Oops, I did it again: double posted that last article. All is not lost however as I have two high quality stories to post.
The first is Steve Jobs’ resumé. I personally liked the way he detailed a few of his musings (“building executive teams”).
The second is, Lap dancing club offers to pay students’ tuition fees. Only at tim.movementarian.com do you find links to iconoclastic stories such as this.
Speaking of reliable and verifiable, check out this Time Travel Unit — diagrams and all. Props goes out to Justin (the guy behind my flashy animated gif) for this gem.
And the last one is, The Biggest Game In Town. Next to reading and writing, I’ve invested more time in playing video games than I’d like to admit (unless I’m around other gamers). Maybe I should have chosen the highly lucrative crack or gaming industry — either one earns more than zero each and every month.
Are you a know-it-all? Beat all your witless friends in Trivial Pursuit? Win all five days in a row at Jeopardy? Well then, step right up my friend, because I have an outlet for the yoke that is your brain (or some other real Confucianism).
If you have a bit of spare time, are objective at least once in a blue moon and have the keen ability to write technical articles, then the Wikipedia is for you.
And quickly, a wiki is like a collaborative white-board. So imagine you’re back at the School of Hard Knocks (circa 1975) and you’re trying to explain to some coeds the social game of Twister. Trying to take advantage of their naïveté, you insert risqué rules that are not otherwise in the “Official” rulebook – like nekkidness and wine coolers.
Now a Puritan classmate of yours comes by, sees what youÂ’re doing and immediately erases everything on the board. Not only is a certain anatomical feature being blocked from any frisky adventures, but youÂ’re dignity is squashed like a third-party candidate in a California gubernatorial election.
So youÂ’re officially punch-drunk (isnÂ’t Thesaurus.com great?) — all Wikipedia is, is an online encyclopedia that anyone and everyone can add to, edit and delete articles. So if your masterÂ’s thesis was on the effects of peanut butter in high altitudes, you could add a paragraph or two, to a couple topics, namely “peanut butter” and “altitude.”
The biggest advantage of Wikipedia is also its biggest weakness (though IÂ’d have to say itÂ’s a major advantage currently) – since anyone can edit or add articles, the number of entries grows faster than the population of Sutter’s Mill in 1849.
Sadly, once users from AOL discover it, what could happen is the sky will and fall and it could eventually turn into another DMOZ – great idea, but in combination with a high signal-to-noise ratio you could have an ideological tug-of-war or scripted bots that ruin the fun for everyone.
All post-apocalyptical P.K. Dick melodrama out of the way, here are a few articles IÂ’ve enjoyed from Wikipedia of late:
- l33t (be sure to check out the leet version of Google)
- B1FF (is ESR supposed to be Mr. Linux advocate himself?)
- Yakov Smirnoff (In Soviet Russia, women dress you)
- Slashdot Trolling Phenomena (IÂ’ve been actively reading the site for over 5 years now and still had no clue how the Natalie Portman troll evolved)
- Engrish (thatÂ’s flied lice you plick!)
And I’ll close with a recent story of a White Hat Hacker (hackers that find exploits and bugs in your server security code and try to help you fix them): Adrian Lamo. Although he is not certain of the actual charges, he is turning himself over to the FBI in response to an outstanding (#4) warrant. The reason I mention this is because I got hacked several months ago, by some script kiddies – I would have gladly enjoyed someone like Mr. Lamo poking his head into my providers system to help discover potential exploits which in turn could have saved me time, money and several girlfriends.
I suppose the moral of the story is, if youÂ’re going to try and help a high-profile company like the NY Times, donÂ’t take SSNÂ’s, thatÂ’s just asking for trouble.
Oh, and yes, for those of you that were wondering I now can splurge with all the endorsement monies I made from Wikipedia LLC [insert meniachal laugh here].
Lastest: if only Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia could fuse, then the sum of all human knowledge could be downloaded into my brain through my Super Ultra WiFi 802.11Z antenna…
