Patrick

unscripted

Idiosyncratic artist and former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s journal is ridiculously good. He writes about art, current events, literature, music, physics, video games and apparently attends concerts by Sufjan Stevens, Jenny Lewis, Joanna Newsom and Arcade Fire.

This Weezer music video gleefully channels some of the funnier internet memes of this millennium.

Who needs expensive game consoles like the Wii or PS3 when you can play free games online … like BUDGET HERO. It’s fun and informative.

I’ve got 10 invites to Evernote. Shoot me an email if you want one!

Reddit is a user-contributed news aggregator with an ultra-clean interface and an intelligent ranking algorithm. Steve Huffman, an acquaintance of mine from UVA, develops the site in Python (although the site started in Lisp). Read an interview with another Reddit cofounder on mental_floss.

As a faithful Left, Right & Center listener and Huffington Post reader, I thoroughly enjoyed Tracy Ullman’s Arianna Huffington impersonation. If it weren’t for pirated online videos, I’d actually have to order Showtime.

Is the social web moving towards an open network? How long will the walled gardens remain separate? Should your online ego be centralized or decentralized? The Economist and TechCrunch observe the latest trends.

Editor’s Note: First posted this on tWF back in early 2005, this article predated my eventual reading of Ayn Rand’s complete novels and a few of her other writings. While I’m not a strict Objectivist, I still appreciate her ideas. And though the Kensico Cemetary statue in the photo below does not accompany Rand’s grave, I like it so much I think I’ll keep it anyway (if photographer Lee Sandstead doesn’t mind).

I first met John Galt on a bumper sticker last December. A little Volkswagen silently asked, “Who is John Galt?” and for some reason I felt like someone had asked this before. Like it was some eternal question that had been in my subconscious mind for many years, finally springing to the surface thanks to a cute little German car. In any case, a quick Google search revealed the literary source of this question — Ayn Rand’s 1100-page masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. Next time I was at Barnes & Noble, I picked up the paperback for $9.

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The long-lived but only briefly updated Wild Ferret is going to stop paying its rent in the next couple of days, and thus the domain “thewildferret.com” will cease working. However, if you need to retrieve old contributions (and perhaps re-post them on your own site like I’ll be doing shortly), you can visit the temporary link here until I finally take that down by the end of March. For everyone other than the half-dozen contributors, The Wild Ferret was an online zine that went through more design changes than it had articles. A fun project at the time, but not worth the cost of a domain name.

If you’ve donated to a presidential candidate, you can’t escape the Huffington Post.

TechCrunch endorses Obama and McCain; the Democratic candidate received accolades for his support of net neutrality, spectrum deregulation and H1-B visas. McCain won by virtue of not being as computer illiterate as the rest of the candidates.

The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks and Apostrophe Abuse are the sort of snarky punctuation blogs the world needs more of.

Test your Traveler IQ. Geography has never been this addictive.

Walk Score is a clever Google mash-up that calculates how amenable your neighborhood is to walking. I got an 85.