I hate my sense of direction.

I seriously wonder how I’m ever going to find my way around the University of Georgia campus, much less around its surroundings… and the pedestrian-unfriendly bus maps I’ve mentioned in the past don’t help things a bit.

Edited 2005/06/17 to add: Maybe I’m just weird, but I find this older version of UGA’s map to be easier to read than the newer versions. I think it’s the 3/4 overhead view… makes it a lot easier to identify landmarks! (Seriously, I wouldn’t get nearly as lost if maps looked a bit more like console RPGs. :-p)

To whoever wrote that Mytob virus that’s currently spamming itself out:

Your attempt at social engineering is a commendable one, but it fails on so many counts. Let me dissect it so you can see how misguided it is.

(more…)

Yahoo! Music has one of the best collections of streaming music videos on the Internet, but unfortunately, the people behind the site still steadfastly refuse to support Mac OS X, instead recommending that viewers use Netscape 4.7 for Classic to view the videos. (Buhhh?!)

So, well, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. Based upon the VBScript offered in this OSNews guide, I’ve hacked together a rather rudimentary AppleScript to take a music video URL copied to the clipboard and open the direct link to that video stream. So, without further ado, here’s the script; share and enjoy.

I’ll gladly take down this script as soon as Yahoo decides to support some OS X native browser… and until then, this isn’t exactly stealing any ad revenues from Yahoo, since video ads don’t show up in Netscape 4.7 either.

Edited 2005/06/24 to add: Obviously Yahoo’s figured this one out; they’re now hiding the direct links inside the onClick attribute of the links, while pointing the actual href to a different page. Viewing source will solve that problem pretty easily. 🙂

Edited 2005/09/28 to add: It seems like they stopped hiding the links in Javascript now, at least from what I’ve seen.

Edited 2006/03/23 to add: Yahoo fiddled with their links a while back so that this particular script doesn’t appear to work anymore. I recommend using Firefox together with PKLaunch, which does the job admirably.

Oooooh. Google is working on creating a 3D VR map of San Francisco, according to BoingBoing. I’d like to see someone do this for Atlanta. And the University of Georgia/Athens, for that matter. 🙂

OK, here’s a prime example of why I find some bus maps incredibly hard to decipher.

Here’s a map of the University of Georgia’s weekend bus route (PDF link). Simple enough. Now look toward the bottom at Rogers Road and Milledge Avenue. One would think that those roads ran in some direction resembling east-west, right?

Nope. Not unless north-northwest counts as ‘some direction resembling’. Here’s an actual map of that area via Google:
Rogers Road, Athens, GA

That is *so* not east-west. In fact, I’d say it’s far closer to north-south!

And people wonder why I look at these sorts of maps and can’t make head or tail of them…

Edited to add: Yay. Apparently there’s a grocery store that’s a two-minute walk from the part of Milledge Avenue that the bus covers, according to Google Maps. I just wish the bus map had been clearer so I could’ve figured this out sooner– I had been looking for a north-south route on the west side of the map, not an east-west route on the south side!

Oooops. The Scripps web team seems to have misspelled champion Anurag Kashyap’s name on the Photo Gallery page.

Naturally, I’ve saved a screenshot of this momentous error for posterity’s sake. 😀

And speaking of misspellings at the Bee, anyone catch that John Minnich was representing the “Roanoake” Times, according to his official placard? Some proofreader needs to be sacked…

Congratulations to Anurag Kashyap, winner of the 2005 National Spelling Bee. May this bee be like an appoggiatura, driving you onward to even greater events in life…

OK, OK, that was stretching it a bit. I always have to work the winning word in there somehow. And musical terms are really hard to work into a post like this except as metaphors! 🙂

Samir Patel and Aliya Deri, you deserve congratulations as well, having tied for second place. Given the difficulty of the words you had to spell to get there, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Congrats also to Finola Hackett, who, in Canada’s first year at the Scripps Spelling Bee, managed to rise all the way to tie for eleventh place. Great work for a complete newcomer to the Bee, and more reason that Scripps should just give in and call it International already. I hadn’t the slightest clue about ‘nisse’ myself, and I’m a spelling bee veteran. And you still have another year to try for!

Katharine Close, you’ve got another year left as well… so good luck on your last chance. I probably would’ve left the last letter off ‘laetrile’, if I hadn’t mangled it even more…

Bah, I’ll just say congratulations to all 273(!) of you who participated in the Bee. It’s a tough competition– and I say this from experience, having been there myself in 1997…

The new version of the Georgia driver’s manual is set almost entirely in Comic Sans. ::horrified scream::

No, seriously. Check out the link in the paragraph above if you don’t believe me.

Really. I can’t think of many typefaces that would be more inappropriate for detailing the dangers of controlling two-ton hunks of metal…

[Edited 2005/07/27 to update the link, which was no longer valid after the great Georgia DMV overhaul of 2005.]

Hm, interesting: Tiny Music Makers is a series of blog posts on the origins of such recognizable jingles as the Intel chimes, the Mac start-up sound, and the THX sound. (via BoingBoing)

In the same vein as Search and replace consideyellow harmful, HotJobs offers a rather interesting article on what “bards” to avoid eating during interviews.

Yes, that’s right: someone did a global search and replace changing “foo” to “bar”. Oops.

(via Doh, The Humanity!)