Aces Full of Links

HiHo Shotgun

• Violent HiHo Sequel (Animated, Japanese, Flash)
  • Someone’s riffing on those goofy, classic, incomprehensible Panasonic commercials.
• God Bless You Responses (Irreligious)
  • Neat page of responses to “God bless you” for people who don’t speak the god talk. Some of the more polite ones are very nice.
  • Polite: “Thanks for your sentiment!”
  • Reciprocating: “To your health! Peace!”
  • Weird: “Curse you, Red Baron!”
• Free Fonts (Graphics)
  • Download a boatload of free fonts.
• Guess the Google (Game)
  • See a number of images. Try to guess the keywords that were used to get those images from a Google image search. It’s fun!
  • Example: you see a rose, a playground ball, an apple, a stop sign… looks like the word “red” to me!
• Omnivore (Article, Advice)
  • Author is little bit of a jerk, but it touches on something I’ve been wondering about lately. How do you become a person who eats everything? The reason I wonder is that I’ve often marvelled at the ability of a food critic to eat anything and everything. To criticise effectively, you have to eat a variety. And even though I’ve come a long way since I was a kid, there are still foods I eschew because I don’t like them.
  • Another aspect of the article, faddish food “allergies.” Knowing people who have actual medical issues with certain foods, it irks me slightly when people express bizarre “allergies” that they have decided they have.
    • Suddenly, everybody has become lactose-intolerant. But the truth is that very, very few of us are so seriously afflicted that we cannot drink even a glass of milk a day without trouble. I know several people who have given up cheese to avoid lactose. But fermented cheeses contain no lactose! Lactose is the sugar found in milk; 98 percent of it is drained off with the whey (cheese is made from the curds), and the other 2 percent is quickly consumed by lactic-acid bacteria in the act of fermentation.
  • Another example: MSG. While MSG isn’t necessarily good for people with sodium-sensitive hypertension, people went nuts over the MSG in Chinese food, claiming all sorts of reactions. However, you rarely hear about them complain about glutamate’s found in Mexican food, other prepared foods… or those naturally occurring in tomatoes! This bugs me, because some people really do have food issues.
  • Everyone has the right to choose to eat what he wants and there are plenty of good reasons to choose not to eat certain foods. But don’t tell me you’re allergic to foods that start with the letter “J” because some chiropractor told you.
  • See also: comments on Greek food which relate to a number of different conversations I’ve had with friends recently. Wow. Long comment for a shotgun entry.
• Darth Side (Blogging, Humor)
  • It’s Darth Vader’s blog! Some of the entries are quite funny.
• Make Fire wiht a Can of Soda and a Chocolate Bar (HowTo)
  • I tried this, but it was taking too long. I will try it again and will report back on some sunny day that I can get it to work.
• Individual I (Symbolism, Activism)
  • 
  • Individual-i stands for: Freedom from surveillance, Personal privacy, Anonymity, Equal protection, Due process, Freedom to read, write, think, speak, associate, and travel, The right to make your own choices about sex, reproduction, marriage, and death, The right to dissent
  • The Individual-i symbol is not owned by any organization. There is no platform, no organizational structure, no meetings. This symbol is in the public domain: uncopyrighted, untrademarked, unowned. Anyone can use it for any purpose.
• Fake or Foto? (Graphics Game)
  • Is it a photograph of a real-world object, or is it computer generated?
• Serenity (Movies, Trailer)
  • Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) takes his “Firefly” TV show to the big screen. I thought it hadn’t gotten a fair chance on TV, so I’m glad to see this. For those who never saw it, it’s like Deadwood meets Cowboy Beebop or Star Trek. The movie appears to expand on some of the same material the series presented, specifically dealing with the character River. We never got a chance to find out what her deal was.

Bonus!

• Gnomz (Comic Creator)
  • Make your own little pixel comics!
• Pleasantly Plump May Be OK (News)
  • OK - lose a few pounds through healthy living if you feel the need to. But, boys and girls, you may be fine just the way you are. So don’t obsess. (He says this as he plans to enter a weight loss phase.) But I mean it. A few extra pounds might not be so bad, if you’re eating healthy foods and getting exercise.
  • “People shouldn’t think that this study gives them a free trip to the pork rind buffet,” said Keith Ayoob, associate clinical professor in the department of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Experts agree that a good diet and exercise are important for health, but some question whether the multibillion-dollar diet industry has misled Americans about the health hazards of being a few pounds overweight.
• PHP Cheat Sheet (Geeky, Tech)
  • Shout out to all you programmers in my audience. Word. Every coder loves a cheat sheet, no?
• Gmail Drive shell extension (Tech, Useful)
  • Take a Gmail account, install this utility on your PC and suddenly you have a 2GB drive that wasn’t there before… storing files in your GMail account! Use it on multiple machines and transfer files from home to work. Neat! (There are some file size and filename restrictions)