I created a philanthropic URL shortener to generate passive income for important organizations. It accepts Amazon.com URLs and appends the affiliate ID of a non-profit organization before shortening them. Anyone who follows the shortened link and buys something makes Amazon give ~ 4% of the order total to a non-profit org. The URL parser under the hood is super smart and fully ajaxed-out (while failing gracefully with javascript disabled). The goal of the site was to make it as simple and straightforward as possible to encourage people to use the service. It also generates Open Search browser plugins so Firefox and IE7+ users can replace their default Amazon search engine with a feel-good version.

I’ve been helping a local art gallery increase their support base by building out a website. It sports a custom Drupal theme and is stupidly easy to update. They shouldn’t have a hard time keeping their content fresh. The artist boxes on the homepage load in a random order on each page refresh to prevent sibling rivalry. Unfortunately, it makes caching impossible. :/

I spent all of half an hour setting up Gallery 2 at memedump.com. It helps me keep track of all the funny and profane things on the Internet. The website looks like crap and is loaded with crap. Thus, it makes total sense that it’s way more popular than my other projects and already reports 50,000+ page views. I later created memeaday.com for those people who want just one meme a day.

There are a couple other things in the bucket including a video mash-up website but online video editing is, well, hellza problematic. So that one’s going to take a while.

Lastly, my housemates and I had a blast acting out scene 330 of Star Wars: New Hope. Star Wars Uncut is a great project and you should sign up to film a scene right now. Let me know how it goes. Our shoot was a lot of fun.

It has no doors and looks completely ridiculous. It’s classed as a low-speed vehicle and can not exceed 25mph. It can legally be driven on roads 35mph and under (nearly every street in San Francisco). It has a license plate and is registered and insured like any other vehicle. It’s 100% electric and I plug it into a standard 110 volt outlet to charge it at night. It gets 25 miles to the charge and costs $10/month in electricity.

It is tons of fun. The previous owner installed a CD player and stereo system. I found a bike rack on the street and installed it. We drive around blaring chiptune. Travis and I drive to the bike kitchen with our bikes on the back. We go to costco without having to get a city carshare car. We can go to rainbow grocery and buy all the vegan food we want without having to haul stuff back on the bus.

Wherever we go we park on the sidewalk and people assume the vehicle is owned by the city or a local university. No tickets, yet. I went to rsa at the Moscone Center. It was downtown San Francisco in the middle of the day and parking was completely impossible (as expected). I drove into the Terba Buena Gardens and parked in an outdoor walkway. No one said anything and I returned three hours later.

I am lucky to live in a small city (San Francisco is only 7×7 miles) where such an obscure vehicle is practical. I encourage everyone in a similar situation to explore alternative means of transportation. Electric vehicles have superb acceleration and drive like a go-cart. Sooooo much fun.

Toward a Deontological Obfuscation of God

God is a cheeseburger.  Or so I convinced myself when I was 16.  It was my junior year of high school and I decided my formal education was a total waste of time.  Rather than study for my pre-calc final exam (after only attending the class on occasion) I thought I would try an experiment: I’d pray for a passing grade.  But I wouldn’t pray to God; I would pray to a cheeseburger.

I was raised in a traditional Roman Italian Catholic family.  I attended church every week and I had the Bible beaten into my brain.  My mother wasn’t a very good bible-humper, though.  She raised me to believe that all God cared about was my actions toward others.  She led me to believe if I was a caring, decent human who put others before myself, God would approve and take care of me.  She raised me to be a good person.

So I defamed God.  I envisioned him/her to be a ridiculously juicy cheeseburger and I facetiously worshipped said entree for the week leading up to the exam.  I was under the impression that if God took offense to being burgerfied while I made a sincere effort to follow the Golden Rule, God was an arrogant douche bag with no sense of humor and not something I was willing to look up to.  I mean it was funny: God being a cheeseburger and all.  Come on.  (Yes, I trolled God).  If God wasn’t full of herself I’d get a decent grade on the exam and pass out high-fives all around.

The episode taught me three things:

1.  My teacher was an idiot.  The exam was a multiple-choice Scantron test.  I solved every answer by the process of elimination and scored an 82%.  It was the most poorly written test I had ever come across with each set of answers able to be reduced to one of two possible solutions.  Paired with one third the knowledge of pre-calc i should have had, I had ~75% chance of answering each question correctly.  I have no idea what the guy was thinking.

2.  If God exists, she really only cares about the motives of my immediate actions.  If this were not the case she would have set me on fire because I blasphemed her mad hardcore-like.  Hey, I meant no harm, though.  My intended goal was good-natured enlightenment.

3.  God is a cheeseburger.  If you fear God rather than befriend her, you are an idiot because how can you seriously be afraid of a cheeseburger?  Prayer should not be painful or scary.  If you worship God because you fear Hell, you are willingly imposing a sort of metaphysical totalitarianism upon your consciousness.  God means nothing unless you create meaning for her.  Why not choose something that will make you happy inside?  You should really reevaluate why you take the Bible so literally.

God is a cheeseburger.  Or a glowing white ball, or a jar of mayonnaise, or an old man with a beard, or a sliced pickle, or two strips of bacon, or a thick slice of cheddar cheese, or a fresh sesame bun, or… mmmmmmm… God…

Since my last update, I have taken to a new place of employment. I spend my days as Webmaster of the Electronic Frontier Foundation where I help lawyers and activists cross swords with the scourge of the interwebs. It’s a great place to work. EFF has been around for eighteen years and if you’re not a member you should consider becoming one — we’re a membership supported organization.

I’ve also begun biking a lot. I commute via bicycle around seven miles (roundtrip) to and from work everyday through city traffic. It’s a lot of fun. And really dangerous at times. Which makes it fun. I ride my dad’s 1975 motobecane super mirage which is becoming exceptionally rickety and will soon be replaced by a beautiful 1982 colnago once I finish building it.

I was debating whether I should port my old blog entries into this new blog and I decided not to. It’s nice to start anew and most of my old entries were painful to read. But that’s how it is with all old blog material. I think I’ll leave the old geoblog online for archival purposes and redirect the rss feed to this one. Yes, that will do.

You’ve probably noticed the ridiculousness of this blog. I’ve always been fascinated by horizontal layouts but I’ve never seen a fluid horizontal layout. With the help of jQuery and a great plugin I think I’ve built a wordpress theme that will widen horizontally when necessary. It’s quite buggy at this point and makes IE6 cry. I’ll fix that over the next few days. When I get to it.

In three weeks Travis, my housemate, and I will be traveling from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian railway. More on that later. I am going to eat dinner now.