cheesebikini?

Props to Chris Messina for the flyer

I’m presenting PlaceSite this afternoon at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. If you’re attending, please come say hi! Also: we’re teaming up with a few other scrappy startups to rent out a bar and host a party Wednesday night starting at 9 pm at the Caskroom, 550 Park Blvd., San Diego. If you’re in town, drop in and say hi!

In other news — today at ETech we’re announcing two new partnerships, with Sputnik and WaveStorm. Both are wi-fi infrastructure companies who help retail establishments and other venues to set up, maintain and manage public wi-fi networks. Sputnik’s an American firm based in San Francisco; WaveStorm is based in Paris and serves customers in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. PlaceSite’s community wi-fi software will be offered to customers of these firms.

Bravo, Dav. Powerful words.

With a single keystroke in OSX, you can invert your laptop’s screen and turn it black-and-white. That improves the legibility of things that are hard to see in brightly-lit environments. Repeat the keystroke and you’re back to normal.

Here’s the key combination:
CTRL-ALT/OPTION-[Apple-key]-8

Bonus: now you can freak out your Mac-using friends who haven’t heard of this feature, but who let you near their keyboards.

UPDATE: A NIST employee has explained the service described below.

This just in from fellow SIMian Matthew Rothenberg:]

Here’s something strange to explore. A guy I know recently stumbled across this. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to syncrhonize clocks on your computer to the govt’s atomic clock.
However, it also seems to have another strange service running in port 78 and 79. Telnet in, and hit enter after connection is established, and you get this:

——————————————————-
dream% telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18…
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is ‘^]’.

P: P: My name is Patsy: and my husband’s name is Paul:
We come from Pittsburgh: and we sell Peaches::
880-223-821-266-590-908-785
$ 0 875 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.
——————————————————-

The names, city, and food change each time, but they always start with the same letter. The numbers on the bottom appear to be doing some incrementing based on time, but the pattern hasnt been figured out yet.
They are not synchronized across ports.

Secret government broadcasts about the JFK conspiracy? The first step of SkyNET becoming self-aware? An equivalent to a Numbers Station? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) WHO KNOWS! Let’s get some smart SIMS minds working on deciphering this, or at least propose some wacky theories.

-mroth

People who attended the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: Here are transcripts of IRC chatroom conversation that took place during the conference, in raw Colloquy format. (These are partial transcripts, but the chatter that accompanied your talk might just be here.)

3/15:     #etech channel (490K)     #joiito channel (300K)

3/16 to end:     #etech channel (1 Mb)     #joiito channel (340K)

Congratulations to my classmate Carolyn Cracraft for making it to the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.

She won the national Jeopardy! College Tournament a few years ago and tomorrow night she will kick ass again in some L.A. studio. Unfortunately the show won’t air for a couple of months, but we’ll still be rooting for you Carolyn.

(As far as I know, she’s my only friend who can read hieroglyphics, and I wouldn’t dare play her at Trivial Pursuit.)

Thank you Frances, the largest, slowest and strangest hurricane of my life. Thanks for bypassing my family and my childhood home.

Oh my.

Eva started a weblog.

And I don’t say that lightly.

Welcome Eva! It’s about time.

No joke. And this follows last year’s 30 percent tuition increase. My degree’s getting more expensive by the minute.

And its value might be shrinking. This $372 million cut faced by the University of California system, following on the heels of similar cuts each year for the past four years, has the preseident of the UC system “deeply concerned” about the quality of education that UC can provide. Many people consider Berkeley the best public university on the planet, but how long can that reputation be maintained without funding?