy derived from those expressions. At the end of the twentieth century, there was also a hello? that expressed surprise and a Hello-o-o with an exaggerated up and down of the voice that implied, Wake up! What do you think you're doing?

I was just on Digg or something and ended up watching the whole interview on Youtube. From what I could gather from the interview she wrote a bogus book and is full of shit, but it's entertaining so watch the video after the jump.

(more...)

They're actually not sure if accounts were hacked or phished, but Microsoft is saying it's not a breach of their servers... Their probably going on the assumption that if the content was from their databases the passwords would be hashed, but what about xss or some rogue browser plugin? What if there's a breach in some popular software that lets people log into msn messenger and sends off their credentials? Or those 'who blocked me' sites that lure in American Idol voters. Either way they're reporting 10,000+ accounts exposed beginning with A and B, regardless of how they got the info one can only assume they have A through Z.. the probability of getting that many credentials and all of them happen to start with the first two letters of the alphabet? ANYONE that still has an @hotmail, @live, and whatever other domains Microsoft uses must change your passwords for ALL the sites you use, starting with your hotmail account. Assume all your mail and calendar appointments have been read by the original hackers AND about 100,000 other random people by now. Someone with access to your email account can reset all your passwords, online banking, facebook, etc. and gain access to all of it while simultaneously locking you out. Now while this is almost definitely not Microsoft's fault, I can't understand why so many people still use hotmail. Like it's almost as shit as Yahoo mail, and Yahoo mail is complete shit. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe it'll prompt a wave of computer literacy so users can protect themselves from this stupidity. Furthurmore WHY hasn't anyone thought to take phishing into the non-virtual world. A bunch of guys set up next door First National Bank with a big sign out that says "Fish National Bank" then just wait around for people to hand over their financial information. People are obviously ridiculously stupid. And while we're on the subject how pretentious is First National Bank, like anyone cares you were first.

Just a quick psa I've been asked to do from time to time, if you don't see the irony, you should call the government immediately. Now on with some stuff I feel like writing.

I've been critical of Microsoft pretty much any time I talk about them but it should be noted that they do produce a lot of really awesome stuff. It just so happens that I'm a programmer/web guy and Microsoft's web endeavours tend to be very shitty and politicky (see Bing, Windows Live, IE), so I talk a lot about that side of the company. I also really dislike Windows having used it for years and realizing and re-realizing that it's just an all round stale sandwich, and from what I've seen of Windows 7 they still can't seem to deliver a good OS. But with that said I do think some of their hardware stuff is incredible. Like the Xbox, Natal, Surface and their labs projects like Photososynth and Seadragon are wow.

What I'm trying to say here is Microsoft Courier. If you haven't seen it just do a video search and watch the demo. Why would anyone use an old school notepad and pencil when you could have a super intelligent dual screen tablet like that? No really I'm asking. And I read somewhere it'll hit the shelves soonish. It looks to me that this form factor at least, if not the Courier itself will become an essential home/business device. Like a toaster or printer.

The other thing is electric cars. If you go to BetterPlace.com you can find out all about this company that's figured out how to make 100% electric cars feasible now. They're starting out with smaller countries (namely Israel, Denmark, and others), they say they'll deploy the first cars around 2011 and go commercial in 2012. In two years there will be places that have fully electric, regular sized cars and more importantly the infrastructure of charging stations and battery swapping... stations, (for when you don't have time to charge the battery) to back it up. They've committed to having at least 100,000 cars on the road and in dealerships by 2016, and they currently have a range of about 170km on a full charge which when you add battery replacement stations - a process that takes about 2 minutes - could potentially be extended infinitely. Oh yeah I almost forgot instead of paying for electricity or new batteries you pay for miles/kilometres you drive, like a pre-paid cell phone.

I wrote yesterday about Light Peak, according to Engadget the specification was dictated [sic] to Intel by Apple who plan on putting it in a line of Macs as early as next fall. The plan eventually being that it will replace all other protocols (see USB, Firewire, DVI, Ethernet, eSATA) so if you've been waiting for USB 3.0 or core i7's in a Mac or you already have one in a PC and thought you were ahead of the curve, the game is about to completely change and you're probably gonna have to replace it all starting next year with new super fast stuff that uses optical connectors. You know, it would be nice if just once they waited till after todays new cool stuff was out and being used before teasing us with the next huge leap in technology. I guess it's more profitable to never actually satisfy the consumer.

Google is working on Google Chrome Frame, which is a plugin for Internet Explorer. Think of it like the Flash plugin, except instead of Flash, it gives IE the ability to read modern Javascript and HTML and even more importantly the ability to read Javascript without failing, throwing errors and the incompatibility that Internet Explorer innately has with all other browsers, code, and between versions of itself. Google Chrome Frame is a WebKit/V8 plugin - for browsers who's developers refuse to follow the standards. You can now easily prompt IE users to install the plugin and the page renders like it would in Chrome and Safari. It's still early on in the project, and requires XP SP2 or greater. I don't believe anyone still using Internet Explorer has the where with all to install a Service Pack, but if they did they'd also have upgraded at least from IE6 and yet there are still plenty of people stubbornly using it. I think Google Chrome Frame is ingenious, but doubt it will be the silver bullet needed to kill off IE. I'd like to see some accurate market research on browser/os share, who's using what and why. I believe people still using IE fall into two categories. Those that are ignorant, hate the web, or themselves; and those who are forced to by stuffy silly IT guys at work who outrageously believe that IE with all it's gaping unpatched security holes and incompatibilities is somehow a good choice for their IT environment. Also on the Google side is Google Analytics for Flex/Air applications. There's been workarounds for a while where you could bridge to Javascript from Flash to trigger Analytics events. Now you get some Actionscript tracking code and classes which you can call as part of your navigation/deeplinking procedures. Next step is to be able to index Flex/Air apps... hmm... Also from Google, I've stumbled across it before but if you haven't go have fun in their Code Playground Next up is Intel, who've developed a new technology to replace copper wires called Light Peak. Essentially Fibre Optics for the wires inside your computer, and possibly everywhere else. Capable of transmitting data at 10Gb/s (1.25GB/s) with future versions being capable of up to 100Gb/s (12.5GB/s). At those speeds you could copy the entire contents of a 1TB hard drive in under 2 minutes. Wow, pretty soon YouTube will be in Blue-Ray quality and Blue-Ray will go the way of VHS.. anyone surprised? Also Intel related are the new Core i7 chips that are slowly being rolled out. And the rumours surrounding Apple's October Special Event, where word on the street is they'll be unavailing Core i7/i5 chips across the board and price reductions to compete for the holiday season. If only they'd get better screens on the iMac... here's hoping. In the open source world I was introduced to FLARToolKit today. Augmented reality for Flex developers. The demos have you print out an image marker that the code looks for. You turn on your webcam and it calculates the 3D space based on the marker and superimposes a 3D animation that in real time follows the marker around rotating tittling and putting on a really impressive show. There was other stuff but I'm writing this when I should be coding, and I could have done without the 30 articles I just read too..

They went through her resignation speech with red pen. Check out all 10+ pages it's astonishing  http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/palin-speech-edit-200907?currentPage=1

 

 

 

Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate - Ars Technica.

Great article covering the conflicts in outlining video codecs for the html5 spec.

Woman illegally downloads 24 songs, fined to tune of $1.9 million - CNN.com.

The RIAA has bribed yet another jury and fined a woman $1.9 million for 'illegally' downloading 24 songs. Do people still pirate individual songs? Since I discovered torrenting I find it easier to pirate by the discography. I've been busy with other stuff but this article reminds me I haven't downloaded any music recently, and I have a long list of artists I wanna listen to. Download all the music you can, spread it around, share it with your friends and family, and support artists directly by going to their shows. Buy indapendent music.

With that said how much would you have had to pay the RIAA?

Here's a screenshot of my Itunes Music folder song count:

MATH: $1,900,000 / 24 songs = $80,000 per song

I have a bunch of podcasts and my own music in there, but according to bribed juries everywhere I currently owe the RIAA about $1,136,000,000, which for the other dyslexics out there is 1.136 billion dollars.

The RIAA suing people who barely pirate obsene amounts of money that they will never actually receive. It doesn't make sense why they're not more outraged at companies that make things like ipods. The current Ipod model has 120GB capacity, that's about 30,000 songs. WHY DOESN'T AN IPOD COST 2 BILLION DOLLARS THEN? Obviously most that music is pirated, millions of people have ipods and very few people in the world have spent $30,000 at 99c/song from the itunes store to fill it up. In case I haven't said it yet in this post, FUCK the RIAA.