Gabe's Shared Feed

The biggest TV success in history, "American Idol," features three brands -- Coca-Cola, Ford and AT&T (formerly Cingular) -- have shelled out a reported $26 million to sponsor the show . But for all the money spent and on-air mentions, do the sponsorships really register with viewers?

jonasson@martinlindstrom.com(Martin Lindstrom)

For the first time, astronomers have taken a visual image of a multiple-planet solar system beyond our own.

Using the Gemini North telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, researchers observed in infrared light three planets orbiting around a star about 130 light-years away from Earth, called HR 8799. The discovery, published today in Science Express, is a step forward in the hunt for planets, and life, beyond Earth.

The alien system is supersized compared to our own: All three planets are gas giants, weighing roughly 10, 10 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter, circling a parent star 1.5 times the mass of our sun, and 5 times as bright. The giant bodies (two of which are pictured above) are orbiting at roughly 25, 40, and 70 times the distance between Earth and our sun. If there are Earth-sized planets present, they are too small to see with current technology.

"This is the beginning of a capability that is really going to move the search forward," Peter Michaud of Gemini Observatory told Wired.com. "Now we can refine the technologies and continue the exploration process until we perhaps someday find something more similar to the Earth. Those goals are pretty exciting in terms of gaining a perspective on our place in the universe."

Finding distant solar systems isn't new — the current exoplanet count is above 300 — but almost none of those planets were directly imaged. Instead, most were discovered using a technique called spectroscopy, which measures the slight wobble of a host star as it is tugged by orbiting planets.

"With spectroscopy, you see the effects of the planet, but you don’t actually see the planet," Michaud said.

The research team, led by Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, took advantage of a technology called adaptive optics, which uses a flexible mirror on the telescope to compensate for the distortion of light caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere.

Imaging the planets was made slightly easier by the fact that the bodies are not just reflecting light from their star, but are also glowing themselves. Scientists estimate they formed about sixty million years ago, and haven't yet cooled completely from the process of contracting into planets.

"These are really young planets, in a young system, and are still warm," Michaud said. "That's why we see them in the infrared — that made it favorable."

The astronomers confirmed that the planets are orbiting the star, and don't just happen to lie in the background, by observing their relative motions.

See Also:

• Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed

Image: Gemini North Observatory: Two of the planets orbiting around the star, which has been blocked in this image due to its brightness in order to increase visibility of the planets. 

Video: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF

From Craft magazine: Fetus cookie cutter

A few days ago, the Ubuntu Tutorials blog pointed out the excellent Shiki-Colors theme. It’s my new favorite!

On the theme’s GNOME Look page, you can download the GTK theme, or a script which can also install icons, a GDM login screen theme, and wallpapers. I just wanted the GTK theme so I selected this download. To install, drop the downloaded file into the System->Preferences->Appearance Theme tab. You’ll then have the option to select one of the four Shiki variants.

If you’re still using Ubuntu 8.04, don’t forget to install the required version of the Murrine theme engine. Here’s the i368 package from theme’s author.

In the screenshot above, I’m also using the Liberation fonts set, which I think looks a bit better than the default fonts. Install Liberation fonts from the package ttf-liberation (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

Use the Fonts tab in System->Preferences->Appearance to apply the new fonts. I switched from the default font Sans to Liberation Sans.

If you’re looking for a theme for your Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, don’t forget to check out the new community themes package. It includes a three other excellent themes: Dust, Kin, and New Wave.

Install the community themes from the package community-themes (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install community-themes

If you’ve installed a new theme, applications running as root like Synaptic may display unthemed. Here’s how to fix that problem.

What are your favorite themes for Ubuntu?

(author unknown)

Filed under: Imports, Video

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time has received a lot of attention for its bizarre cross-platform release: the same game will come out on the same day on both the DS and the Wii, and it will look the same. So, yes, by virtue of looking good for a DS game, it will be a not-that-great-looking Wii game. But the point is that it can be played anywhere.

And that's what this trailer gets across: any combination of DS players and Wii players, in any location with Internet access, can play Echoes of Time together. If you feel like blowing a bunch of money, you can play it on both systems.

Connect and play anytime, anywhere with FFCC Echoes of Time originally appeared on Nintendo Wii Fanboy on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ads by GoogleJC Fletcher

Shared by HeyGabe
Shared becuase White Schipperkies are an abomination. What do they streak shit on _themselves_?

[Pup voice] You really let that bathtub GO this week.

When you're done with the bathroom, I'd like dinner. [Gets off mop, trots over to T.V.]

Beauregard the Schipperke likes to help out where he can, right Christopher G.?

Shared becuase White Schipperkies are an abomination. What do they streak shit on _themselves_?

John Scalzi's a hell of a writer and a hell of a smartass, and Zoe's Tale, his debut young adult novel, features one of the most likable, most smart-assy protagonists I've ever had the pleasure of sharing 330 pages with.

Zoe's Tale is set in the Old Man's War universe -- the universe established in his debut novel -- in which the human race has begun to colonize the stars, creating a secretive military bureaucracy that oversees it all. The shock troops of the colonization effort are genetically modified supermen who started out as senior citizens on the overcrowded Earth before opting to get a new finely tuned body and a new lease on life battling the alien races that compete with human beings for access to the plum planets that can sustain life.

The Lost Colony, the third Old Man's War book, tells the story of the Roanoke colony, the first colony made up of colonists from other worlds (instead of Earth) that single-handedly stands off a fleet of 400 alien races that are determined to wipe the colony out.

In Zoe's Tale, we have the same story, told from the point of view of a different character, Zoe Boutin Perry, the adopted teenage daughter of the colony leaders (themselves ex-military supersoldiers from the previous volumes). Zoe is incredibly likable, believable, and witty -- a smartass's smartass. She also has a unique position in interstellar politics: her birth father, Charles Boutin, created a technology that gives consciousness to a powerful alien race called the Obin. The Obin had been uplifted into intelligence by a race of cruel and godlike aliens who endowed them with intelligence but not consciousness. The Obin revere Zoe as a goddess and her safety and disposition are the matter of a complex treaty between humanity and the Obin.

Zoe is a colonist on the sleepy backwater world of Huckleberry when her parents are tapped to lead the experimental Roanoke colony, a move she wholeheartedly supports. On the colony ship, she makes a group of fast friends and emerges as a leader herself, something that is doubly important once the ship arrives and it transpires that Roanoke isn't what they were promised. Instead, the new colony is a pawn in a galaxy-spanning military game that endangers all the colonists and exposes them to hardship.

As the story plays out, Zoe blossoms beyond her outer shell of witty barbs and finds hidden reservoirs of strength and maturity. On her journey, she is forced to confront the inequity of her relationship to the Obin, and to question the nature of intelligence and consciousness.

This is a novel for young people that has it all: action and adventure, science and philosophy, love and angst. Scalzi's own likable personality (and that of his delightful daughter, Athena) shines through the narration, making these people into just the sort of folks you'd like to be stranded on a hostile planet with.

Zoe's Tale on Amazon

John Scalzi's a hell of a writer and a hell of a smartass, and Zoe's Tale, his debut young adult novel, features one of the most likable, most smart-assy protagonists I've ever had the pleasure of sharing 330 pages with.

Zoe's Tale is set in the Old Man's War universe -- the universe established in his debut novel -- in which the human race has begun to colonize the stars, creating a secretive military bureaucracy that oversees it all. The shock troops of the colonization effort are genetically modified supermen who started out as senior citizens on the overcrowded Earth before opting to get a new finely tuned body and a new lease on life battling the alien races that compete with human beings for access to the plum planets that can sustain life.

The Lost Colony, the third Old Man's War book, tells the story of the Roanoke colony, the first colony made up of colonists from other worlds (instead of Earth) that single-handedly stands off a fleet of 400 alien races that are determined to wipe the colony out.

In Zoe's Tale, we have the same story, told from the point of view of a different character, Zoe Boutin Perry, the adopted teenage daughter of the colony leaders (themselves ex-military supersoldiers from the previous volumes). Zoe is incredibly likable, believable, and witty -- a smartass's smartass. She also has a unique position in interstellar politics: her birth father, Charles Boutin, created a technology that gives consciousness to a powerful alien race called the Obin. The Obin had been uplifted into intelligence by a race of cruel and godlike aliens who endowed them with intelligence but not consciousness. The Obin revere Zoe as a goddess and her safety and disposition are the matter of a complex treaty between humanity and the Obin.

Zoe is a colonist on the sleepy backwater world of Huckleberry when her parents are tapped to lead the experimental Roanoke colony, a move she wholeheartedly supports. On the colony ship, she makes a group of fast friends and emerges as a leader herself, something that is doubly important once the ship arrives and it transpires that Roanoke isn't what they were promised. Instead, the new colony is a pawn in a galaxy-spanning military game that endangers all the colonists and exposes them to hardship.

As the story plays out, Zoe blossoms beyond her outer shell of witty barbs and finds hidden reservoirs of strength and maturity. On her journey, she is forced to confront the inequity of her relationship to the Obin, and to question the nature of intelligence and consciousness.

This is a novel for young people that has it all: action and adventure, science and philosophy, love and angst. Scalzi's own likable personality (and that of his delightful daughter, Athena) shines through the narration, making these people into just the sort of folks you'd like to be stranded on a hostile planet with.

Zoe's Tale on Amazon

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Four years after delivering the speech called "The Audacity of Hope" that would launch him toward the White House, Barack Obama has become a case study in audacious marketing, an object lesson on why you should forget inherited notions of whom your audience can be.

mcreamer@adage.com(Matthew Creamer)

I'm not doing NaNoWiMo, but I know a lot of people who read my blog are, so I thought I'd collect some of the writing advice I've found over the years and put it all into one easily-bookmarked post.

Before I get to the older stuff, a couple new things I've found:

• io9 (which I feared would be lame like Gawker, but is awesome like Lifehacker) collected some secrets to creating great characters, according to six science fiction authors.
• I wrote about the weird feeling of emptiness that I always experience after I finish a project. Charlie Stross expressed something similar in a post titled On finishing.

Got it? Yay! Let's move on to some older stuff:

• five simple ways to Just Keep Writing
• Elizabeth Bear, Cherie Priest, and John Scalzi are three authors who are as generous with their advice as they are awesome and successful.
• One more post with lots of links to and wisdom from Elizabeth Bear.
• Five writing lessons I wish I'd learned the easy way.
• Even Neil Gaiman struggles from time to time. This is very comforting to me. (Interesting note. If you read that linked post, you'll see a mention of my friend who quit his safety net job to be an actor. He's on Heroes this season. Go David!)
• Neil Gaiman, it turns out, is very reassuring to me.
• Sometimes, you just get writer's clog. This is okay, and it will pass.
• I explored some of the differences I've encountered between writing short-form and long-form fiction. Related to that, from the common sense file: When working on short short fiction, which I'd say is between 500 and 1000 words, I can keep stuff in my head and write it all on the fly. Since I've moved into longer-form stuff this year, I've discovered that I absolutely must have an outline to follow, so I write that first (I spend a lot of time on it) and then use it as a memory map (much like I use my own memories when I write my narrative non-fiction stuff) when I write the story. I did this with both Star Trek mangas and with one of the two short stories (~15,000 words each) I've been working on since June. Of the two, guess which one has been enjoyable to work on? [::headdesk::]
• A collection of resources that I've come across, which I found useful as a writer.
• John Rogers writes very candidly and frequently about writing for television and movies. He is awesome, and so is his blog.

If you're doing NaNoWiMo, remember that the whole point of the thing is just to get a whole bunch of words together in a hopefully-coherent story that you will have to edit, rewrite, and polish. It is not supposed to be good, it is not supposed to be perfect, or even ready for anyone but you to read. The idea is to write, and write a lot, so let me close with Wil's Fundamental Truth of Writing: Don't be afraid to suck. It is easier to fix a broken scene than it is to fill up a blank page.

[Pup voice] You really let that bathtub GO this week.

When you're done with the bathroom, I'd like dinner. [Gets off mop, trots over to T.V.]

Beauregard the Schipperke likes to help out where he can, right Christopher G.?

Inside, email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses for over 50 different companies to inject your customer service complaints into their corporate executive offices, and get it well on the way to success.

Be sure to read our Ultimate Consumerist Guide to Fighting Back, a go-to handbook for the dissatisfied consumer. Once you've decided to go the executive customer service right, be sure you read this first so you know what to say when you call the corporate avatar of your choice.

The Consumerist Executive Customer Service Index

Alamo
Amazon
American Airlines
Apple
AT&T
Bank of America
Best Buy
Blizzard
Blogger
Blue Cross/Blue Shield
Busey Bank
Buy.com
Chase
Circuit City
Citibank
Comcast
Continental
Dish
Disney
Enterprise
Equifax
frys
Gamefly
Helio
Home Depot
HSBC
Keybank
Lenovo
Loews
Macys
Microsoft (and Xbox)
Nicors
Office Depot
Office Max
Orbitz
Paypal/Ebay
Pitney Bowes
Qwest
RCN
Register.com
Sears
Sirius
Sprint
Staples
Symantec (Norton)
T-mobile
Target
Time Warner
Uhaul
United Health care
Verizon landline/DSL/Fios
Verizon Wireless
Wachovia
WaMu
Wells Fargo

In the event you can't find the info you are looking for here, you can scan our backlog of contact info, or use Google to uncover the addresses yourself. In the event you find something we don't have, feel free to share at tips@consumerist.com.

Researched by Alex Jarvis
Last updated: 11/07/2008

Ben Popken

I'm not doing NaNoWiMo, but I know a lot of people who read my blog are, so I thought I'd collect some of the writing advice I've found over the years and put it all into one easily-bookmarked post.

Before I get to the older stuff, a couple new things I've found:

• io9 (which I feared would be lame like Gawker, but is awesome like Lifehacker) collected some secrets to creating great characters, according to six science fiction authors.
• I wrote about the weird feeling of emptiness that I always experience after I finish a project. Charlie Stross expressed something similar in a post titled On finishing.

Got it? Yay! Let's move on to some older stuff:

• five simple ways to Just Keep Writing
• Elizabeth Bear, Cherie Priest, and John Scalzi are three authors who are as generous with their advice as they are awesome and successful.
• One more post with lots of links to and wisdom from Elizabeth Bear.
• Five writing lessons I wish I'd learned the easy way.
• Even Neil Gaiman struggles from time to time. This is very comforting to me. (Interesting note. If you read that linked post, you'll see a mention of my friend who quit his safety net job to be an actor. He's on Heroes this season. Go David!)
• Neil Gaiman, it turns out, is very reassuring to me.
• Sometimes, you just get writer's clog. This is okay, and it will pass.
• I explored some of the differences I've encountered between writing short-form and long-form fiction. Related to that, from the common sense file: When working on short short fiction, which I'd say is between 500 and 1000 words, I can keep stuff in my head and write it all on the fly. Since I've moved into longer-form stuff this year, I've discovered that I absolutely must have an outline to follow, so I write that first (I spend a lot of time on it) and then use it as a memory map (much like I use my own memories when I write my narrative non-fiction stuff) when I write the story. I did this with both Star Trek mangas and with one of the two short stories (~15,000 words each) I've been working on since June. Of the two, guess which one has been enjoyable to work on? [::headdesk::]
• A collection of resources that I've come across, which I found useful as a writer.
• John Rogers writes very candidly and frequently about writing for television and movies. He is awesome, and so is his blog.

If you're doing NaNoWiMo, remember that the whole point of the thing is just to get a whole bunch of words together in a hopefully-coherent story that you will have to edit, rewrite, and polish. It is not supposed to be good, it is not supposed to be perfect, or even ready for anyone but you to read. The idea is to write, and write a lot, so let me close with Wil's Fundamental Truth of Writing: Don't be afraid to suck. It is easier to fix a broken scene than it is to fill up a blank page.

I'm not doing NaNoWiMo, but I know a lot of people who read my blog are, so I thought I'd collect some of the writing advice I've found over the years and put it all into one easily-bookmarked post.

Before I get to the older stuff, a couple new things I've found:

• io9 (which I feared would be lame like Gawker, but is awesome like Lifehacker) collected some secrets to creating great characters, according to six science fiction authors.
• I wrote about the weird feeling of emptiness that I always experience after I finish a project. Charlie Stross expressed something similar in a post titled On finishing.

Got it? Yay! Let's move on to some older stuff:

• five simple ways to Just Keep Writing
• Elizabeth Bear, Cherie Priest, and John Scalzi are three authors who are as generous with their advice as they are awesome and successful.
• One more post with lots of links to and wisdom from Elizabeth Bear.
• Five writing lessons I wish I'd learned the easy way.
• Even Neil Gaiman struggles from time to time. This is very comforting to me. (Interesting note. If you read that linked post, you'll see a mention of my friend who quit his safety net job to be an actor. He's on Heroes this season. Go David!)
• Neil Gaiman, it turns out, is very reassuring to me.
• Sometimes, you just get writer's clog. This is okay, and it will pass.
• I explored some of the differences I've encountered between writing short-form and long-form fiction. Related to that, from the common sense file: When working on short short fiction, which I'd say is between 500 and 1000 words, I can keep stuff in my head and write it all on the fly. Since I've moved into longer-form stuff this year, I've discovered that I absolutely must have an outline to follow, so I write that first (I spend a lot of time on it) and then use it as a memory map (much like I use my own memories when I write my narrative non-fiction stuff) when I write the story. I did this with both Star Trek mangas and with one of the two short stories (~15,000 words each) I've been working on since June. Of the two, guess which one has been enjoyable to work on? [::headdesk::]
• A collection of resources that I've come across, which I found useful as a writer.
• John Rogers writes very candidly and frequently about writing for television and movies. He is awesome, and so is his blog.

If you're doing NaNoWiMo, remember that the whole point of the thing is just to get a whole bunch of words together in a hopefully-coherent story that you will have to edit, rewrite, and polish. It is not supposed to be good, it is not supposed to be perfect, or even ready for anyone but you to read. The idea is to write, and write a lot, so let me close with Wil's Fundamental Truth of Writing: Don't be afraid to suck. It is easier to fix a broken scene than it is to fill up a blank page.

"Star Wars" - an a capella tribute to John Williams, from YouTube star Corey Vidal. (YouTube, thanks Mark Day!)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The print business was horrified enough last week when The Christian Science Monitor revealed plans to fold its 100-year-old daily print edition in favor of the web and a weekly print product. But by the end of one of the worst weeks in the history of newspapers and magazines, the Monitor was starting to look like one of the few places publishing could turn for even a dim ray of hope. Clearly, the changes to publishing's business model aren't going away, so publishers are going to have to adapt to a new reality. As Time Inc. Chairman-CEO Ann Moore said in a speech last week, "If you're sitting on your five-year plan, you're delusional." But just what should publishers be planning for?

nives@adage.com(Nat Ives)

Shared by HeyGabe
Sharing this one only to draw attention tot he Flip.tv in the foreground
.

Some Christian fanatics are concerned, quite reasonably, about the economy, and have chosen, quite absurdly, to try and correct the problem with prayer. So far, so typical, but then … well, they picked a peculiarly oblivious way to do it. They prayed before a statue of a golden bull on Wall Street. (via Pharyngula: Where’s Charlton Heston when you need him?) Sharing this one only to draw attention tot he Flip.tv in the foreground
.

Halloween is one of the best holidays, second only to Christmas. I get to dress up in costumes that are completely geek related. This year I even got to make the costumes which made it that much better. But another thing that is awesome about this holiday is pumpkin carving. I have done some coo...

By: craineumcraineum

The giant 8ft Lego man who washed up on the beach

“The Lego giant’s arrival on the East Sussex shingle yesterday morning comes two years after an armada of plastic ducks landed on British shores.” (via Mail Online)

(author unknown)

Shared by HeyGabe
I don't hate the finder so much. I just use QuickSilver and a bash shell to do what I need to with files. I would, however, point out that Vista's file explorer is a shiny turd.

Everyone out there with a stiffy for the “rewritten in Cocoa” Snow Leopard Finder needs to get a grip. Cocoa is just an API. It is not some sort of magic technology where you just sprinkle a ton of square brackets in your source code and you instantly get a better UI.

From a user’s perspective, the Snow Leopard Finder is going to be pretty much the exact same turd we’ve had in Mac OS X all along.

 ★  I don't hate the finder so much. I just use QuickSilver and a bash shell to do what I need to with files. I would, however, point out that Vista's file explorer is a shiny turd.