The “It Gets Better” project keeps growing, with more and more videos added each day. It’s great seeing so many GLBT sports organizations are stepping up.

I was pretty happy with the photos I got. Especially the two included here and the one I used as my Frapto Project 365 post yesterday “Natural Scrimshaw”.

Medford Watercourse 25

Medford Watercourse 30

]]> http://blog.techfun.org/2010/03/medford-watercourse/feed/ 2 http://blog.techfun.org/2010/03/nicole-sandler-after-air-america/ http://blog.techfun.org/2010/03/nicole-sandler-after-air-america/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:03:33 +0000 JD Thomas http://blog.techfun.org/?p=2203 Nicole Sandler, a progressive radio host – formerly of Air America and other talk and music gigs – is now broadcasting online.  You can check her out on twitter (@nicolesandler) or at her website Radio or Not.  She also has a blog as part of the site. You can grab its RSS feed here.

Last night’s (March 1, 2010) episode is embedded below. You can go to UStream.tv/radioornot and get all her latest episodes as they air.  She seems to use the chat room there during broadcasts.  Currently there are about a dozen archived shows there from the last few weeks. That should be plenty to to see if you like her style.

Whats Left of Terry Hoskin's Home

Click here for a slideshow of photos of Hoskin’s handiwork.

via Frustrated Owner Bulldozes Home Ahead Of Foreclosure – Cincinnati News Story – WLWT Cincinnati.

The video below is NOT Hoskins. Someone else did the same thing back in 2005 and posted it on YouTube.com.

They should also read 95% of user generated content ‘is spam’ / And 85 per cent of all emails, according to report to ensure they are not part of the problem.

In the season opener of Real Time with Bill Maher he took on the idea that the Tea Party Movement is not actually a movement and instead is actually a cult.

That section starts at about the 2:20 mark.

• People in cults believe in ridiculous unattainable goals like “decificit reduction by way of giant tax cuts”
• Cults have their own vocabularies:  Freedom means Guns, Diplomacy means Weakness, Elitist means Reader, and Socialist means Black.
• Cult members attribute all the problems to one person – in the Teabaggers case, this one:

The Problem

A poll showed 90% of Teabaggers thought that taxes had gone up or stayed the same under Obama.  Only two percent thought they went down.  The simple reality is:  for 95% of working families, taxes went down.

Only 2 percent of the people in a movement about taxes and named for a tax revolt, have the slightest idea about what is going on – with taxes.

So, it would be easy to just mock, except that those who fall under the control of cults aren’t necessarily weirdoes, they’re victims. And we shouldn’t forget that these people are our relatives, our neighbors and the folks at the next table in the restaurant. Especially if that restaurant is Hooters and it’s dollar wing Wednesday.

By the way, the poll Maher spoke about is on the CBS News site at Poll Reveals Most Americans Don’t Know They Got a Tax Cut.

Tax Poll Results

The pie chart – while showing an insane amount of ignorance on the part of those polled – doesn’t sound as bad as Maher indicated on his show. Thats because that chart shows ALL partipants. The full text of the article does go on to explain that:

Of people who support the grassroots, “Tea Party” movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

Those answers must frustrate the president who has highlighted its tax cuts for the middle class in almost every speech.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that as part of their economic recovery, his administration has passed 25 different tax cuts.

“Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes,” he said. “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.”

In his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Katie Couric, he touted the tax cuts in the stimulus package: “we put $300 billion worth of tax cuts into people’s pockets so that there was demand and businesses had customers.”

The election race for President of Earth is in full swing, with two clones as candidates and the Planet Express crew registers to vote. Meanwhile, a mining disaster on Titan sends the price of titanium through the roof, and Bender seizes the opportunity to make a quick buck by pawning his 40% titanium body.

As a head with a pile of cash, Bender begins enjoying his new lifestyle. During a trip to the Hall of Presidents in the New New York Head Museum, Richard Nixon’s head ruins Bender’s illusions about the glamor of a life without a body. The next day Bender heads off to the pawn shop to retrieve his body, but it has been sold. Later, Nixon’s head announces its candidacy for President of Earth, using Bender’s body to escape a constitutional provision that “nobody can be elected more than twice”.

[Fry and Leela are watching a debate. The candidates are clones, they use the same tone of voice and body movements for each other's short speech]
Jack Johnson: It’s time for someone who has the courage to stand up and say,
[slams his fist on the podium]
Jack Johnson: I’m against those things that everybody hates!
John Jackson: Now, I respect my opponent. I think he’s a good man. But quite frankly…
[slams his fist on the podium]
John Jackson: I agree with everything he just said.

There are many many ways to access Twitter ranging from command line tools all the way up to slick Adobe Air applications like TweetDeck.   If Adobe made a decent 64bit Linux version of TweetDeck I would still be using it and have never discovered my current favorite Twitter “client”, Brizzly.

I use Twitter from three different PC’s on a regular basis and while I can do all kinds if fun synchronization stuff ranging from using Dropbox to  rsync to unison to sshfs to keep my settings and preferences all in sync across the machines but that really gets to be a pain and I started looking at a purely cloud based solution.   Because  I had absolutely no use for Twitter when I did not have an active Internet connection, this seemed an ideal situation where a hosted application would be perfectly fine.  The fact that I would be accessing it from 32bit and 64bit Linux as well as from the occasional Windows machine meant that a web based solution that worked fine in Firefox or Chrome would give me the best results.

I knew I hated the limitations of the actual Twitter.com site so I started asking for opinions from others on Twitter .    I ended up using TwitHive.com for a while.  TwitHive is @yongsu‘s valiant attempt to bring many of the features first popularized in TweetDeck to a web browser.  Its ability to create “Channels” (think Columns in TweetDeck and later Lists on Twitter itself).  TwitHive is a very nice, simple, and effective tool but I would mainly recommend it to people who are happy with a heavy client like TweetDeck  and just need occasional access to Twitter while away from their main PC.

Brizzly Bear

During that time I had a few friend’s taking part in Brizzly’s private beta.  They all seemed to like it so I signed up for an Invite and one soon arrived.   I created my account and linked my Twitter and Facebook accounts (in much the same way as in the TweetDeck client).  When I first got it all set up I have to say I was unimpressed.  It looked much like the normal Twitter interface with the iconic Twitter bird replaced with a teddy bear in bird drag (see right).

Brizzly Bar

Within two hours my attitude had changed and I have been hooked ever since.  Now many other clients do some of what Brizzly does.  You can click a TwitPic.com or Yfrog.com link in TweetDeck and see the photo, and there are several other clients that will expand links created through URL shorteners like Bit.ly and TinyURL.com.   Brizzly does all that and more.   In addition to the known image hosts like TwitPic and Yfrog, Brizzly checks ALL links for likely image destinations and will show them inline as shown in the video above.  It also grabs the embed code for links to YouTube.com videos and lets you watch them in place.

Brizzly also makes it very easy to get to everything that matters to me via the bar on the left.   I follow 177  people (as of right this minute) and it is not overwhelming in Brizzly.  I also like the fact that the Direct messages come up in more of an Instant Messenger style interface and off to the side so you can DM with someone without hiding your main tweets.

I thought I would miss my old columns in TweetDeck but the addition of Twitter’s Lists in combination with Saved Searches took care of that lack.

So, all in all, if you are happy with your way of using Twitter on a computer (Mobile devices are different) then more power to you, but if you are new to Twitter or you tried it once and didn’t like it or “get” it, please give Brizzly a try.

]]> http://blog.techfun.org/2010/01/brizzly-the-faces-of-twitter/feed/ 2 http://blog.techfun.org/2008/08/capitalism-and-conservation-collide-in-the-north-sea/ http://blog.techfun.org/2008/08/capitalism-and-conservation-collide-in-the-north-sea/#comments Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:46:49 +0000 JD Thomas http://blog.techfun.org/?p=948

From: UK Fishermen Dump Catch Overboard to Make More Money

The European Union put fishing quotas in place for a reason: to prevent the kind of overfishing that experts warn could lead to mass extinction of marine life in the coming decades. But, European fishermen aren’t pleased with the quotas because they limit profit possibilities. So to get around that, they’re doing something pretty horrifying: dumping tons of perfectly good dead fish back into the water. Fish that should never have been caught in the first place.

Recently, the Norwegian Coast Guard shot video of UK fishermen doing just this, and the sight of such wastefulness (a whopping 5 tons of dead fish) has shocked many people who didn’t realize the extent of what was going on. Check it out at The Guardian.

Read the full post at EarthFirst.com

NOTE: The practice is legal, as the EU only sets quotas for fish landed at ports, not what is actually caught at sea. In this case, it appears the fishermen were discarding low-value small (but legal) fish in order to fill their quota with higher-value big fish.

Comments are disabled on this post. If you would like to comment on this please do so at the original post on EarthFirst.com.