Today, I accidentally discovered the game of Facebook-whacking (remember Googlewhacks?), in which you find various search phrases for which your friends are the number one result, when you search on Facebook.

You can accomplish this by stringing out-of-context words from the “Info” section of someone’s facebook profile. The more TV shows, bands, and movies they have listed, the easier it is.

Some of my friends can be found on Facebook by searching for:

muppet ninja
adore massive sex
pelican f***ing
psycho playboy
grimy men
tasty manure
ugly shakespeare
impossible jewish artist
love fresh boy

and many, many more! Some are more descriptive of the actual person than others…

Try it! What can *you* come up with?

My company, Topspin (which I dearly love), is currently hiring for two positions. A sys admin in Santa Monica, and a SQL DB admin in San Francisco. You can find out more about these positions, and our awesome startup, here.

If you’re a command-line-happy nerd who likes to use scp (secure copy) to copy files to one or more remote web-servers, you may come to love this script, which I wrote a few years ago, and which I use numerous times every day. It saves a lot of typing when I’m updating files on my web-servers via the command-line (which is how I usually do it).

If the previous sentence does not describe you, then run! Run for the hills!

Here’s a page describing my script, mcp, along with a link to download it.

Many computers measure time as the seconds elapsed since 1970. This number is shown below, in universal time.

In a few hours (6:31:30PM ET) it is expected to reach the magic number of 1234567890

( Update: You missed it! – reset your computer clock to reexperience it! )

You are advised to celebrate exuberantly, which will provide stimulus to the global economy.

Here’s a link to a full-screen version. Enjoy!

Update: Festivities are over. Here’s what happened at 6:31 eastern time at the location above. Not visible in the picture are a number of us behind the camera quaffing beer.

While visiting the Gold Bug shop in Pasadena, a wonderful place that more closely resembles a cabinet of curiosity than a gift store, jewelry shop or art gallery, I was reminded of my love for the unclassifiable.

Its a fundamental problem that accompanies our need for taxonomy, I guess. When I used to visit real record stores (remember those?), they had racks for “Rock”, “Jazz”, “Classical” and so on, but often, the music I liked best was the stuff that didn’t fit neatly into one of those racks. Is Laurie Anderson rock? Not really, but that’s where they put her. Unfortunately, the “hard to classify” quality that made her so interesting also made her hard to sell, I imagine. It’s easier to sell something when there’s an obvious shelf to put it on.

The best stores have a special shelf set aside for this stuff. It might say “Other” or “Miscellaneous” or “Weird shit”. This is my shelf — I’m always looking for the “Other” shelf.

If I’m presented with an online store catalog, and it provides an “Other” – that’s the first thing I look at. I know the most interesting things will be sitting in that collection, gathering dust.

For example, the first time I visited the iPhone app store, and was presented with the following categories:

Games
Entertainment
Utilities
Social Networking
Music
Productivity
Lifestyle
.
.
.

The first thing I did was scroll to the bottom of the list. It ended with

.
.
.
Weather
Books
Medical

“Crap!” I thought. “Where’s Other?” The lack of an “Other” shelf means that some remarkably innovative apps are probably getting misfiled (under Enterainment or Lifestyle or who knows what), and they are not being discovered (although I imagine social networks can ameliorate this problem a bit).

By the way, after kvetching for a bit, I checked out the stuff in “Medical”. Woah!

Similarly, when I occasionally find myself filling out surveys, I hate it when I get a series of multiple choice questions that don’t provide an “other” on each and every question whose choices don’t encompass the known universe of possibility. For example, the “What Industry are you employed in?” question on many registration forms appears to have been constructed at some time in the 1980s, and has no actual bearing on the present universe. Yes, I use computers for a living, but I am neither in “High Tech,” nor in “Engineering,” nor “Communications” nor “Entertainment”. For much of my career, I’ve been in businesses which straddle these areas, among others.

If I’m filling out a paper survey that has a question like this, I simply pencil in my own “Z: Other” and circle it.

For online surveys you end up being forced to pick a close but inappropriate answer, which causes the survey to artificially fit into the marketer’s predefined world view. Yuck.

So, back to my hypothetical record store. What causes something to go on the “other” shelf? There are a few principal reasons I can think of:

A) It straddles two or more categories, such as PDQ Bach, which is both classical music and comedy (and often succeeds at being neither).

B) The actual category is so small it’s uneconomical to provide a unique shelf, such as Sound Effects and Bird Song records (both of which I own, due to my penchant for scouring the “Other” bin). Speaking of which, Goldbug, which got me started on this tirade, has a highly desirable, but pricey, collection of ingeniously designed birdcalls. Check ’em out. I want ’em all.

C) It is a pioneering work, which may one day have company in its own category. Or it might, if anyone manages to find it.

D) Other.

A collection of images from the Victoria Australia Bush Fires group on Flickr.

Interactive version here.

Thanks to Pamela Fox for alerting me to this group.

UPDATE: These photos have been pulled from Flickr, apparently due to copyright issues. If I find a similar collection, I’ll post an updated mosaic.

Francine Kizner does a nice write-up of the “Data+Art” show at the PMCA where I have a couple pieces.

Link

Of course I’m biased, but I think the show is really cool. My favorite show in Los Angeles since the Visual Music exhibit at MOCA a few years ago.

If I find other press / blog coverage, I’ll post it here…

UPDATE

Here’s an L.A. Times article on the show.

Etude in G Minor, 1983

I thought it might be a good idea to catalog and record all my old piano pieces, many of which exist solely in my head, and haven’t been notated or recorded. “Etude in G Minor” is something I used to play a lot in 1983, during a period when I was experimenting with a more impressionistic style. These recordings were made yesterday, in my living room, on my creaky old piano, in dire need of tuning and repair.

Here’s a few more:

Hymn (1977)
7 Pianos Theme (1982)
C Jam (1983)
One Zero One Zero (1984)
Happy Song in C (1985)
Janet’s Blues (1986)
Crooked Waltz (1994)
Sedley’s Lament (1994)

9 Piano Pieces by Jim Bumgardner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

I’m currently working on a couple images for the upcoming Data + Art show, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. This show runs from January 25th, thru April 25th, 2009.

The images I’m generating include over a hundred thousand Flickr photographs, taken during the past year.

I’ll be attending the opening, which is on Saturday, January 24th, at 7pm. There’s a 5 dollar admission fee.

I should also mention that my friend, David Scharf has a show, Micronautics, opening the same night, in the same space. David is a master of color electron microscopy, and his work is amazing. Check this out:

You should see this critter blown up large. Amazing stuff!

David’s work, which is about magnifying things that are very small, makes a good compliment to the “data + art” show, in which we reduce things that are very large.

Hope to see you at the opening!

Denise Bagley from ComfortStylus.com recently sent me a sample of their Quirk Bendable Pencil, thinking it would be of interest to the puzzle solvers who visit this website.

I generally solve puzzles with a pen. However my wife, Janet, used it for a few weeks, and submitted the following review:

Comfortstylus is a fancy name for a cute little pencil that you wear on your fingertip. It has about the same heft to it as a Q-tip and is even more bendable. The comfortstylus got my attention the moment I saw it. Actually it came in the mail for my husband but I opened it not knowing what it was. I immediately started to play with it to find out.

It was fun getting it to cling to my finger in the precise way that I wanted it. And once attached, you can wave your hands around or whatever and it doesn’t fall off. You almost forget you have it on. The comfortstylus uses and stays eternally sharp–no more sharpening needed! Use it to do your Sudoku puzzles if nothing else. (My favorites are still Killer Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles.)

Negatives:

1. No eraser! Perhaps other models have them, but mine did not. Unlike my puzzle-genius husband, I never do puzzles in pen because I need to be able to erase.

2. Easy to lose. Tip: Always place it somewhere safe before your mother comes to visit. Yes, I learned this the hard way.

To sum up: It’s a fun alternative to your hum-drum pencil, but don’t get rid of your no. 2’s.

NOTE: Looking at the website, it appears that ComfortStylus.com is not currently selling the Quirk, but a similar product that doesn’t include the graphite tip. I imagine if you contact Denise, she can help you obtain a Quirk of your very own.