Swimming with the Razorfishes: 02/27/2005

"When you bathe, do not admire yourself in a mirror. Never stay in the bath more than five or six minutes — just long enough to bathe and dry and dress AND THEN GET OUT OF THE BATHROOM into a room where you will have some member of your family present."

Helpful advice, indeed.

I missed this earlier in the week. Forgive me, I live in The United States. Rinus Michels died Thursday morning.

Wow...Edmund Leveckis' photos are fantastic. I love finding these people, quietly publishing such great stuff.

Wow -- I missed this when it was released. Earthlink has been building a Flash-based mail client, and it looks pretty good.

"I had a discussion this week about an organization that tries to solve every new problem with a process. (No, not IBM). It was about people hiding their incompetence behind new ways of filling out paper" [via vowe.net]

Oh my God -- I've been saying this so much in the last 12 months. Process won't help you if you suck. It will just make you suck more repeatably.

[and, yes, all you people from my office who lurk here and don't say anything, I am talking about you.]

RFIDAnalysis.com. Very cool analysis and hack of encrypted RFID tags.

If someone wants to buy a football jersey with "ASS MONKEY" across the back, I'm not quite sure why the NFL wants to stop them. Please note that the phrase "TIT BIT NIPPLY" is also banned.

SANS has update info on the DNS attack reported yesterday. It appears limited to a known vulnerability in a Symantec firewall. Move along. Nothing to see here.

SANS has a short blurb about a possible (global) DNS attack. I haven't seen this anywhere else.

New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Very nice.

Also, served by the odd combination of Apache and Cold Fusion.

The New York Times adds Ink and Lens to its section lineup. Sylvia Plachy gets the first Lens feature, hopefully carrying on with her excellent Voice column.

I couldn't find anything about this on The Times site. Also, no word whether or not these will be available online.

Hmmm. I don't know what to make of this.

The Washington Post online has Freddy Adu on the front page today.

I just found this via Slashdot: Weka, a cool data mining library in Java. Really nicely done.

Yahoo's 10-year netrospective. My company's profound stupidity even made the list(!).

Brilliant. [requires Windows Media Player]

Wow -- The Grey Album is way better than The Black Album.

This is fun. Requires a Java-enabled web browser.

POTD

click for high-res

The Diane Arbus exhibition, Revelations, is making its way to The Metropolitan Museum. Even though it is oh-so-hip to like her photos, this is a great exhibit. Prints from twenty years of her work, from her beginnings through the 1960s. Good stuff. Catch it before May 30, when it packs up and heads to Germany.

This is a little freaky. Some insane high school teacher in Brick Township, NJ (home of some perfectly respectable strip malls) seems to take the national anthem pretty seriously.

He rather gruffly orders his students to stand during the anthem, then screams at those not giving sufficient "respect."

Check out the story and the video. You have to watch the video to experience the extent of his irrational yelling.

Two thoughts:

Adolescents are supposed to learn from someone who behaves this way? There is very clearly not much learning going on after an outburst like this.
Is this man so stupid that he thinks yelling like this will actually work? Is his mind so addled from TGI Fridays' nachos and cheap beer that he forgets what it is like to be a 15 year-old guy?

That moron should be canned.

Oh -- and bravo to the student who videotaped the crazy teacher.