Saturday, May 08, 2004
Family Ties
Here you go. Approximate your commonness at Name Statistics, where you can find out what percentage of people in the United States have your first and last name. It's not as cool as my favorite name resource, Behind the Name, but it's pretty fun.
So here's how I turn out:
Justin is the #56 most common male name.
0.311% of men in the US are named Justin.
Around 380975 US men are named Justin!
source namestatistics.com
0.311% of men in the US are named Justin.
Around 380975 US men are named Justin!
source namestatistics.com
Yours is a very rare last name.
Very few last names in the US are like yours.
Be proud of your unique last name!
source namestatistics.com
Very few last names in the US are like yours.
Be proud of your unique last name!
source namestatistics.com
Looks like my last name is super rare. Actually, this is no surprise. The only person I've ever met who's known other people with our last name has been from Slovenia. For the longest time, the only other folks we could find in the States who shared our last name ran a funeral home in Pennsylvania.
Now, one of the first sites to come up with an exact match for the name is this one. Apparently it's a webpage for an ancient processional masquerade and festival in Slovenia. That's right, actually--that's where my family comes from. The actual purpose of the festival is impenetrable from the information contained on the website, though the masqueraders are led by a frightening and demonic tong-toting character called kliskar who wears a sieve on his head, while the animation of the procession looks like a crappy South Park episode.
These are my people.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Oprah and Martian Children
The Smoking Gun, through the marvelous Freedom of Information Act, recently received a load of complaint letters filed to the FCC about an episode of Oprah that ran for the second time in March. I didn't see the actual episode, so unfortunately I cannot attest to its vulgarity, though from what I gather many people who wrote to complain were upset by the discussion and definition of terms like "tossed salad." I don't need to describe what it is; the letters are disturbingly eager to do that for me.
I admire Oprah for being the only talk show host who can successfully navigate both highbrow culture and absolute trash--sometimes in the same week. Perhaps this is part of her formula for success; people feel they've earned an hour of guilt-free sex talk after they've struggled through The Grapes of Wrath and participated in silently (okay, watched) a discussion of the book between celebrities and the omnipresent Oprah.
It's apparent that the folks who wrote in to complain about the show had not struggled through The Grapes of Wrath and earned their trash. Their obvious anger often fails to translate into eloquent writing; letters like theirs simply aren't the way to win friends and influence people. Don't get me wrong--I'd likely not want my small child hearing explicit descriptions of sex acts, and Oprah does run at the hour of the day when many children are getting home and turning on the television, but we've already established Oprah's pendulum penchant for trash. And if these letters prove anything, it's that many people have much to learn about how to constructively share their opinions.
I mean, if you're going to write because you wish someone to impose a fine for a lewd broadcast, why would you insult the person to whom you write in graphic sexual detail?
Some of the letters take a different approach, instead reviling Oprah with aspersions so bitterly racist you can just imagine the author's blood vessels throbbing visibly in his flushed face as he hunts-and-pecks his rage out in an uncontrollable paroxysm. I rather prefer the more subtle punch packed by the writer who calls Oprah the mother of harlots, referring, of course, to the passage in Revelation 17:5 which describes the unholy queen of perdition and handmaid of the Antichrist.
Yep, sounds like Oprah.
Let's take a step back to my favorite, which is golden in its simpleminded hyperbole. Have you seen Mars Attacks? These little green buggers invade the earth and kill with ceaseless abandon, and seem unstoppable until they hear the olde tyme (vintage, if you will) music of the feeble grandmother, whereupon their heads explode inside their helmets, smearing the inside with spouting goo. I didn't honestly believe that kind of thing actually happened, but it appears it does, and with small children who hear about "tossed salads".
Note to babysitters, then--because, as we've seen, parents are already keenly aware of the danger: keep your charges away from the dirty old white women and the other non-white whoremongering idolators on television--unless you want a horrible mess to clean up, and quite a bit to explain when mom and dad get home.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Scrobbled
Looks like the Audioscrobbler servers have updated my personal music homepage. So you can see what I listened to two days ago. You can click on the artist or song to see who else is listening to that song.
Looks like April March and Los Cincos are pretty lonely out there in the Audioscrobbler listener database. I'm the only one listening to them. This makes me curious how the rest of my music collection stacks up. Too bad I haven't yet figured out how to load those songs I've been listening to on my iPod--I've played probably about 8 hours of music that Audioscrobbler just doesn't know about.
Audioscrobbler is supposed to connect you to a group of people who have similar music interests. I guess that's why they're working on a feature that will automatically link you up with people who statistically listen to the same kind of thing you do. Good thing I listened to some Calla. Otherwise, I might not have any friends.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Additions
I've added new blogs to the sidebar. This is good for you, as you can see what I've been reading. This is good for me because I no longer need to locate these blogs in my poorly-organized Favorites menu.
When I started blogging, I didn't think that it would be a source of help for me.
Maybe I didn't completely get it. But when I think about it that way, there's a tiny temptation to...make my blog my homepage. So I can have all of my favorite links close at hand.
And then I'll turn into a flower.
Strangers
Accursed Blogger. I lost my last post because it said I had timed out, and my browser didn't cache the text from the post.
That's bound to happen, I suppose.
Anyhow, tonight I was on about the Stranger a Day project, which I discovered through Idle Type. This fellow, Roark Johnson, takes a picture of a new and complete stranger every day. Then he must run off and develop all the photos so he can post them once a week. He's been doing this since the first of the year, and there are pictures clear back to then. He must travel quite a bit, too, as he finds his subjects all over, from Kentucky to Chicago.
Many of the pictures are simply marvelous, really. It's one of those elegant and simply beautiful ideas that makes one wonder why more people hadn't thought of something like that before, or why there aren't a dozen "Stranger of the Day" websites with their own little category on Yahoo! and everything.
Then again, not all of us are using a Deardorff 8x10 camera, as Roark does. Not that equipment makes the (wo)man, or anything.
Monday, May 03, 2004
Ah! Wonderful Free New Features!
Thanks to the folks at HaloScan I now have added comments and trackbacks--you can see them on the bottoms of each one of my posts, right there in their tiny glory!
That feels great.
I owe it to the blog, Life at TJ's Place, which I noticed had comments powered by HaloScan--some curiosity and two moments later, and there you have it.
Now I'm not the only one who gets a say around here. Something of a relief, honestly. And not just to me, dear reader--I assure you, I have until now felt your pain.
Carving out my internet aural soundscape
Courtesy of Idletype, I found out about Audioscrobbler. It functions as a plug-in on your computer's media player, and it pays attention to what you play, then submits the songs automatically to the Audioscrobbler servers. Then it organizes favorites, lists, suggestions, and other listeners according to your listening habits. It's also kind enough to post your results to your own personal webpage, so people can browse your listening habits and see what you've been putting in your ears. Here's mine.
It's not uploaded any of my songs, as there's something of a delay before it submits them to your page. It seems, also, that there's an additional delay for song submissions, but I'm comforted by the news that RJ, the guy who's a developer behind this business, has tracked down the problem and has formulated a solution "involving a Java version of the queue muncher and a secondary database." Honestly, I'm glad he thought of that, because tech wizard I am, I'd likely have just thought of implementing some kind of fix with the secondary database and forgotten altogether about the mighty powers of the Java queue muncher.
Looks like I'll need all my technical expertise, however, to figure out how to get this thing to identify what songs I've been playing on my iPod--that's how I listen to most of the music on iTunes, and if it's honestly going to watch only the information I play while I'm at my desktop and playing iTunes, it's in for a pretty unexciting ride.
Blogdentity
I wonder if all bloggers, at some point, undergo an identity crisis.
Emily's been working through some blog identity issues these last few days, and I do understand what she's saying--after you've been writing on these things for a while, especially as we have been, it appears you wonder what direction or good all your writing does.
Sometimes I think I don't blog about cool enough stuff. I mean, I found absolutely a ton of great links to follow on Idletype. He's much more a link-heavy site than a text-heavy site, like mine or Emily's or even Brett's. And there's a lot of great stuff to look at, on the order that my I echo my brother's sentiments--"how do some of these people find this stuff?"
The good thing about blogging is that we bloggers like to cite our sources. So now that I've found Idletype, I've found where all the stuff on Idletype comes from.
Some of it fits with my interests. Some of it doesn't. And I usually have much more to say about what I post than he does, and not nearly as much as others. Looking at all the different blogs and kinds of blogs reminds me it's okay; that's why there's mine, and that's why there's theirs.
Bloggers, to thine own selves be true.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Upstart Architect Webmaster
I've surfed architecture sites for just about two years now, since I had an architecture seminar as a senior undergrad. The seminar was a cross-disciplinary capstone course for honors students, and has absolutely been one of the most important classes I walked away with from my college career.
Well, not all architecture sites are created equal. My long-time favorite has been Great Buildings, which is put together sort of like the architectural equivalent of the nearly-peerless Artchive. Great Buildings has its good features--an expansive list of styles and examples, a mix of floor plans, elevations, 3-d models (admittedly a bit gimmicky, but fun), and pictures. It also has its problems. The main one of these, as far as I'm concerned, is that they're quite stingy with the pictures. I'd love huge, expansive photos. Additionally, the commentary and pictures are sort of separate from one another, though the commentary is indeed very good. There also, really, isn't any help for architecture newbies; with all that information, it would have been quite simple to include a glossary.
So the other day I was looking for such a thing, and found a real gem of a site with Ontario Architecture. Granted, it's a survey of only Ontario architecture, and thus cannot hope to have the breadth and depth of a site like Great Buildings. But it's a great project. The Glossary is really magnificent, with examples of many different architectural features, as well as a great combination of defining text and example pictures to both show and tell a definition--really important for architecture. The glossary is not completely thorough (there are terms here and there that are missing), but it does a lot quite well.
I was also impressed by the Building Styles portion of the site, where one can select from a large list of styles and their representatives in Ontario. This is where it gets more local, but the site retains a more universal feel, as the discussions of the buildings really shows how they individually demonstrate the style. Another genius feature--hot points on the pictures show what it is you're looking at; for example, roll your mouse over the dentils on the Kingston Courthouse under the Classical Revival style, and it will show you that you're pointing at the dentil, and even take you to the definition if you want.
Amazing! I was shocked to learn this site is the brainchild of one individual, a Shannon. If Great Buildings were Microsoft, they'd buy Shannon and her website, put her to work, and be unstoppable.
