Archive for October, 2007

I subscribe to the local freecycle mailing list and have filters set up in Gmail to label all freecycle mail and have it get archived automatically so it doesn’t clutter up my inbox. I don’t check it every day, so I just want to see what’s available right now. Sometimes I also have a specific thing I’m looking for. To help look for these things, I use the following search string in Gmail.

label:freecycle subject:offer subject:-wanted subject:-want subject:-needed subject:-need subject:-taken

You can also add subject:bike and it will only return results that have the word bike in the subject line. This assumes that the label you are using for all of the freecycle messages is freecycle.

The most recent album by They Might Be Giants, The Else, closes with this really catchy song called The Mesopotamians. Now you can watch the video for The Mesopotamians! You might find that it bears a passing resemblance to The Monkees, which is undoubtedly the inspiration for the traveling band concept. Near the beginning of the Monkees video they are walking toward the camera with their arms behind each others’ backs. Near the end of the video for The Mesopotamians they are shown doing the same thing. There are a few other parallels, but I’ll let you find them yourself.

The vast majority of people ignore signs with more than two words on them. Ideally, signs shouldn’t have any words on them. There were no ducks near this sign. At first I thought that maybe the sign was placed improperly where no one would see it. Another possibility is that the ducks were there until they put up this sign and people stopped feeding them. People near the edges of other parts of the lake were unaware of the sign and fed the ducks there, where they can now be found in abundance. In any case, I thought it was common knowledge by now that you’re not supposed to throw bread at the ducks.

Want a free cell phone? Lessig has one to give away. Get a free phone from the Lessig Blog! I know I tried. You have to be the 100th person to complete the instructions. I guess he just doesn’t have any use for it. That’s pretty nice of him to give it away rather than eBay the thing. I guess I’m not as altruistic as he is.