lynne spears talked to people about her new book through the storm: a real story of fame and family in a tabloid world. lynne talks about allowing your kids to follow their dreams. say your kid always dreamed of doing blow in a conoco gas station bathroom with sleazy photographers, then you should allow them to follow that dream. get it?

“i think you have to let them follow their dreams,” she says in a new interview with people. “i think it would be worse in the end if you didn’t.”
but she does express regrets about not listening to her “gut” at times: “was i the perfect mom? no.”
she says britney and bryan have yet to read it, but “jamie lynn loved the book. i started to cry because i told her, ‘i wanted so much for you to like it.’ and she got up and kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘mama, thank you so much.’”

looks like motherhood has done nicole ritchie some good. her rack is now bigger and actually appears to be in good shape. i never knew she had one to be honest, this is a vast improvement. these are pictures of her and her daughter, harlow winter kate out taking a stroll.

unlike ashlee simpson’s twins, lindsay lohan’s twins are the cool kind. the kind that make her “fun.” and the kind that attract attention. they were at full mast this weekend in new york city at fashion week. man, this is one of the best racks around if you ask me. good going lindsay, keep up the great acting career.

more lindsay lohan big boob pictures.

if you date a member of the jonas brothers, you are not getting the nooky. the brothers, sons of a pastor, have made this clear by wearing promise rings. maybe this is just a ploy to get girls to try to convert them to the evil side? you know, the fun side of life.

brand clearly angered some in attendance when he repeatedly joked about the jonas brothers, the sons of a pastor, all of whom wear purity rings as a symbol of their vow not to have premarital sex. at one point, brand brandished one as if he had won it from a jonas brother.
“american idol” champ jordin sparks defended them: “i just wanna say, it’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not every guy and a girl wants to be a slut, ok?”
brand responded by apologizing, before slyly offending again by alluding to r. kelly in an unprintable joke (like many of his).
perhaps summing up his perspective, he explained, “a bit of sex occasionally never hurt anybody.”

who freaking cares? that’s what i say. i mean, if she turned down an adult site where she was set to perform “acts,” then i’d be upset. but playboy pretty much sucks anymore if you ask me. they still think the articles are cool. while they write articles, other places write “scenes.” scenes are way cooler, trust me. rather than look at lindsay naked, i’d rather see her answer the door for the plumber that’s coming over to fix her pipes. now that’s rad.

page six says, “if there’s nudity, then the answer’s no . . . she’s not going down the [new york] magazine road again,” lohan’s rep told playboy’s creative consultant, hal lifson, referring to lindsay’s naked marilyn monroe tribute last winter. lifson said he hoped to have lohan do a tribute to ’60s sex kitten ann-margret and her film “kitten with a whip.”

continuing my experiments with iphone panoramas (and risking turning this blog into just a photo-blog), this was stitched together using photoshop cs3 from three pictures i took this weekend. i'm not terribly happy with the colors, but i'm a bit limited with the iphone.

a friend, seeing my panorama pictures yesterday, said i could have done a much better job using photoshop cs3. he offered to redo one of my panoramas to show me how much better photoshop was at blending the exposures of the individual images. i have to agree, it definitely looks better. the resulting picture doesn't have any of the banding or abrupt transitions seen in my original panoramas. time, perhaps, to grab a copy of cs3. the only question is whether it's worth spending $1000 on.

the concept of aggregation is increasingly important on the internet, as the sheer number of information resources increases. the average user wants to track more and more things on the internet; an aggregator quickly becomes necessary as one's bookmark list grows to infinity. the first aggregators, what i call 'general purpose' aggregators, like bloglines, google reader, and newsgator, are focused on tracking blogs and news feeds, making it easy to subscribe to whatever blogs the user came across.

the new service friendfeed has been getting a lot of attention the past couple of weeks. it's the latest in the line of what i call 'individual aggregators,' services that aggregate all the distributed parts of a person's on-line presence in one place. a person may have a blog, a twitter account, a flickr photostream. these services combine all of these items in one place. this trend started with facebook's newsfeed, continued with plaxo's pulse, and then several other services, including tumblr can do most of what the individual. these services are different than the general purpose aggregators in that they're focused on tracking individuals, not feeds. but the general purpose aggregators can do what the individual aggregators can do, because the underlying technology, rss, is the same. it's really just a matter of user interfaces and a key bit of information.

the problem

the individual aggregators collect a list of all of the distributed parts of a person's on-line presence. they ask each user to list their twitter account, their flickr account, their youtube account, their blog. this list doesn't exist anywhere in a way that's machine readable. each of the individual aggregators has to deduce this information and then maintain it. or more specifically, each user has to maintain this information on each of the individual aggregators. wouldn't it be better if this list existed somewhere under direct control of the user in a way where it wasn't siloed in a centralized, proprietary service? that way, every aggregator could take advantage of it and users would only have to update the list in one place.

a modest proposal

this problem is actually a general purpose version of a problem already solved by something called rss autodiscovery. in order to make it easier for general purpose aggregators to find rss feeds to subscribe to, many publishers included a special line of text in the headers of their html. i have one on my blog:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="rss" href="http://www.wingedpig.com/index.rdf" />

aggregators know to look for this line, which tells them where the rss feed for that blog exists. can't we just extend this to include a list of all the other aspects of a person's identity? have one line for each service the person uses, and change the title accordingly. so, i could include:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="flickr feed" href="http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=35034347955@n01&lang=en-us&format=rss_200" />

for my flickr feed. this doesn't have to only apply to services that publish rss feeds. i could even do something like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/twitter" title="twitter" href="wingedpig" />

to indicate my twitter account.

by doing this, the list of all the parts of a person's on-line presence is kept under the control of the person, associated with their blog. it's distributed, open, and easy to implement.

how to make it work

for this to work, a couple things need to happen. blog publishing software has to be modified to ask for and then insert this information into the headers of a person's blog. then,aggregators need to be modified to look for this information, and to periodically recheck it. the general purpose aggregators need to augment their interfaces to allow people to subscribe to these new feeds. but none of these things are terribly difficult to do.

dear lazyweb,

i'm in need of a new laptop bag, something on the smallish side. it needs to fit my macbook air and its power adapter, my kindle and its power adapter, my bose headphones, possibly a small mouse, and a couple of cords. so, not much. any recommendations? i'd like to see it in person before i buy it, and i'd like to get it this weekend, so that eliminates mail-order places like waterfield.

milestones: 100,000 views june 3 2008 200,000 views july 7 2008 300,000 views july 25 2008 400,000 views august 2 2008 (100k in 8 days!) 500,000 views august 15 2008 600,000 views september 1 2008 mp3 now available! thanks to waacm for setting it all up. http://www.savefile.com/files/1689289 holy crap my first honors in the music category! as of saturday, march 8 at 7:33 est #92 - top favorites (today) - music #89 - top rated (today) - music thanks everyone! july 30 (and about 1 week therafter) honors: #2 - top rated (all time) #1 - top rated (all time) - music are you kidding me? thank you so much everyone! this is amazing! i have worked on this piece for longer than any i can remember, it is longer than any i can remember composing, and the composition part is probably a shining example of what i am capable of. i may have spent about 10 or so hours total or more on this. unfortunately, the computer i usually work on had its sound card break, so i went on my secondary one to make this. well, it has a different version of camstudio that i don't like, and when i'm recording the sound quality is less than fabulous. furthermore, i miscalculated where i could properly re-use clips, and some of the transitions aren't very clean. this piece didn't come out like i had hoped, and i'm planning on re-doing it once the better computer is fixed. because i don't know how long that will take, i've uploaded this in the meantime. expect an update sometime in the next 70 or so years (my way of saying i have no idea when it can be fixed). ok, well about the piece... yes, i can do more than video game music, and i really like this song so i looked at some sheet music and it looked possible, but the sheet music was flawed, with the bass rhythm off and percussion next to illegible. the result: i did a lot more of this song by ear than i usually do. all of the percussion is by ear, the bass rhythm is by ear, and much of the gameboy parts are by ear (and since i'm not very good at pitch-picking, they could be wrong. if you know the correct notes please tell me so i can fix it in my update). the cars (strings) in this tune aren't very prominent in the real song, so i decreased the volume for most car parts, but it's not as quiet as the song had because i liked how it filled in a lot of the emptiness. if the string part was next to nothing in the song, though, i left it out of here. the cars aren't always on the exactly correct beat because if they were i couldn't decrease the volume for only the cars because volume control is for the whole beat. it makes the piece a little sloppy but i dealt with it. the flowers that seem to be in random (and sometimes off-the-scale) places are the result of a glitch that lets me make them shorter by placing them on the low a (i thank lologuru for teaching me this trick). my only instrument choice regret is that the plane sound is quiet. it would be perfect if it were louder, because it is long enough to simulate the echo effect that the actual song has during almost all of the vocals. thanks for watching, and i dare you not to bob your head while listening. software used: music: mario paint composer - http://www.unfungames.com/mariopaint/ notation: midinotate player - http://www.notation.com/midinotateplayer.htm video: camstudio 2.5 beta - http://camstudio.org/ editing: windows movie maker all free, legal, and unlimited.

author: axelrod777
keywords: haddaway axelrod777 in techno night at the roxbury song what is love flash music video pepsi max commercial
added: march 6, 2008

impressive. one of this video watcher a "live book" about armstrong. his message: ------------------------------------- hi david, sorry for taking so long to reply. i'm not on that video nor was i there. i'm a life-long louis armstrong nut so i know when he did everything. there are two books that i get my information about videos from, "all of me-the complete discography of louis armstrong" by jos willems & "louis armstrong on the screen" by dr. klaus stratemann. the louis clip you posted is from the first of two bbc-tv shows. each show was 45 minutes & they were taped on the same day, july 2, 1968. aside from louis the rest of the band is tyree glenn-trombone, joe muranyi-clarinet, marty napoleon-piano, buddy catlett-bass & danny barcelona-drums. louis died three years later, on july 6, 1971. he was only on the road full time for another two months after this clip. by mid september of 1968 he was seriously ill in the hospital & was out of commisiion for most of 1969. i hope that's enough information for you. best wishes, phil ------------------------------ phil, i am very been thankful by the information. thank you so much.

author: davidnob
keywords: louis armstrong
added: december 29, 2006

© beckmann group. to make a donation and help the world's wildlife please follow this link... http://www.bornfree.org.uk/shop/acatalog/donations.html the dvd, "christian the lion at world's end" can be purchased at... http://www.bornfree.org.uk/shop/acatalog/videos_and_dvds.html which will help the born free foundation save even more of the world's wildlife. they also have signed copies of virginia mckenna's book "christian the lion's journey to freedom" available at... http://www.bornfree.org.uk/shop/acatalog/books.html the dvd is also available at http://www.beckmanndirect.com/wildlife_bfwchristianthelionworldsenddvd.php there's also more info at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/christian_the_lion many thanks to all the tv shows and news programmes who've used my video in their reports and helped to raise awareness of animal welfare throughout the world. this is also true of news publications such as the sunday times (27-07-08) & timesonline... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4407100.ece and the daily telegraph (31.07.08)... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/07/30/ealion130.xml and also the sun (28.07.08)... http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/article1479860.ece christian left the kora reserve in 1973. he made his new territory along the tana river, but when the wakamba herdsmen kept bringing their livestock to his hunting ground, he moved on. george adamson said in his autobiography, "i used to count the days on which we hadn't seen christian, but when they reached 97, i gave up recording them in my diary." because a lion can live from 12 to 15 years in the wild, adamson believed that christian ended his days in the meru national reserve only a few miles up river. "lion man" gareth patterson, author, environmentalist, and the person who continued george adamson's lion rehabilitation work, revisited kora in 1998. this is what he found... http://www.fatheroflions.org/kora_revisited.html as for the two guys, the born free foundation tells me that anthony "ace" bourke (referred to as ace "berg" in a daily mail article) lives in australia as a lecturer and expert in the area of aboriginal art, and john rendall lives in the uk and is a trustee of the george adamson wildlife preservation trust. anyone wishing to donate to the george adamson wildlife preservation trust can do so by contacting one of the following.... george adamson wildlife preservation trust 16a park view road london n3 2jb uk tel: +44 (0)20 8343 4246 fax: +44 (0)20 8343 4048 info@georgeadamson.org the tony fitzjohn/george adamson african wildlife preservation trust georgianna pennington regnier 116 la patera drive camarillo ca 93010 usa +1 805 987 0997 honours received for this video at various times: #1 - top rated (all time) - global #1 - top rated (all time) - pets & animals - global #1 - most responded (today) - pets & animals - global #1 - most responded (this week) - pets & animals - global #1 - most responded (this month) - pets & animals - global #1 - top favorites (all time) - pets & animals - global #1 - most viewed (all time) - pets & animals - global

author: tadmanly
keywords: christian lion africa ace berg anthony bourke john rendall george adamson born free reunion whitney houston will always love you friends friendship remembered affection hug hugs hugging get in touch the view abc msnbc times timesonline
added: june 28, 2008

this is live at san quentin in 1969. this is the original radio version (except no bleep) that your daddy knows!

author: jegjr
keywords: johnny cash boy named sue original live san quentin prison
added: november 28, 2006

music video - selena - i could fall in love just an fyi i got a lot of comments on this videos i know i miss her too she rocked but i also got a lot of messages on this and to answer your questions no i did not know her lol just cuzi have her videos does not mean i knew her lol but yea enjoy the video.

author: klarizag
keywords: selena
added: february 21, 2006

tired of shlepping your guide books around paris? if you have an iphone, you might want look into frommer’s paris guide, which fits nicely on your favorite mobile phone from apple. this is basically the hard copy guide book, but in a digital and more convenient format.

while we’re on the subject of i-things, apple is rumored to be announcing new ipods next tuesday, september 9, so keep an eye out for that. by the way, ipod touches are basically iphones without the phone (but with internet), so most (if not all) iphone apps should be able to work on these.

frommer’s paris iphone app (you must have itunes installed on your mac or pc to view this)

tags: france, paris travel, travel guides, frommers, iphone apps

the parti socialist (ps) just wrapped up their l’université d’été, a summer camp-like convention for french politicians. this year it was in la rochelle (i’m not sure if the venue changes yearly). here’s the extremely long-winded francois hollande, the premier secrétaire of the socialist party with the mayor of la rochelle, maxime bono, in the background.

previous dialogues: the dalai lama and carla bruni, michael phelps and alain bernard, sarkozy and qaddafi, laurent voulzy and alain souchon, barack obama and nicolas sarkozy, johnny hallyday and sylvie vartan, tom hanks and jean reno, daniel balavoine and francois mitterrand, florent pagny, zidane and xavier darcos

tags: france, politicians, ps, francois hollande, l’université d’été

here’s a new, ultra-handy, free dashboard widget for mac users who speak and write french. it’s a french dictionary that is much easier to use than the tangible leaf through (with your actual hands!) version, as well as even an online dictionary. install and off you go. just hit f12 to access your dashboard and your dictionary will be waiting for you. download it here. if you use it often, please consider donating to the developer.

tags: france, french, widget, dictionary, dictionnaire, dashboard, mac

from the rawfeed:

“france’s national train service (sncf) is offering 1,000 usb train tickets in a trial. the tickets also contain a unique-id rfid chip that provides wireless “easy pass” access to trains. by plugging the card into a pc usb port, the users’ computers are automatically connected to the sncf web site, where they can make payments and get schedules. schedules can be downloaded to the card. the cards work like a debit card — passengers buy some amount — say, 100 euros — then the fare is deducted each time they ride. the cards also serve as photo id, with passengers’ pictures on the outside.” link

tags: france, sncf, train travel, usb train tickets, weneo

here’s some kooky celeb trivia in france from bittenandbound:

“brad pitt and angelina jolie are eligible to receive $2592.81 in parenting subsidies [for 6 kids] each month as residents of france.

jolie gave birth to twins knox and vivienne on july 12. the couple have three adopted children - maddox, six, pax, four and three-year-old zahara, and a biological daughter, shiloh, who was born in namibia two years ago.”

tags: france, chateau miraval, caf, brignoles, jolie pitt, child support