How Fast Are You?

In what we nerds take as a very positive sign, the robots.txt file for the official White House website went from about 2,400 of Disallow lines to just two lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

A sampling of the previous Bush-era file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

via Boing Boing.

I’m a photo nerd and a professional web geek.
I relish all things tech and food.
I have been known to bring a roomful of people under my control with several well-placed chocolate cakes. Beware.

Did I mention the food?

• I like to eat and nap.
• I have an Apple tattoo… on my heart.
• I live near the water where there are fewer humans.
• I welcome our future robot overlords.
• I am freakishly tall.
• I can reach the top shelf where the cookies are hidden.
• No, you cannot have a cookie.

Break free for free!

That Bald Guy calls me a cult member, and he’s right: I have the Apple Kool-Aid running down my face after glugging down gallons of it. But I have taken a positive step.

After spending years paying $99 for a suite of services I never really used that much, I was glad to be getting push synching for my hard-earned dollars. But it wasn’t worth $99.

$12.99 a year, maybe, but not a Franklin. I mean, I can just sync at night.

Thankfully, a new web site has created a way to use Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative with push contacts & calendar on your iPod touch or iPhone, thanks to NuevaSync and Google. In order for this phase of your MobileMe recovery, you will need the iPhone 2.0 OS. To upgrade, connect your iPhone to your computer and click “Check for Updates” in iTunes.

NuevaSync links Google Calendar and Contacts with their Exchange server, which enables you to sync your Google info with devices that support Microsoft Exchange. You can sign up here.

Read more here. And welcome back to reality.

What’s In a Name?

The full and proper name of this website is “How Fast Are You? How Dense?” (sometimes abbreviated as HFAYHD) and reading the explanation of what the name means is kind of like having a joke explained to you: by the time you’ve heard the entire explanation, you get why it was supposed to be funny, but that time is now long past. Having said that, what follows attempts to explain why this website is called “How Fast Are You? How Dense?”, and by the time you finish reading it, you will probably understand why it has such a obtuse and grammatically inappropriate name, but you will almost certainly no longer care. Plunging onward:

Once upon a time, in a far off land called “The 80’s”, there was a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was the coolest thing ever. It covered a future full of wearable computers and smart-drugs and virtual reality and everything that was going to turn us all into gloriously posthuman cyborgs that lived and breathed information. And this future had just arrived, this very minute, and minds and bodies would never be the same. In a word, it talked about cyberpunk.

This herald of the “future now” (Mondo) had a tag line: “How fast are you? How dense?”¹ This, also, was the coolest thing ever. In the darkly dystopian future that was due any second now, we gloriously posthuman cyborgs would be using this as a recognition signal, a handshake protocol. We would greet everyone with a demand for bandwidth specification: How much information can you provide me with? How quickly can you accept the information that I have to impart? Because us cyborgs need information like a fish needs water, and I don’t have time for niceties.

This site attempts to provide you, the reader, with interesting information at as high a bitrate as our day jobs allow. Because you and us, we’re all are gloriously posthuman cyborgs, and we’re living in the cyberpunk future. For example:

Wearable computers? That cellphone in your pocket has more computing power than 3,600 desktop computers from The 80’s and is probably connected to the Internet, a massively interconnected system of billions of computers and providing a medium through which billions of people and companies work and play.

Smart-drugs? In a survey of 1,427 scientists, 62% percent said they had taken drugs like Ritalin, and 44% reported using Provigil, to improve their mental performance. It is estimated that 7-20% of college students have taken drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for the same reason.

Virtual reality? Look no further than Second Life, World of Warcraft, or any of the other dozens of virtual locations where meet to play, socialize and create.

So, welcome to the future. Now, how fast are you? How dense?

Complaints? Requests? Corrections? Threats? Bribes? Anything else that won’t fit in a comment form?

Well, OK, she’s had several, and for a lot longer than I have, but still. It’s exciting! Tune in for her adventures in design, knitting, jewelry, textiles, painting, and all manner of artistic and crafty pursuits. In fact, head on over right now and say hi!

Rumor has it that (if she can get your humble narrator off his butt) she’ll soon have a fabulous web emporium of beautiful and hand-crafted objects that you can purchase for your very own. Very soon, I swear!

Surf the NSFW web at work, Ms. Cubedweller, but don’t get caught! workFRIENDLY is a service that will disguise any web page as a MS Word document so your pointy-haired-boss won’t suspect a thing.

Via 27B Stroke 6, the best named blog ever.

Tehnical Note: Sadly, when I tried to drop their JavaScript into this post, Blogger that it “cannot be accepted”. I know that they implemented a “fix” recently to prevent malicious JavaScript from being disseminated via posts or comments, but rather than being at all limited to malicious code, it seems they just block all <script> tags. Lame.

I swear, I’ve been following this project since it started.

Doug Chiang had an amazing concept in 1993 as a result of teaching himself painting and design. The result is Robota: Reign of Machines, which has enthralled me and many others since he first started putting the ideas on the web. As a geek, I bow to his experience as Design Director on Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and then his work on Episode II. Big props.

In the past few years, there has been even more progress on this cerebral and engaging concept. Please check out the teaser trailers, then go to Doug’s site for more on the artwork, concept and vision of a sci-fi visionary. You’re welcome.

Speaking of that whole writer > blogger > podcaster > publisher > reader relationship thingie, John Scalzi has more to say on the subject.

It seems that Robert J. Sawyer (sf author and publisher) and Evo Terra (sf commentator and podcaster) “are having a rather lengthy discussion on their Web sites about whether e-books are really a way to get one’s self known as a science fiction author.”

Mr. Scalzi makes an interesting point that I had kind of suspected, but not being a writer or publisher had no real way to verify, to wit: no one really knows what effect distributing one’s printed work online has on the sales of that book (or other books by that author for that matter.)

If you’re interested in this subject too, check out his post, and follow the links through the Sawyer/Terra conversation as well.

I think I just peed myself a little.

Via Boing Boing, source of much nerdiness, god FSM love ‘em.

‘Nuff said, really.

Via Boing Boing.