If this were the future we’d have a lot more jet-packs.

Alaska Robotics Comic: The Box is Opened

…and speaking of anthropomorphic food, I’ve always loved the subcategory of cute cannibalistic cartoon food creatures.

This little ginger chew guy is the best. He’s made of ginger and he loves ginger chews! It’s like a cow eating a hamburger.

I said I would eat one of those pickles from the bucket o’ pickles at the video store. I probably wouldn’t have followed through but the pickle fairy left one under the pickle tree this week and I felt obligated to try it.

There are several varieties in the Van Holten brand and I received Sour Sis, “One Puckered Pickle.”

Sour Sis didn’t taste too bad. She was kind of like a pepperoncini and she probably would have been much better if she were thin sliced onto a veggie sub sandwich.

Even though it wasn’t a bad overall experience, I probably wouldn’t go so far as recommending these pickles to anyone but the curious or brave. I also have strong suspicions that the pickle market is largely dependent on people who lose bets or buy gag gifts for their friends who draw comics about pickles.

The Juneau Blockbuster now has giant pickles for sale. They come in hermetically sealed pouches filled with day-glow pickle juice. I haven’t yet been brave enough to try one but I think maybe tomorrow will be the day. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m not as scared of pickles as some people but these things are spooky. They feel like the kind of thing you need to open with tongs and a Homer Simpson style reactor suit.

Alaska Robotics Comic: In a Pickle

I didn’t think it would happen so quickly but Juneau has been added to Google Street View.

Here’s a quick tour of my Juneau haunts:

• Silverbow Bagel Shop - Where we’ve screened many JUMP Society Film Festivals
• Paradise Cafe - Joan makes the best grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches in town and is the anchor of our Vollyball team.
• Augustus Brown Swimming Pool - I’m more of a sinker than a swimmer but Dad likes to go there. If only they had a water slide.
• Costa’s Diner - The best breakfast in town.
• Basin Road - A great place to run and hike.
• The Infamous Blue Door - Beware all who enter

I couldn’t find any good pictures of anyone I know wandering around town but there’s a nice shot from the bridge. These pictures must be from sometime last fall.

Check out The Alaska Short Forum, it’s a new television show we’ve been working on and episode three just hit the web today!

You can catch episodes online or on KTOO/360North which broadcasts statewide.

We’re still in the experimental stages so any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, we’re looking for Alaskan short films to feature on the show so if you know any animators or filmmakers who might want to share their work, please help get the word out. Thanks!

Dear Boing Boing,

Yours is one of a few blogs I read with regularity. It’s filled with wonderful posts by a great group of writers, inventors, and tech geeks who have good hearts and great minds.

Today, when I went to the site to decompress and catch up on my wacky internet news, I ran into a disturbing post about special sections of Boing Boing sponsored by Honda’s “Power of Dreams” campaign.

As a reader, I find this level of advertising embarrassing. It’s worse than having a flood of subscription cards douse my joy each time I open a new issue of WIRED.

I can understand that you need advertising to help cover bandwidth costs and pay for your time but it can and should be done tastefully and with respect to your audience.

The IT ROOM was bad. You endorsed a blatant corporate ripoff of the IT CROWD. It was like Ben Cohen going to work as a huckster for Western Family Ice Cream.

I think this latest advertising venture is worse. You’re mixing your posts with specific advertisements, again from big business with deep pockets. Reading the comments on your site it appears that I’m not alone in worrying. Is money starting to control the show? Will this lead to intentional and unintentional poisoning of your content?

I think you’re all smart enough to avoid the obvious pitfall here and I hope you’ve had a good long discussion about your revenue streams and where to draw the line when an advertiser walks into the room with a sack of cash. Boing Boing is successful beyond imagining and has earned its success by steadily building respect and reputation.

For each of you, Boing Boing has brought great attention to your personal projects and has increased your value as speakers, consultants, artists, and journalists. I have some idea of what that must mean for your personal finances.

It seems to me that in the long run you would most benefit by maintaining good faith with your audience and keeping Boing Boing free from dubious advertisements.

All my best,
Pat Race

P.S. If we’re stuck with “The Power of Dreams” can we at least get some animated sparkles in the header?

Note: We had to kill the forum plugin temporarily because of a security hole. You can comment here.

I’ve been reading the Juneau Empire less and less since the new website redesign at the end of last month. It’s so ridiculously slow loading and painful to navigate that it must be part of some grand and imperceptible strategy. Perhaps they hope to boost their print circulation by intentionally creating the least accessible website ever?

I don’t know, it remains a mystery.

I thought I would try to figure out some way to fix the site but I didn’t get very far. I tried writing a greasemonkey script to just remove all the offending items but I got frustrated with the slow load times. Greasemonkey does a good job of cleaning things up once they load but, weighing in at over 1.2 Megabytes, the Empire site loads like honey through a straw.

What I’d rather build, and what I know how to build, is a scraper. Something to harvest the data and spit it out in a nice clean format complete with RSS feeds. The problem there is a question of legality since I’d basically be republishing copyrighted works.

I might be missing something obvious but it seems like the best route here has to be a client side solution like a custom Firefox extension or a combination of existing extensions.

I wonder how they navigate their own site? Maybe they use AdBlock and Greasemonkey filters? Do they put up with it because they’re being paid by the hour? What a pain in the ass.