Places I Visited on the Internet Today #14

Another day of catching up on the Internet has been recorded:

• I was back on the Buckman Historic Association website, doing more work on it. Anyone need to have a website built/updated/maintained? Get in touch with me, I may be able to help you out for cheap.
• browsershots.org is a website that will give you screenshots of your website as seen through different browsers. It's pretty handy.
• A guy has a really big problem with theaters that do "Tweet Seats" promotions in which they section off a part of the audience to allow them to be on their phone during the production. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with his stance (maybe I have no opinion on it?), but I do know that "Tweet Seats" is a really terrible name. (via @barryjohnson)
• After the Oregonian's article on TriMet driver fatigue, TriMet's board of directors are committed to making changes. The Mercury notes that another significant part of this story was TriMet's stonewalling on providing public records.
• Here's a site with statistics on TriMet overtime. The author claims "the following charts explain themselves", but I couldn't make heads or tails of them.
• Here's a Flight of the Concords sketch. That's a show I never watched. (via @sonyabysonya)
• I have a Pinterest account that I never use or look at, although I did compile some photos of cute animals.
• I'm pretty excited about the Oregon Historical Society's upcoming Oregon Black History Series.
• Speaking of the Oregon Historical Society, they're hiring.
• Bob Dylan's 50th Anniversary Collection: The Copyright Extension Collection, Volume 1 is some seriously cynical bullshit cooked up by music industry suits.  
• I always get really annoyed when someone on the television or radio or real life says,"we have the best health care system in the world" because we don't, and even 15 seconds of Googling will tell you that we don't. It's a jingoistic nonsensical thing to say. If you don't believe me, just read this article.
• I'm interested in seeing a mileage-based road-use tax instead of a flat gas tax, although I didn't consider until now how it "punishes" more fuel-efficient drivers. Still, makes sense to me.
• The Advocate's highly subjective list of gayest cities in America. Portland doesn't make the cut, although Tacoma, Salem and Eugene all do.
• If I had an alligator, I would also have named him Mr Teeth.
• The Bureau of Internal Business Services warns that the city is not spending enough to maintain the current stock of buildings that it owns. 
• Someone's indie game called Famaze. I really like video games a lot, but I don't play them very often.
• I went to tvguide.com because I was wondering what time the Golden Globes were on.
• Amtrak has lost the least amount of money in the past year since 1975, and are adding newer electric trains and expanding service. 
• 1000 Friends of Oregon's report on the high cost of sprawl.
• There's been some talk of putting a freeway out in the Hillsboro area, but it looks like the governor may have set those plans back a bit.
• An HOA for a condo in the Pearl are being dumb jerks about bike parking.
• You know what? If you're a neighborhood activist, maybe you can - regardless of how angry you are - not say that your neighborhood is being "raped". For Pete's sake, this person is talking about a loss of on-street parking spaces. Cry me a river.
• Illinois' public pension system is operating on a $17 million-dollar-a-day deficit.
• The Willamette Week has some background info on the yahoo that wandered around Sellwood with an assault rifle the other day. Here's some of the 911 calls that came in on account of these dummies.
• Milton-Freewater is working on preserving their downtown.
• Vintage Portland has a 1924 industrial map of the city. Swan Island is still an island and Ross Island hasn't been hollowed out yet.
• The Mercury's review of Zero Dark Thirty, a movie that I have no interest in watching, but think that it's really funny that Chris Pratt is in it.
• This article about superfrogs isn't as interesting as I was hoping.
• Bad jokes that can be found on Wikipedia. (via +Chris Higgins)
• Bike Portland has a short round-up of different factions who are organizing the opposition to the Columbia River Crossing.
• The Northwest History Network has microfunding grants available! I might need to get in on this.
• Mental Floss has 11 weird and dangerous things that you could order from the 1902 Sears catalog.
• The Dill Pickle Club's Kickstarter for their next Oregon History Comic - go give them some loot!
• GIFs of the week. (via @_lucky)
• To watch later: the 1962 report "Pollution in Paradise".
• More on the planning of the Zidell Yards from Portland Architecture.
• "The Formulaic Nature of Contemporary Album Cover Art"
• Lance Armstrong will admit to Oprah Winfrey that he used performance enhancing drugs. Not because he is ashamed and regretful, but because he is a jerk and admitting this will allow him to pursue his personal goals.
• Quora question pages I looked at:
• What is it like to be exposed to new technology after a 20+ year prison sentence?
• What is the most bizarre job interview you have been party to?
• What is it like to talk with a serial killer?
• Why don't web browsers render the same content identically?
• From the Retronaut:
• The Mad Potter of Biloxi
• Polluted America, 1971 - 1977
• Autogyros
• Wikipedia pages I went to:
• List of inventors killed by their own inventions (via @mightythylacine)
• CSS Hunley
• Karel Soucek
• AVE Mizar (a flying Ford Pinto!)
• Boardman, Oregon
• George E Ohr (the Mad Potter of Biloxi)

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #13

I was sick for a good portion of this week, and as a result I didn't spend too much time looking at the Internet (I was too dizzy for reading). Today I caught up on it:

• My pal Drew Anderson is looking for work, and has an online portfolio that you can check out. Drop him a line if you know of anything! Through Drew I learned about this online resource for designers, but I haven't taken the time to really check it out much.
• A photo of a piece of work by Diana Al-Hadid. I like it, it reminds me of Chandra Bocci's installation work, which is the best. (via @RGBurrell)
• The AV Club's list of worst films of 2012. I went to a lot of the original movie reviews linked on the list, and also read their review of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 because I tried watching it for a laugh while I was sick the other day, but stopped after a half-hour because it was too terrible and boring. I finished up by reading the reviews for Parental Guidance and Jack Reacher because I like reading reviews of bad movies. Did you know that Tom Cruise's real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV? Ha ha!
• Rob Reiner on IMDB.
• Ubuntu will be available as an OS on smartphones in the near future, apparently.
• The vaporware of 2012.
• A silver lining of the Great Recession is that it may have struck a fatal blow against the exurbs.
• A short article about a no longer extant church in Oak Grove. (via @LostOregon)
• Here's a NYT article about the development of facilities to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. The bigger shocker for me in that article is that the average passenger vehicle emits five tons of carbon dioxide annually. Holy shit. (via @SherrardEwing)
• A selection of album covers from the Kitten Covers - you should probably just go straight to the original source, since its great. Of the selected covers, though, my favorites are Lou Reed's Transformer and The Cure's Disintegration.
• Avis bought Zipcar, and someone analyzes the deal.
• Katie Lane's Work Made for Hire Blog, which is a great resource for freelancers.
• Here's a quick seven question survey about Multnomah County Library's hours and services that you should take. 
• Ever wondered where the Soviet Union would have thrown 500 or 2000 nuclear missiles at if the Cold War really went South? Well, here's your answer!
• A Steve Duin piece on the difficulty of finding housing for homeless veterans.
• A use for Kickstarter that I hadn't seen before: getting funding to place a bench in a public park.
• I finally got around to seeing New Year's Eve with Jamie Kennedy.
• I actually read the NYT piece about Apollo Robbins, professional pickpocket, in this blog post yesterday, but I'm including it in today's list of links because I found it so fascinating. Typically I'd just link straight to the NYT piece, but the blog post contains some links to videos of him in action. I watched some of his moves multiple times, and can't detect the moments that he's doing his tricks.
• The Dill Pickle Club is going to be putting out a comic about Governor Tom McCall. More info here.
• Here's an article about the political machinations in Clark County as it relates to C-Tran and the CRC. 
• I'd let myself briefly forget about the depressing news that Republicans are blocking the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
• Go watch some giraffes smash each other with their necks. It's crazy.
• I thought this article on Bike Portland was going to be about how cops were considering starting to patrol the Springwater Corridor, but it's actually about them thinking of doing a traffic crackdown on bicyclists near Oaks Park.
• The Oregon State Archives has a couple of photos (Facebook link) of the Wolf Creek Highway (now the Sunset) being built during the 30s. They've been posting a lot of photos from this project lately. They also posted a very 1987 photo of Barbara Roberts and Norma Paulus.
• The former Weiderhorn mansion in Raleigh Hills can be yours for the low price of just $6.9 million.
• From the Retronaut, General Electric's 1967 human exoskeleton. Had no idea that this concept existed as far back as this. Also on the Retronaut, wacky "headless" portraits made by jokers in the 1800s (take a look at the very first photo of the series - maybe someone should have cracked a bit of a smile in that one, because as it is it looks pretty grim).
• A picture of Governor Kitzhaber playing the 1980s fighter jet game After Burner at Ground Kontrol.
• Here's someone's open letter of complaint to Car2Go. I haven't used the service, but outside my window today I watched someone spend six and a half minutes (I timed it) trying to get their card to let them in the car before they gave up and walked away. 
• The pictures of this baby tapir playing in the snow and messing around with a capybara are great!
• "Nine strange new laws for 2013"
• A story of a rape conviction in California being reversed because the victim wasn't pregnant.
• The Willamette Week reports that baby elephant Lily is now owned by the sketchy elephant trainers of Have Trunk Will Travel, which is kind of non-news since the paper had made such a huge issue of this a month ago already. My prediction is that with Mayor Adams out of office, the Willamette is going to start in on the Oregon Zoo as their favorite target for their practice of creating non-scandals.
• An speaking of old media organizations creating non-scandals, I bet that the Oregonian editorial board is going to go on bitching about Mayor Adams all throughout Mayor Hales tenure. They're going to be the conservative version of that old hippy dude you know who still can't stop telling you about all of Bush's war crimes. Anyway, exhibit A for this might be this editorial about Hales' options regarding the Department of Transportation.
• Politifact Oregon's "Truth-o-meter" on Mayor Adams? It looks like it's a wash.
• From Vintage Portland, here's a pretty interesting aerial photograph of Portland from 1965.
• I went to historicbuckman.org today to check a couple of things out (I designed and built this site pro bono for the Buckman Historic Association).
• "Six questions with a Civil War material culture scholar" - you're either really excited about that link, or it sounds like the absolute most boring thing in the world. There is no middle ground there.
• The wiki for the D&D games that I run.
• From the police blotter:
• 01/02/13: a carjacking.
• 01/02/13: firefighters trying to help someone suffering an overdose are interfered with by some weirdo. There's probably a sad/creepy compelling story going on here.
• 01/03/13: a medically endangered man and his puppy were missing! But they were found and they were okay. (Sorry, the link does not contain photos of the puppy.) 
• 01/03/13: people at a drug house got arrested.
• 01/03/13: someone vandalized a bank as an act of protest. You know what: if you're going to damage physical property as a political statement, and you're planning on alerting the media, maybe you should make your act a little more hazardous and compelling than throwing a rock through a window.
• 01/03/13: the cops arrested a serial armed robbery suspect. They probably recognized him because of his distinctive hairstyle.
• 01/03/13: the cops arrested this really creepy looking guy for murdering a woman on Christmas day.
• 01/04/13: The cold case team solved a murder that happened in 2002, but the murderer has already died.
• 01/05/13: An armed bank robbery happened in Montavilla.
• 01/05/13: A body was found in Johnson Creek.
• 01/05/13: The police are hoping that you can find this guy that disappeared after the night of the 22nd.
• 01/06/13: a barfight ends with someone firing a gun. No one was hurt, and they caught the person with the gun.
• 01/06/13: and another fight that ends with a gunshot. Again, no one was hurt, but they didn't find the person with the gun. Remember when Mayor Adams (RIP, jk) enacted some sensible gun laws and all the right-wingers came out of the woodwork to bitch about how he was taking everyone's rights? Man, one thing that I can guarantee is that Mayor Hales is never going to have half the troll problems that Sam did.
• Wikipedia pages:
• Diana Al-Hadid (this page could use some additional editors, because its current content is too promotional.)
• McGufffin
• CD+G
• Pedagogy