So we finally caved and started a Twitter acount.  Not sure what we’ll make of it and certainly can’t promise it’ll be worth following.  But it’s there.  If you want to follow us or Twitter yourself and want us to follow you let us know!  Also, any tips or tricks would be most kind.

Seeing as how we have technology ADD and can really only do one thing at a time (so actually it’s not ADD at all, myopia perhaps?) it’s possible this experiment will go the way our Tumblr went.  Unloved and neglected.

Here’s our profile.  Be our friend.  If you follow us, we’ll follow you.

Dear Yellow Pages makers,

I’m sorry.  It’s not you, it’s me.  Saturday was the last straw.  I think you have a good product, great even.  Unfortch, I found someone that’s even better.  She’s called the internet and we’ve been together for about 10 years.  So if you could stop showing up at my door unannounced that would be greatly appreciated.

I don’t like it when I get unsolicited emails, so you can imagine how I feel about these books that end up on my doorstep.  Like I said, it’s not you.  I’ve just found something better. So if you could move on and stopping producing so much waste and stop driving me crazy, well, you get the idea.

Sincerely Yours,

James Furbush

Had more site problems last night and the only thing I could do was reinstall the most recent back up copy of the database.  Which unfortunately, was from Dec. 18.  So I just lost essentially a month and a half of posts.  I guess it’s time to start regularly backup the database if I’m going to continue to have problems or think I will anyways.

This is so lame.  Sometimes I hate myself.  Over the weekend I’ll try to republish some of the lost posts, well probably the ones that were linked to anyways, etc.  So amatuerish.

update: in the process of adding the lost posts and it’s getting very tedious.  I might just be picking and choosing certain ones, a “best of” if you will, to repost.  There’s a lot that isn’t necessary at this point.

update #2: Took about 2.5 hours to reload 35 or so posts.  Looking at the total amount lost for January (average of 5 per day) and I could be here all night and tomorrow uploading.  So now I’m definitely picking and choosing, especially posts that were linked to, received comments or had higher traffic.  Expect lots of posts with music videos and movie trailers to be gone.  It’s worth my time and yet it isn’t in many ways.

update #3: At this point I’ve lost interest in reupping ever post from January.  I’m going to handpick a few and have that be that.  I’ve got most of the ones I want back up, but at this point, there is no sense looking back.  I should be looking forward and plug away.

What’s more disturbing/curious/funny: the color of your number 2 after a steady diet of beets or your number 1 after chowing down on asparagus?

Comcast is my internet service provider and I loath them with all my intellect.  When I suspected they were throttling my traffic and I called them about this they accused me of having a faulty wireless router.

It’s almost like the higher ups give the customer service reps canned responses for this sort of thing.  Anyway, it’ll be nice to finally switch to an ISP that adheres to net neutrality.

And thanks to Google, consumers will be able to better equip themselves against their ISPs.

Google will provide academic researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the United States and Europe to analyze data, said its chief Internet guru, Vint Cerf, known as the “father of the Internet.”

“When an Internet application doesn’t work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP (Internet service provider), the application, your PC (personal computer), or something else?” Cerf wrote in a blog post.

The effort aims to uncover the problem for users, Cerf said. Cerf is widely known for his work for the U.S. government in designing the Internet protocol in the 1970s and 1980s.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t indicate whether or not Google will make this information  widely available or if they’ll make an application for individuals to test their ISP.

Update: In fact, they are making applications widely available.  Among these tools are: the Network Diagnostic Tool, which tests your connection speed and gives you a diagnosis on speed issues; Glasnost, which tests whether your ISP is blocking or throttling BitTorrent connections, and Network Path and Application Diagnosis, which helps you find problems that usually plague last-mile broadband networks. All of this is part of their Measurement Lab, a set of tools (some already working, some upcoming) for network diagnostics.

According to Mashable: “Before, tools such as these have been reserved for network administrators, hackers and other experts; now, Google is trying to introduce them to a wider audience. It’s not really that important if this wider audience will actually use these tools; what’s important is the fact that Google is taking a stand, saying: we’re going to help you fight for net neutrality even if the ISPs don’t like it.

“It wasn’t an easy decision to make, even for a giant like Google. If these tools were coming from another source, the ISPs would probably simply employ measures that render them useless. However, it’s much harder to block a service if Google stands behind it. On the other hand, even Google doesn’t want to anger every ISP that’s throttling network traffic in some way – and many of them are doing it. Net neutrality has just received a huge push; probably one that will ultimately turn the tide to its favor. “

Timelapse video of a cross country flight at night, flying above clouds glowing with city lights.  As Kottke recommends, make it full screen, plug in those headphones and relax.

You won’t be shocked, if like me you think McDonald’s tastes like salty cardboard.  If I have to eat fast food, then I try to make it something that will taste good.  There’s plenty of options here in Portland to not have to eat at McDonald’s or Burger King and thank good for that.  Still, it’d be nice to have an In-N-Out Burger up here.

Consumers rate regional food chains above national fast-food chains in overall customer experience, according to a recent survey by Sandelman & Associates, a San Clemente, Calif., market research and consumer-trends firm.

In a survey of 94,000 users last year, In-N-Out Burger of Irvine, Calif., was the top winner in overall customer satisfaction, which takes into account, among other things, quality of food and service, cleanliness and value for the money, in the 2008 Quick-Track Awards of Excellence.

“It’s probably easier to maintain the highest standards if you’re only operating in a couple of states,” says Paul Clarke, vice president of sales and marketing at Sandelman & Associates. “So, customers recognize the difference.”

Indeed, consumers appear to be “trading down” from high-end restaurants and frequenting lower-priced restaurants more than they used to. Sales are predicted to pick up in quick-service restaurants by 0.4% this year, while full-service restaurant sales are expected to decline by 2.5%, according to the National Restaurant Association.

My test for whether or not a fast food place is worth the extra time and money is if they use fresh cut potatoes for their french fries.

But thanks for wondering by the way.  Carbonell, better know as the ageless Richard Alpert on Lost, told SciFi Wire that he doesn’t wear men’s eyeliner.

At the TV Critics Association press tour, some reporters asked if you wore eyeliner, which Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse denied. What do you think of this?

Carbonell: My brother sent me this link about the TCA, where you guys were at. Someone had asked about whether I was wearing eyeliner. I think Carlton came to my defense, and he said, “He’s 100 percent sans makeup” or something like that. I could see why some people would think I have eyeliner on because [my eyelashes] are dark. Especially the bottom row, they’re pretty dark. I’ve been dealing with it since I was a little kid, and so to me it’s very funny when it comes up, especially at TCA. My brother told me to look online and sort of Google something about that, and my name came up as a couple things. One of them was Maybelline Man. I’ve been dubbed by some people as Guyliner. It’s very amusing.

In regards to this season’s time jumping, Carbonell admitted that it will slow down and the dizziness of the season will end.

“I’m a little dizzy,” Carbonell admitted in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “Initially, it took me, in the first episode, [a moment to figure out] ‘OK, when am I exactly? Where are we, and when am I?’ But, no, it didn’t take long. I think the viewers, after this episode [that aired Jan. 28], the show very much settles down, and you get the gist of the season, that you’re going to be dealing with some elements of time travel.”

So what’d ya’ll think of last night’s episode of Lost? The biggest thing for me was young Charlie Widmore.  It’s funny how at this point I could take or leave the castaways, they’ve become almost secondary in the larger picture of the island.  Also?  Daniel Faraday is my new favorite character.

Brad Bitt, Frank Langella, Robert Downey Jr., Sally Hawkins, Mickey Rourke and Anne Hathaway talk it up.  I love RDJ starts to praise Rourke for 9 1/2 Weeks and he goes “I remember when that came out” before getting cut off by Mickey Rourke who goes “You probably remember it better than me.”  At that point in time RDJ probably didn’t remember it much either.

It’s funny how much reverence Mickey Rourke has among these people and he deflects all praise with self-deprecation.  Interesting.

Amazon has about 500 free Mp3s to download, many you might already have, but there’s lots of good stuff by The Gaslight Anthem, Blue Giant, Apples in Steroe, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings, My Morning Jacket, The Black Lips, etc.  Dig in!

Old school choose-your-own-adventure meets web video. So far 500,000 people have started the journey but only 100,000 have survived until the end. Can you survive the agents, dragons, and zombies and make it to the important meeting?

I haven’t had the chance to delve into this, but I will tonight.  Pretty cool.

Obviously, having never met the man, the best way to remember him is through his monumental body fo work.  It would be daunting to start anywhere, as so much of Updike’s work is considered essential at worst, canonical at best.

“His body of work is so large and thoroughly lauded, his achievements by now so familiar — the casual erudition, the inhuman rate of production, the pioneering application of top-flight, literary-descriptive prose to vaginas, breasts, penises, and bodily excretions — that it’s hard to see any of it fresh,” writes Sam Anderson of Vulture.  “It can be intimidating. Dipping into his work sometimes feels like going for a day hike on Mt. Everest. What’s the point?”

The point, as Anderson notes, is that your life will be enriched.  Tom Mallon has a lovely grace-note here. You can read online archives of Updike’s work at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review Of Books, and The New Republic.

A new study suggests a relationship between genes and sociability.

“Some of the things we find are frankly bizarre,” said Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University in Massachusetts, who helped conduct the study.

We find that how interconnected your friends are depends on your genes. Some people have four friends who know each other and some people have four friends who don’t know each other. Whether Dick and Harry know each other depends on Tom’s genes,” Christakis said in a telephone interview.

There could be good, evolutionary reasons for this. People in the middle of a social network could be privy to useful gossip, such as the location of food or good investment choices.

But they would also be at risk of catching germs from all sides — in which case the advantage would lie in more cautious social behavior, they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It may be that natural selection is acting on not just things like whether or not we can resist the common cold, but also who it is that we are going to come into contact with,” Fowler said in a statement.