The Phantom City

I’m pretty sure this is how alternate timelines diverge. Just before Super Bowl XLI, featuring the Colts vs. the Bears, you can get these two highlight videos by NFL Films:

Warner Brothers Chicago Bears Super Bowl XLI Champions DVD
Celebrate Chicago, you are the city of champions once again! Remembering the Monsters of the Midway, the Chicago Bears and their intimidating defense helped vault the club to the Super Bowl XLI title! Relive the Bears’ rise to the top of the league with this Warner Brothers Champions DVD. NFL Films takes you from the opening whistle against the Packers to the final gun in Miami.

Warner Brothers Indianapolis Colts Super Bowl XLI Champions DVD
The demons are gone, buried deep in the Miami sand. Peyton Manning finally won the “Big One,” leading the Indianapolis Colts to their first Super Bowl championship in 36 years. Join NFL Films on a video ride from the first snap against the New York Giants to the final play in Miami at Super Bowl XLI. The Warner Brothers DVD relives the Colts’ rise to the top of the NFL!

Link courtesy of Deadspin.

Nothing quite brings that lesson home than watching your production web server go down just before you’re about to leave for the day, all because a message from you to the hosting reseller inquiring about hard drive capacity was translated by the hosting provider as “Take the hard drives out of that server.”

We like to watch the show Beauty and the Geek on The CW. It’s an interesting social experiment, even though it requires a lot of stereotyping to function. However, it normally treats it with a little self-consciousness. However, catching up on recent episodes, we heard this statement: “Guys, we’re going to ask you questions about topics women like to talk about: Fashion, beauty, and pop culture.” The women were asked questions about aeronautics.

Wow. Just…wow.

Actually, I’ve never really understood the pop culture basis of many of the “Geek” questions. While it’s possible a geek might lock themselves away from the rest of the world, most smart people I know tend to be information sponges. I’m thinking there’s a decent likelihood that they’re going to know pop culture references that the audience is also expected to know. On the other hand, field-specific information that hasn’t been studied since high school seems a little more likely to stump “Beauties” who don’t normally get exposed to any of it. As a result, the challenges are usually more interesting than the quiz sessions at the end.

Update: Just noticed that the quiz section is much shorter this year. Maybe the producers thought it was boring as well.

So it organized itself into a large list of free online education resources.

Although, it does claim to have been created by Jimmy Ruska.

Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

I was checking the comments flagged as spam by Akismet, and I found one authored by Shakira! Now, I’m not sure why she wanted me to know more about mortgages and insurance — by including 25 links — but I am so flattered she found my blog interesting.

I should point out that Akismet is amazing. It’s picked up more than 4,000 spam comments since install, and I haven’t found a false positive yet.

In an attention economy, reputation can take you a long way. In this case, it takes Atoosa Rubinstein, former editor of Seventeen, to an investors meeting to talk about videos of her cat. Perhaps someday I’ll be famous enough to propose cat videos as a business project. Or maybe I’ll keep it simple and just get a cat.

Link courtesy of Gawker.

Update: Doesn’t Alpha Kitty Atoosa sound like a good name for an anime?

You know, I missed out on this particular cultural phenomenon, and now I am so sorry that I did. All My Children. Transsexual. Zarf. “I have a penis.” Words fail.

Courtesy of Best Week Ever.

GetaFirstLife.com:

A 3D analog world where server lag does not exist.

I like this First Life.

Link courtesy of the Doc Searls Weblog.

Well, I’ve just upgraded this blog to the “Ella” WordPress 2.1 release, named after Ella Fitzgerald. The process went fairly smoothly, although the upgrade instructions leave out the usual one-step database upgrade, so I was a little surprised to see my installation immediately break. However, when I logged into my admin, the first thing I was presented with was an opportunity to run the database upgrade.

I don’t see a huge difference on the admin side, even with a modified interface, but I do appreciate the autosave feature. Hopefully we won’t run into any bugs. If you do, let me know at admin (at) thephantomcity.com.

A sad story. I guess not everyone understands the whole Quaker college thing.

Link courtesy of Automatic Writing.