Talking Time Travel

I'd like to share with you a special talent
It ain't so hard to do, it's called time travellin'

Well, I woke up this morning feeling quite unpleasant,
Found I couldn't enjoy my present.
So I sat in my bed and tried to superimpose
Things I would have rather saw in front of my head.

I was time travelling,
Teleporting
Darn tootin'

Well, I travelled back to a different time
When people besides rappers enjoyed the rhyme.
One thing I can't comprehend
Is why poets nowadays don't call rhymes their friends.
Maybe I could be their friends, too.
Well, I must have been doin' something right
Hung out with the types of people
Who wrote, edited and updated Strunk & White

I was a travellin' troubador,
Village storyteller
I'd like to think so.

Well, it got a litte bit cold in my old log cabin,
So I devised a new mode of time travelling:
Instead of visual superimposition
I tried my hand at writing fiction
About things I ain't did yet,
But intended to do
And thereby make 'em happen.

Well, all of a sudden, my seat felt trembly
Found myself on a schoolbus to a school assembly
Where my supergroup was performing.
Well, you can be in my supergroup on one condition:
That you're my best friend, musician,
And don't mind unpaid conditions.
We was invited to the high school by the Peace Club
To fight the Fight Club
On their 100-watt light blub radio station.
Well, at that station, we met a kid, about 13,
Painted our schoolbus green
And called it the Joke-A-Minute Brain Machine.

He was bipolar,
Avant-garde,
High roller, savant tard
Well, on board that bus--I don't know why--
I got a hankerin' to learn to cry.
Now, learning to cry was quite a chore,
Just like doing anything you ain't never done before.

I was log flumin'
Jet streamin',
Quite relievin'

Well, I could have gone for the rest of the evening,
Or perhaps till the world ended,
When a moan from my girlfriend did bring me home
Next to her pillow.
Lookin' so gorgeous
(Don't like me to say so--
Thinks it's shallow).

AltDaily Covers ArchiveFacebook

The good people over at AltDaily.com decided to do a story on my Firefox add-on ArchiveFacebook.  Go check it out Take that Facebook!

ArchiveFacebook 1.0 is Live

Just launched my Firefox extension for archiving your facebook account. Here's the download page. Here's the support page.  Thanks to my advisers Dr. Michael Nelson and Dr. Frank McCown for the guidance and support (and the great idea).

You may not believe this, but Facebook will not always be around. Your Facebook account will not always be accessible. It's up to you to archive your data before it lands in the big bit-bucket in the sky.

Here's an Ignite presentation I put together for it.

Archiving Facebook Ignite

View more presentations from carlton.northern.

Gmail Down: System Failure or Genius Marketing Ploy?

The Internet has been buzzing with the news that one of the largest web services on the web, Gmail, is down. Just a few hours ago TechCrunch wrote an article about how this news was crippling Twitter. They estimated that during that time there were 10k twitter posts being generated every minute containing the word "gmail". Can you imagine how much publicity this is generating for the email powerhouse? This is Twitter alone. Doing a search for "gmail" on Google News and limiting the results to the last 24 hours we get back 16k results. It's insane how newsworthy this is.

There are some really bright minds at Google. They have some of the best engineers in the world, but Google realizes that their engineers can't do it alone. Google has been hiring top notch management and business professionals all the while. I wouldn't put it past some young MBA, trying to make a mark for himself, pitching the idea of a fake outage for sheer publicity. Sure, its bad publicity, but as we all know - there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Google has a history of timing their press releases and public events at crucial moments. Take for instance the launch of Chrome OS right before Microsoft launches Office in the Cloud, effectively stealing their thunder. They also conveniently started sharing information about Google Squared before it was even launched in an attempt to steal the limelight from Wolfram Alpha.

Google may seem like a clumsy, brain filled company, but they know what they're doing. Eight years of recruiting the best talent from Stanford and other hotbeds of brilliance has kept them sharp and creative, and I think their marketing team just maybe had a moment of glory, at the expense of their engineers.

Phil Hartman Was the Best

Translation Party, Will You Please Translate "My Humps"?

Translation Party is a new mashup that finds the point at which no changes are made between a traslation with English and Chinese in Google Translate. This point is called the "equillibrium". Needless to say, the equillibrium is almost always hillarious.

I thought it would be fun to try the Black Eyed Peas song "My Humps". I couldnt have been more right. This:

What you gon 'do with all that junk? All that junk inside your trunk? I'ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, Get you love drunk off my hump. My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump , my hump, My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps. Check it out

Turned into this:

All waste in the square? All waste in the trunk? Kawano Megumi Nobu, please use the wine. My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps. Check it

I have no idea where "Kawano Megumi Nobu" came from. Here's the link to the complete translation.

Night Man

Night man,
Sneaky and mean
Spider inside my dreams
I think I love you
You make me wanna cry, you make me wanna die
I love you, I love you , I love you , I love you, I love you.
Night Man
Every night you come into my room and pin me down with your strong arms
You pin me down down and I try to fight you
you come inside me and fill me up…

Just two men sharing the night
It might seem wrong but it’s just right
It’s just two men sharing each other
It’s just two men like loving brothers
One on top, and one on bottom
One inside, and one is out
One is screaming he’s so happy
The other’s screaming a passionate shout
It’s the Night Man
The feeling so wrong it’s right man
the feeling so wrong…
I can’t fight you man when you come inside me and pin me down your strong hands and I’ll become the Night….the passionate, passionate Night Man.

They took you Night Man
and you don’t belong to them
They left me in a world of darkness
without your sexy hands
and I miss you Night Man
so bad.