Canvai Databank

An ex-Jack Sparrow spills on life at the Magic Kingdom.

As Jack, I had four hour-long sets a day. We worked in New Orleans Square. I would find a place I liked, and the hosts would set up my line. A host is someone who helps run the line of people that forms to meet you. They’re basically your security. When we started, Disney thought they wouldn’t give us a host. They thought we’d mingle. I laughed at that. I said, “I don’t mean to be the guy that knows it all, but from Renaissance Faires I can guarantee you this character will have the park’s longest line.” Disney had invented a Jack Sparrow autograph the three of us learned, and immediately the line for autographs was gigantic. The Jacks ultimately got two hosts.

From LAMag.com; http://www.lamag.com/featuredarticle.aspx?id=7016

GTunnel is a Windows application that works as a local HTTP or SOCKS proxy server. After setting proxy to GTunnel in web browser or other Internet applications, the traffic will go through GTunnel and our server farm before it reaches its original destination. GTunnel protects Internet users’ privacy and freedom of speech in these ways:

• User’s IP address is hidden and user’s Internet privacy protected. The destination servers see GTunnel server addresses instead.
• Traffic content is encrypted with industry-strength algorithms between the user’s PC and GTunnel servers so the local filtering/censorship systems will not see the content in clear-text format.
• Blockade of target servers circumvented.

In other words, great for bypassing filtering technologies like WebSense. Get it from http://www.gardennetworks.org/products

gtunnel.zip

Haikus are fun. I could never compose them, however, due to my syllable counting deficiency.

Arial, the clone
But not of helvetica.
Grotesque is its sire.

Via boingboing; http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/05/15/font-haiku.html

Ready, Set, Type… See how fast you type as you race against other typist in this typing racing game. Type passages from famous books, movies, quotes. I topped out at 120wpm, with an average of 93wpm, but speedy pros will wow and amaze you.

http://play.typeracer.com/

Cute, whimsical, irreverent, animated gifs are perfect for emoticons. The monkeys enjoy the largest collection, and therefore, the widest range of emotions. Green piggy and pink piggy are also very cute. Zipped files of all of the gifs are here.  pink-piggy.zip, green-piggy.zip, all-cute-monkeys.zip

The original source, and more animated gifs here, http://msn.o-pass.com/show_monkey.php?page=1

English version of the website is here. http://www.imemoticon.net/

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less. Dunning and Kruger were awarded a 2000 Ig Nobel prize for their work.

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

From wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
Also, a list of cognative biase: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Notoriety as Renaissance Artist Vs Notoriety as Ninja Turtle. via xkcd.com

Other XKCD favorites: #128, #46

The optical Illusion Dinosaur from Samsung’s Soul Cell Phone Promo (via neatorama) was so amazing that I thought I would google around the net to see if I can find a papercraft available so I can make one for myself. And the Internet, containing everything, turned one up here.

dragon.pdf

netstat (network statistics) is a command-line tool that displays network connections (both incoming and outgoing), routing tables, and a number of network interface statistics. It is available on Unix, Unix-like, and Windows NT-based operating systems.