Matt O’ Rama

Screw The Censors

Light Blue Touchpaper » Ignoring the “Great Firewall of China”

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!!

This is a very easy-to-use way of getting around most of the censorship done by the so-called “Great Firewall of China”. I applaud any attempts to route around censorship, especially political censoring like the government of China does.

Tags: grommes, china, censorship

This Sucks

KRQE News 13 – Flames wipe out four businesses
One of the places apparently destroyed by a stripmall fire this morning was The Comic Stop, the shop I went to weekly for years. After I dropped out of comics for a few years I decided to find a shop and see if there was anything I was interested in. I found the Comic Stop and quickly returned to the comics habit in full force. The owner, James, was in a lot of ways a stereotypical comic geek turned shop owner but he’s a hell of a guy and I could live with occasional ranting about things like changes the new Battlestar Galactica made to the Viper’s wings. Going to a comic shop every week means you get to know the people at the shop and hopefully become friendly with them. I still fondly remember George, the guy who owned Comic City, the shop in San Diego that my parents drove us 30 minutes to every week for years and years over a decade ago now. James and Mary, who also worked in the shop, became friends of mine pretty easily, not something that usually happens to a introvert like me.

This is a terrible and sad thing to happen. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Since we moved pretty far from the shop I haven’t been there but I hope he starts up again. There’s not too many genuinely nice and friendly comic shop people in Albuquerque and he deserves to try again.

Tags: grommes, comics, fire, comic+stop, albuquerque, friends

Puppetron Rocks!

One of my favorite artists, Beck, was in town on Friday and I was lucky enough to get to go see him. It rocked. I’d heard that he was performing partly with puppets and I was skeptical but man, those puppets were so cool it’s crazy. He had a mini stage setup with puppets of the band performing behind the real guys. Then the puppets were broadcast on the big screen behind the stage so you saw Beck, and Puppet Beck performing everything. It wouldn’t have worked with very many bands, I’d think, but Beck has always had a playful / weird streak so it completely worked. I was happy enough with this show that I’m not really all that disappointed that I’m probably not going to get to see Tom Petty and Pearl Jam in Denver next weekend.

Tags: grommes, concerts, music, beck, puppets

How About Banning Unfeeling Idiots From Library Boards?

The Porter County (Indiana) library system board of directors, apparently realizing that they’d rather not spend their afterlife roasting in hell, has lifted their ban on lending books to homeless children living in shelters.
Sheesh. These people should all lose their jobs for even thinking of something like this. A library should be a place for people to come and have a chance to better themselves or at the least get a break from reality, something I’d imagine most people living in homeless shelters would welcome. They don’t need to be treated like criminals and denied access to books, of all things. Shame on this board, I hope they never have to be treated like they’ve treated the residents of the shelter.

Beware Falling Books!

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problem in the library, originally uploaded by Klara Kim.

The horror! The horror!

Unreads First Real User!

So I’m looking at the Unreads.com homepage the other day and what do I see? The site’s first actual user! Click to see Cinqo’s Unreads Stack. Awesome. I have no idea who this person is but from the look of the books on their list, I’m intrigued. They look like my kind of person. Whoohoo!

I’m going to start emailing people today to have them look at the site so hopefully more people will be giving me feedback before too long. I’ve been working on the text and the Help popups and man, it’s hard. I’m very wordy so boiling things down to their essence is tough stuff. It’s useful though, it helps me crystallize my thoughts on the site. You work with something and you have an idea but actually communicating that to people who don’t know anything about the site makes you figure out just exactly what the thing is supposed to do. Unreads can appeal to lots of different people with different uses but I can’t just list a bunch of ways to use the site, it has to pull people in. Hopefully I’ll make enough money off the site eventually to hire somebody to help me out in this area.

Onward and upward.

Tags: grommes, unreads, startup, web2.0, design

DIY

MAKE: Blog: DIY Smoker

This Trashcan Smoker I made last weekend was featured on the MAKE magazine blog. The author of the article in ReadyMade magazine where I got the idea also found it. Awesome!

The coolest shoes in the universe

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The coolest shoes in the universe, originally uploaded by MattGrommes.

A birthday present from my parents. Thanks!

BOOKS

Anna Burnside: Potter and the philosopher’s endless drone – Sunday Times – Times Online

So it came as something of a surprise to discover that readers of The Book Magazine have voted J K Rowling as the greatest living writer in Britain. How can this be? … She had one good idea that became a formula that she has now worked into the ground.

I agree with her assessment of Harry Potter but I always find these lists interesting for another reason. The people who voted Rowling the best whatever didn’t do so because they actually thought she was the best writer. Most likely the majority of people who voted for her haven’t read almost any other books than the Harry Potter books so they have little to compare her to. They voted for her because they know her name and they “liked” the books. I quote “liked” because that’s how most people think of books, they either like them or they don’t. There’s no critical thought behind it, no comparison even really. “I liked Harry Potter and the kids read them so I’ll vote for whats-her-name”. This doesn’t invalidate the ranking, but the ranking isn’t for Best Living Author, it’s for Most Popular Author. Those 2 things are different in every way except some authors might appear on both lists and it’s disingenuous for the magazine involved to label the list the way they did.

PEACE

Thinking Peace, Fight Terrorism, Robert Alberti

We have an opportunity, now laid so grievously before us, to start and win a war with our most powerful and uniquely American weapons: love, opportunity, education and hope.

Excellent. Just excellent. Read it.