Parrot Power: Alex Wanted a Cracker, but Did He Want One?
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A famed parrot showed signs of an inner life, and a bit of a temper.
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Tycho: We'll be going over PAX preregistrants soon to determine this year's Omeganauts, and anyone who has registered by June 15th is eligible. If you'd like to hurl yourself into the running, please do so at your earliest convenience. This year's Omega Prize differs substantially from our offerings in the past. Here's how: Winner and guest secure passage to this year's Tokyo Game Show, flight and Hotel included, assisted by five thousand dollars in cash as a kind of general purpose "Misbehavior Fund." Ain't a bad wage for three days' work. (CW)TB
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(InfoWorld) - IÂ was hungry and it had started to rain when my mobile phone buzzed to tell me I could now buy sugar in a hermetically sealed packet. A picture on my phone's screen of a goldfish swimming past the cheery new packaging drove the point home. Suddenly, I had a craving for fried fish in sweet-and-sour sauce. Pushed by some strange urge to seek out a Chinese restaurant, I looked around and saw the same goldfish staring down at me from a nearby billboard. The message, zapped to my phone over a Bluetooth wireless connection from a billboard near Opera in central Paris, is part of a new service called Chrono Connect offered by French advertising company JCDecaux SA. The service involves 54 billboards in central Paris, either 8 or 12 square meters in size. The billboards contain a roll of different posters and, had I passed by at some other time of day, I would have seen and received a different message. Advertisers buy one of four time slots -- night, rush hour, working hours or meal times -- during which their poster will be displayed. Anyone lingering in front of the billboards with a Bluetooth phone in "visible" mode will receive an invitation to download a file. If they accept, the billboard zaps it over to their phone. Each billboard contains a roll of posters and a small computer with a Bluetooth transmitter. The files for transmission are loaded into the computer from a USB (Universal Serial Bus) stick at the same time as the posters are changed. The computer can match the files it transmits to the model of mobile phone it detects, perhaps sending higher-resolution video to more powerful phones. And while unable to identify individual passers-by or access their telephone numbers, the computer can at least track whether a particular telephone has already been offered or refused a file in the last few hours, so that people who pass frequently in front of the same billboard aren't inundated with messages. One of the first customers to realize the potential of this medium was French comedian and impersonator GÃ©rald Dahan, who used it to distribute a short video clip promoting his current show about the forthcoming French presidential elections. The mobile phone is a natural medium for Dahan to choose, as he is famous for his telephone pranks. In a recent call he convinced presidential candidate SÃ©golÃ¨ne Royal that she was speaking with the Prime Minister of Quebec, Jean Charest. For now, many of Chrono Connect's advertisers are transmitting only a digital image of the poster, like the one I received, but Albert Asseraf, director of strategy and marketing at Decaux, hopes to change that. He says the company is in talks with music publishers so that advertisers can offer song downloads to those willing to stand in front of their posters for long enough. And it could also be a way to distribute movie trailers straight into the hands of people with time to watch them, perhaps with screening times and directions to the nearest cinema. The technology offers so many useful and entertaining possibilities, Asseraf is convinced people will want to receive the ads his company distributes. The only problem, he says, is that too many of them set their Bluetooth phones to "invisible," preventing them from being "discovered" by other Bluetooth devices such as his billboards.
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Why do we gossip? Evolution may hold some surprising answers.
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The People's Daily Online reports Chinese scientists have successfully implanted electrodes in pigeons' brains to control the birds' movements. Reminds us of U.S. attempts to create remote-controlled shark spies. In Danger Room.
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My friend Steve called me in a panic. Seems he and his girlfriend are divided over one important issue. He (a chef) always selects fresh produce for his cooking. She says frozen is better. "Can you help us?" he asks.  Yes ... no ... maybe.
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.
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It sounds like a joke, or perhaps just an urban legend that grew out of Dr. Seussâs âGreen Eggs and Ham.
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Tycho:  Ever since I closed the lid of my DS, sealing the Pokemon within and stunting their development, I have been expelled from polite society.  I think Gabriel might have imagined that we would engage in furious battles during Recess, out on the Big Toy, until the bell rang for lunch.  For a time, I hoped to take on a coaching role for other players, wise with my years (or perhaps weeks) of Pokemon husbandry - but Gabriel exclaimed that "a Pokemon trainer's strength comes from within," which I assume means not from me.  Through some strange reversal of polarity, I am being ostracized for not befriending electric mice.  It is a world dipped - perhaps even double dipped - in madness.
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Tycho: There are two things I must mention.First, Gabriel liked the cover for book four (entitled "Birds Are Weird") so much that he wanted to make a poster of it, and it's not worth arguing with him when he gets like that so we let him do it. It is, even now, awailable!Also: PAX preregistration opens today, and since we've had a couple of these now you probably know if it's something you'd like to attend. You save ten dollars over the door price, which is, like, ten bucks. This is money you could put toward some other purpose!(CW)TB
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Frankly Speaking: Frank Hayes relates a chat Santa had with an elf about annual gift giving to the IT world. And what's with all the penguins? Santa wants to know.
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Would you like your crickets  deep fried and crispy? Peppered and presented in a neat circle  on a bed of green leaves?
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Picky eaters used to have few choices about expressing their delight or disappointment over a restaurant meal: Say something to the waiter, tell their friends or fill out that little comment card that comes with the check and hope somebody reads it.
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Word over at Penny-Arcade is that Mike and Kara are playing WoW again. My wife and I have also recently gotten re-hooked on the game. Could this mean a renewed interest in the conflict between Panda Attack and the Penny-Arcade Alliance? Considering that there are about 4 Arcadians to every 1/2 of a panda, that means [...]
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There is a part of gamer psychology that is rarely discussed, but incredibly important: We are thrilled by wanton destruction. We need it like a form of food. Commentary by Clive Thompson.
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CHARLESTON, S.C. - Could the awesome and seemingly limitless power of DNA be focused on a parakeet?  That question is intriguing historians who want to bring back the extinct Carolina parakeet - the only parrot species native to South Carolina.
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Analysis: The Presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan will dine with President Bush Wednesday. The purpose of the huddle is to force Pakistan to once again choose between the West and the Taliban