Thanks to Bryan for these. Clicking on the small images above will pop up very large images that may take a while to load.
In what comes off as a comical act of pandering to those hypothetical repressed middle-American kids who look through the magazine hoping to get a glimpse of titties, National Geographic, of all magazines, has published a swimsuit issue.
When I saw this on the newsstand, it was next to a tattoo magazine. The woman on the cover of the swimsuit issue was underwater, with the ripples tracing pale lines on her. At first I thought I was looking at two tattoo magazines.
Bah. I really like Chimera, and I like the name. Apparently they can no longer legally use it.
Mike Pinkerton says he doesn’t want suggestions for other names. Tough. If they can’t use Chimera, I suggest Kimera. Or maybe Ximera, which has a certain OS-X pun quality. But it looks awful on the page. Or maybe they can write it in Greek.
But not Camino.
Jeremy Hedley discovers this gem of automated commerce.
With all the weird and wonderful vending machines in Japan, its surprising how often, well, you can be surprised by them. You think you’ve seen them all, and then something like this pops up. Two stand out in my mind: A vending machine in an underpass, somewhere around Omotesando. It contained, among other things, a giant Pocky box. Jenny and I wondered “OK…is it a giant box of Pocky, or a box of giant Pocky?” We had to know. So we coughed up the ¥500 (or whatever) and found, to our delight, that it was indeed a box of giant Pocky, each one about 18″ long. The other was a Morinaga vending machine that had a 1920s design to it. I bought a box of caramels, and it played a creepily militaristic song.
One issue that Prentiss has emphasized in the past is the need for adherence to a controlled vocabulary when categorizing information. I’ve wondered whether categories could be an emergent outcome of smushing a lot of data together. Well, perhaps, but we ain’t there yet. The chaos at reversible is evidence of that (which I contributed to with my earlier experiment…sorry). Obviously the option exists to take advantage of a useful hierarchy of categories, but the obligation does not.
Preparatory to the appearance of RSS feeds that all the cool kids will want to link to, I’ve tooled up another CSS button:
reversibleTry Reversible: It’s confusing but fun
Later: Word from Joshua is that this will not duplicate Mark Pilgrim’s cool hack: it just makes it easy to create a sort of ad-hoc directory that points back to whatever pages you want. I haven’t asked him, but I suspect this is really almost a diversion he put together on the trail of something else.
I was checking over my error logs recently, looking for problem pages that should be redirected, and found repeated attempts to load FormMail. Now, I do have a form-to-mail CGI on my web host, but not FormMail. FormMail is by far the most popular of these widgets. I was briefly puzzled by the request to load it: I’ve never had it installed, never had a link to it, so I couldn’t quite figure how it could be a bad link.
Until I read a comment on a story somewhere else mentioning that FormMail had a security flaw that made it available for hijacking by spammers. The flaw has been corrected, but it stands to reason there are lots of old installs of it floating around, ripe for the picking.
I don’t quite get it, but Joshua Schachter’s latest project is reversible. This shows where you’re coming from to reach a certain page, as well as where other people came from to get there. OK, that’s nice, but it’s been done before. This also has some kind of categorization system that I don’t understand. I think the real power will come when he generates customized RSS feeds that people can include in their own pages (if it doesn’t completely swamp his server). That will make everyone as cool as Mark Pilgrim.
Later: Let’s try an experiment: Adam Rice | Adam Rice | Adam Rice.
A discussion over at Macintouch led me to the OS X beta of Ragtime, an integrated app available as a free (but big — 54 MB) download. I’ve downloaded it and will be evaluating it.
Got my first case of comment spam today. The commenter purports to the have the URL “http://www.1heluva.com/cgi-bin/join.cgi?refer=23911” and comes from IP number 81.86.245.111 (which has been banned).
Don’t bother going to that URL. It froze my browser, and damn near gave me a seizure with all its blinky scrolly bits.