Update: I absolutely want to have each and every one of you inside of me. You all, within 15 minutes, provided enough Gmail invites to cover every, single entry. Just awesome, thanks! (You can stop sending invites now).

Firefly Caption Contest Winner

First, I want to thank you all for being incredibly unfunny. I used to feel badly about getting paid to write dick jokes, but you have all shown me what an elusive skill it truly is. More specific thanks to the hundreds of you who established that old computers look like refrigerators, Windows sucks, three men in an office will invariable have hot, brown-suited sex, and that Douglas Adams once wrote a paragraph featuring the number "42."

I braved permanently crippling my ability to "fun" to bring you these highlights:

• New from Ikea - The Vacüm line of office furniture!
• While still fighting time restrictions, the Half-Life 2 code staff works diligently on their state of the art, completely secure vacuum computers.
• 10 PRINT "I HATE YELLOW" 20 GOTO 10

See the rest of the runners-up, plus the winning entry, inside.

Science Fiction Case Mod Contest: The
First Winner!

Winner announced for iPod Limerick
Contest

Eurovision Song Contest

eurovision.tv/english/index.htm
track this site | 4 links

"Eurovision Song Contest"

Winner announced for Spymac Dashboard
widget contest

Keynote design contest winner gets a
Cinema Display

Vote for the Free Site Giveaway Contest
winner!

Winner of Second Life contest to design
Cory's book

Falk Bergman was the first to bring me by to have a look at his prototype in development, a giant book positioned next to a seat. Sitting on it automatically fixes your camera position in place, to give you the best possible view of the book.

"The viewer in-world itself is very simple," Falk tells me modestly. "It is basically a shopping agent with two displays that hooks into Page Up and Down [on the keyboards] for changing the pages."

Update: Dragonpage radio have recorded a podcast with me about the book and it went live today. Here's the MP3 link

Spymac iPod photo contest winner
announced

MacJams.com Announces GarageBand Song
Contest

On rock music, eurovision song contest
and weddings

Which brings me to the general music selection of Finnish weddings. It is supposed to be a happy occasion, but yet somehow most of the music is always extremely depressing. It just makes you want to scream: the three required waltzes, and then a selection of other classics, and then moving towards traditional Finnish rock music, in which a lone, drunken man sings his lament after killing his family, right before blowing his own brains out.

Hel-lo? Happy, anyone? Remember? The state where you don't really want to kill yourself (or anyone else for that matter)?

*sigh*

I guess you would need to listen to a lot of Finnish rock music to understand this entry. Hell, even writing about the music depresses me to another dimension. Then again, being alone in a small hotel room, watching the Eurovision Song Contest (which is complete crap, as usual), feeling the blissful state of inebriation ebb away into tiredness and depression ("laskuhumala" in Finnish, a highly descriptive word, I might add) after having left the party prematurely because of the compound effect of alcohol, little sleep, the afore mentioned music, relatives ("Now when are you going to get married, mmh?"), and the general happiness of everyone else (happily married or at least engaged)... What do you expect? ;-)

Anyway. Lots of luck and love to the happy couple.

MacJams announces 500MB free song
hosting; contest

"in a close shave with Occam's razor,
the only precincts in Louisiana unable
to vote until only two hours of voting
time were left were majority
african-american precincts"

FINAL
RESULTS - GREAT CANADIAN SONG
CONTEST

As promised, here are the results of the Great Canadian Song contest. At the end of the first round, our four judges, Chris Corrigan, Darren Barefoot, Robert Cooke and I, whittled the 76 nominees down to 20 finalists. We then re-listened to all 20 songs and ranked them in order. Just as a reminder, to qualify, songs had to be written and performed by Canadians and had to refer at least peripherally to Canada or something identifiably Canadian. The idea was to select possible contents for a compilation CD that would introduce people from other countries to Canada through its music. The judges' rankings are based strictly on personal preference -- how proud we would be to play each song to someone who knew nothing about Canada or its culture and heritage. Many of our favourite Canadian musicians (Bruce Cockburn, Sarah McLachlan, Marc Jordan, Ian Thomas, Blue Rodeo, Jesse Cook, Guess Who, Amanda Marshall, Alanis Morrisette, and Jann Arden just to name a few) didn't make the list because their best (in our opinion, anyway) songs don't refer to Canada. Of the 20 songs that made the final list, 15 were ranked significantly higher than the remaining 5, so we're cutting the list off at that point. That's just the right number for a CD. Here's the list, in combined rank order, with links to the lyrics where available. SONG COMPOSER PERFORMER 1. Canadian Railroad Trilogy Gordon Lightfoot Gordon Lightfoot 2. A Case of You Joni Mitchell Joni Mitchell 3. Nor thwest Passage Stan Rogers Stan Rogers 4. Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald Gordon Lightfoot Gordon Lightfoot 5. Fou r Strong Winds Ian Tyson Ian & Sylvia 6. Helpless Neil Young Neil Young 7. Barr ett's Privateers Stan Rogers Stan Rogers 8. Ac adian Driftwood Robbie Robertson The Band 9. Log Driver's Waltz Wade Hemsworth McGarrigles 10. It's Hockey Night in Canada Lynn Miles Lynn Miles 11. The Last Saskatchewan Pirate Arrogant Worms Arrogant Worms 12. Wheat Kings Tragically Hip Tragically Hip 13. Hillcrest Mine James Keelaghan James Keelaghan 14. Far Too Canadian Spirit of the West Spirit of the West 15. A Real Canadian Girl Stompin' Tom Connors Stompin' Tom Connors We really tried hard to come up with a representative number of Francophone songs, First Nations songs, traditional Canadian folk songs and songs by women composers. But as you can see, the list is dominated by relatively modern (20th century) English Canadian songs penned by men. Please blame me, not my fellow judges, for this failing. My guess is that the best identifiably Canadian songs by Francophones, Native Canadians, and Canadian women, and the best traditional Canadian songs, have yet to be discovered by most Canadians, and we need to educate ourselves better on these important contributors to Canadian music and culture. We'll work on it, and recruit some experts in such music to guide us and help with the judging, when we repeat the contest next year. Meanwhile we will be submitting this list to the CBC, as they requested, and if they aren't enthused about our idea for a compilation CD, we'll use our entrepreneurial resources to try to find another publisher. If we're successful, we'll promote it on our blogs, the various Canadian blog directories and webrings and through BlogsCanada. These are all wonderful songs -- songs of courage, love, loss, tragedy, loneliness and connection with our rugged geography, the land, and, of course, the weather.

I have a question, I have an answer -
pick me, pick me!

Syndication city
by Scott Rosenberg

I'm a late addition to a panel at the Supernova conference this Thursday, June 24: I'll be joining some very interesting people (Technorati's David Sifry; blogger, XML leader and now Sun engineer Tim Bray; and Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate). We're talking about syndication and RSS. The question the panel faces: "Is there more to syndication than reading 300 blogs at once?" What interesting, useful applications for RSS and RSS-like tools are out there or just around the corner?

I've got my own answer(s), but in the decentralized spirit of the conference, I'll open the floor here in comments, and present anything you folks suggest, too.

[Scott Rosenberg]

I have five questions/answers for Scott - I hope he picks me.....

1. How will the evolution of new kinds of micro-content, like Reviews, Events and music playlists - effect the existing blogosphere? A: it will enhance it, making it not onyl richer and deeper, but also make it more relevant to average people - who don't want or feel the need to blog, but who have opinions on movies, books and reataurants.

2. How will FOAF interconnect entire social networks, on-line communities and blogging tool userbases together? A: by enabling digital IDs that encompass multiple presences, end-users will be able to move freely from system to system without having to recreate their strong ties every time.

3. Finally - Salon was one of the first content sites to offer it's readership Blogs. Now that the AlwaysOn Network is also offering social networking - will Salon also offer social networking? I say - yes.

"The Everyman Photo Contest - 2004
Amatuer Contest Rules"

The Everyman Photo Contest - 2004
Amatuer Contest Rules

theeveryman.com/41.php
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iCompositions Exclusive Article

iCompositions: More Free Loops

iCompositions launches new features!

iCompositions gives away 121 more loops
for GarageBand

iCompositions.com has partnered with loops producer Bandmateloops to give away another package of free loops for GarageBand, Logic, and Soundtrack.

iCompositions launches parent MUGnetwork

News: iCompositions offers another 121
free loops

iCompositions posts a tutorial on the
Soundtrack Loop Utility

"Apple's SoundTrack Loop Utility can help you accomplish such a thing. Don't let the name fool you, though. This baby isn't just for SoundTrack. You use it to view and manage the tags within Apple Loops, such as Descriptors, Genre, Instrument, Key and other useful information as well as create Apple Loops for both ST and GB. But the best part is you don't have to own SoundTrack to get it."

iCompositions gives away 200 free loops,
book excerpts, and tutorials

iCompositions offers free loops, book
chapters

iCompositions.com launches world's first
Internet Radio Station for GarageBand

iCompositions.com gives away 150MB of
free upload space to GarageBand Users

Only hours left to pick the winner of the iCompositions 5th Best Song Contest