Dear Ashley Wagner

It's entirely possible that there's something fishy, or at least unfair given the ludicrous way in which the sport is judged, about your placement at Sochi.

But:

1. If that's truly the case, there are appropriate words, like "being ripped off," "cheated," etc. The one you used is a fucking racial slur.

2. Might I remind you that you're only at the fucking Olympics because the US committee, for reasons not made available personally to me, decided to take you instead of Mirai Nagasu, who completely fucking outskated you at the US Championships? Past performance, in this case, appears to have indeed been an indicator of future results.

Palate Cleanser:

Here's Jason Brown (my single favorite skater to watch from the entire games) dancing to U Can't Touch This:

"Jason Brown - 2014 US Nationals Exhibition - Can't Touch This" (Watch on YouTube)

Dear Ashley Wagner

It's entirely possible that there's something fishy, or at least unfair given the ludicrous way in which the sport is judged, about your placement at Sochi.

But:

1. If that's truly the case, there are appropriate words, like "being ripped off," "cheated," etc. The one you used is a fucking racial slur.

2. Might I remind you that you're only at the fucking Olympics because the US committee, for reasons not made available personally to me, decided to take you instead of Mirai Nagasu, who completely fucking outskated you at the US Championships? Past performance, in this case, appears to have indeed been an indicator of future results.

Palate Cleanser:

Here's Jason Brown (my single favorite skater to watch from the entire games) dancing to U Can't Touch This:

The internet has replaced my brain, and I'm okay with that

There's a lot of virtual hand-wringing over "Google Brain," the use of Google as a substitute for knowing things. It's silly on all sorts of levels, of course, from the fact that we live in an age where being a "Renaissance man" would mean having an incredibly limited scope of knowledge, to the fact that for many tasks, just-in-time learning really does make more sense.

So yesterday, sairaali asked about a link I'd posted. I was able to remember the post, but not the link itself, and I also remembered that I'd posted it to Facebook. Unlike LJ (which is reasonably easy to browse back in), or Twitter (which is a pain, but manageable), Facebook makes it nigh-impossible to find old posts, even if you're willing to brute-force browse your entire personal timeline. It's just awful.

But then I remembered -- I'd used If This Then That! IFTTT is basically everything Yahoo Pipes was supposed to be -- a tool that allows people to connect different services together to create "recipes." Some folks use it to do things like get text alerts when rain is forecast, some use it to save all email attachments in Dropbox, some use it to map iOS locations on Google Maps and then export that to a Google Spreadsheet. You can do a lot with it*, and I don't use nearly as many tools in the kit as some folks do (Also, a bonus feature of IFTTT is sometimes discovering new and useful tools early in their cycle).

But one that I do use is a simple recipe that takes any link I post to Facebook, and saves that to my Pinboard account. For those not familiar with it, Pinboard is basically what Delicious should have been, a clutter-free tool with which to save bookmarks. I have all my Twitter and Facebook links automatically sent there (PB does Twitter integration automatically, so no need for IFTTT in that case), and also pin to it directly using a browser plugin (I don't tag all that well, but you're welcome to browse through mine; if I ever have a private link, I can make it private, another nifty feature). About ten seconds of looking through FB links (which get auto-tagged), and boom! I'd found the link I was looking for!

Pinboard charges a one-time fee of a little more than $10 (the price goes up as more users join; it was $9.46 when I signed up about three years ago), but is otherwise free. There's a $25/year option to actually archive every web page you link, which I've been tempted by, but realize I haven't needed very often. But it's an awesome service, and since IFTTT is totally free, between the two of them, they form a really useful ecosystem for managing my links.

*Alas, I haven't found any way to scrape links from LJ posts. There's an RSS tool that will add links to any new post to my Pinboard, but what I'd like is for each discrete link (especially in linkdump posts) to get its own entry. If anyone knows a way I'm missing (maybe with one of the zillion other channels in IFTTT), do let me know.

The internet has replaced my brain, and I'm okay with that

There's a lot of virtual hand-wringing over "Google Brain," the use of Google as a substitute for knowing things. It's silly on all sorts of levels, of course, from the fact that we live in an age where being a "Renaissance man" would mean having an incredibly limited scope of knowledge, to the fact that for many tasks, just-in-time learning really does make more sense.

So yesterday, sairaali asked about a link I'd posted. I was able to remember the post, but not the link itself, and I also remembered that I'd posted it to Facebook. Unlike LJ (which is reasonably easy to browse back in), or Twitter (which is a pain, but manageable), Facebook makes it nigh-impossible to find old posts, even if you're willing to brute-force browse your entire personal timeline. It's just awful.

But then I remembered -- I'd used If This Then That! IFTTT is basically everything Yahoo Pipes was supposed to be -- a tool that allows people to connect different services together to create "recipes." Some folks use it to do things like get text alerts when rain is forecast, some use it to save all email attachments in Dropbox, some use it to map iOS locations on Google Maps and then export that to a Google Spreadsheet. You can do a lot with it*, and I don't use nearly as many tools in the kit as some folks do (Also, a bonus feature of IFTTT is sometimes discovering new and useful tools early in their cycle).

But one that I do use is a simple recipe that takes any link I post to Facebook, and saves that to my Pinboard account. For those not familiar with it, Pinboard is basically what Delicious should have been, a clutter-free tool with which to save bookmarks. I have all my Twitter and Facebook links automatically sent there (PB does Twitter integration automatically, so no need for IFTTT in that case), and also pin to it directly using a browser plugin (I don't tag all that well, but you're welcome to browse through mine; if I ever have a private link, I can make it private, another nifty feature). About ten seconds of looking through FB links (which get auto-tagged), and boom! I'd found the link I was looking for!

Pinboard charges a one-time fee of a little more than $10 (the price goes up as more users join; it was $9.46 when I signed up about three years ago), but is otherwise free. There's a $25/year option to actually archive every web page you link, which I've been tempted by, but realize I haven't needed very often. But it's an awesome service, and since IFTTT is totally free, between the two of them, they form a really useful ecosystem for managing my links.

*Alas, I haven't found any way to scrape links from LJ posts. There's an RSS tool that will add links to any new post to my Pinboard, but what I'd like is for each discrete link (especially in linkdump posts) to get its own entry. If anyone knows a way I'm missing (maybe with one of the zillion other channels in IFTTT), do let me know.

Some things don't change

So, on a whim, I decided to configure an NNTP client today. After discovering that MT-Newswatcher died with Mavericks, I loaded up Thunderbird. There's still an active and free Usenet feed at Eternal September, and I subscribed to a few of the groups I'd frequented twenty years ago.

The aging of Usenet's obvious all over the place, from the general lack of content to the fact that the newest rec.arts.sf.tv group I can find is for Jeremiah. But I did subscribe to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5. Where the most recent thread is from October of last year, talks about Michael O'Hare's death the year before, and (of course) devolves into a flame war by the second of the four messages. Involving curse words and insults about penis size.

On the plus side, hey, spam doesn't seem to be a big thing in Usenet any more.

Some things don't change

So, on a whim, I decided to configure an NNTP client today. After discovering that MT-Newswatcher died with Mavericks, I loaded up Thunderbird. There's still an active and free Usenet feed at Eternal September, and I subscribed to a few of the groups I'd frequented twenty years ago.

The aging of Usenet's obvious all over the place, from the general lack of content to the fact that the newest rec.arts.sf.tv group I can find is for Jeremiah. But I did subscribe to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5. Where the most recent thread is from October of last year, talks about Michael O'Hare's death the year before, and (of course) devolves into a flame war by the second of the four messages. Involving curse words and insults about penis size.

On the plus side, hey, spam doesn't seem to be a big thing in Usenet any more.