http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog Clever name pending. Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:24:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My cousin Andy, who had never been to Las Vegas before, was excited to go to The Price Is Right Live! at Bally’s Las Vegas. As luck would have it, he was chosen at random to go to Contestant’s Row, where it was not his ability to price outdoor space ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/248/ Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price set by Amazon EC2, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply of and demand for Spot Instance capacity. –How Spot Instances Work For batch processing, this new system allows you to trade urgency/throughput for ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/247/ Amanda Palmer liked American Repertory Theater’s "Sleep No More" so much, she announced a performance at the bar within the venue I highly recommend Sleep No More Don’t think of it as a play with a plot, or a puzzle to be solved, but a series of surreal experiences. ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/246/ I’ve been following The Long Now Foundation for some time, starting with the essay in Wired Magazine in 1995 which inspired it. Its mission is to inspire long-term thinking in a world with an increasingly short time horizon. They organize around several projects, but their signature effort is ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/245/ Facebook announced today that they are allowing users to pick usernames. The primary use of these seems to be vanity URLs, so you can put http://www.facebook.com/JohnDoe on a business card instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789. You can only pick one username, and once chosen, it is permanent. This is a lot ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/244/ We’re finally seeing a viable rich editor for MediaWiki emerge. Wikia, the commercial venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is beta testing a WYSIWYG editor. It isn’t perfect, but they’re making great progress. You can try it yourself on their test Wiki. It’s built on the open source ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/243/ I saw Steve Sweeney live ages ago, mainly doing the same material he does here. I’ve always remembered his Bostonians’-take-on-weather bit, and it’s been popping back into my mind as people discuss the beautiful weekend weather swinging back into snow on Monday. Starting around 4:10, paraphrased: “Positive people we ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/242/ No, I haven’t taken up building miniature models of Tuscan towns. This is a digitally processed version of a photo I took in Siena on vacation 2006. Is it convincing? Enthusiasts have been playing around with tilt-shift miniature faking for a while, but the website TiltShiftMaker makes the process ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/241/ Man, I love listening to rebroadcasts of TED talks on my iPod during my commute. Sadly, I’m not interesting enough to be invited to attend, but by becoming an associate member ($1000), I can access a live webcast of the TED conference and show it to ten of my ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/240/ Peter pointed me to CHDK, a firmware enhancement for Canon cameras, including my trusty rusty SD630. CHDK lets you hack your camera’s software to make it do a bunch of stuff that the built-in software doesn’t let you do. It’s not as scary as it sounds. You just need to ... http://www.matthewsim.com/weblog/238/