May Day in the USA: A Forgotten History. “Few Americans realize that the seemingly foreign celebrations of labor held worldwide on May 1st actually commemorate historical events here in the United States. … On May 1st, 1886, the American Federation of Labor declared a national strike to demand an eight-hour work day and 350,000 workers across the country responded.” (of course there are also the pagan roots of May Day)

My cat is obsessed with the neighbors. She’ll watch them through the slits of the blinds and, when something (apparently) fascinating happens, she’ll run outside to the balcony to get a better look. Do they have a cat or a bird or something? I’m too meek to stare at them myself (it’s enough, really, that my meower is voyeur).

Google comes through again! Their top result for a search on hiccups is Bob’s Cure for Hiccups. It is a simple method and worked immediately for me. Amazing! No more “boo!” for me. Also noted, the owner of hiccups.com sells “Hiccups Away”, a liquid that you swallow to stop hiccups. “ULTRA CONCENTRATED Ingredients: Water, Key Lime concentrate, Lemon concentrate, Lime Essential Oil, Sulfur Dioxide preservative” Patent pending. I won’t be needing that, thanks to Bob.

It’s viewer mail day. Steve Cook sent in a link to another fire engine maker, Pierce Manufacturing. Their site even has screensavers and wallpaper. Pierce was founded in 1913 in Appleton, Wisconsin and is now a division of Oshkosh Truck Corp. Dave Faris (who had been taking lots of nice photos with his PenCam until it, oops, broke) sent a link to Sensiva which allows you to draw gestures to execute commands. You can create your own gestures or use the ones they include. It’s like a macro language of gestures. Neato. (I do have other email I haven’t had a chance to process yet; thanks for writing and sorry for the delays.)

A very belated thanks to Justin Henry who sent me an article that condemns the re-use of plastic water bottles. As you may recall, I’d been carting around the same bottle for an indeterminate amount of time. The article cites a study that found high levels of bacteria in re-used bottles. You could wash them, but the typical throwaway bottles are not designed for washing; the openings are too narrow (I suppose you could use a bleach solution instead). The bacteria discovery didn’t bother me much (I would be as lazy about washing any bottle, re-useable or not), but I did some further research and found a greater issue: “non-food grade plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate can break down or leach with the addition of water, light and warmth.” This comes from a Dr. Dean Edell article on water bottle re-use. It bothers me more that I may be ingesting chemicals that my body will absorb. So I went to REI and got a Lexan bottle. It actually does fit in my purse — it’s a tight squeeze though.

I just discovered Yahoo!’s Buzz Index, which tracks the popular items in their search logs. It’s a good way to catch up with what’s on the minds of the masses. This week: “Harry Potter mania has fans going to see movies just to catch the trailer for the upcoming film.”

Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about The Red Dwarf Theme Song, including ring tone versions for cell phones, parodies, and plenty of downloadable audio files. Most useful and amusing are parody lyrics of nutshell descriptions of each season. Time for some mango juice!

It is a strange, eerie feeling to see something you haven’t seen in a long time that you used to see all the time. That was the feeling I had when I ran across a page describing how to make braided barrettes. Everybody and their sister used to wear these back when many of us were in preppy Izod shirts, turtlenecks, and monogrammed sweaters. Bangs and two braided barrettes that matched your clothes. Pink & green, often. Hmmm… this eerie feeling is not turning into a nostalgic warmth.

Some days I start feeling kinda jaded about the “web”. Then a new concept comes and whacks me in the face and I sit up and take notice again. This time, to be precise, it hit me in the ear. The Silophone is a project that uses a huge grain elevator to transform sounds with its ultimate reverb. Specs: “reinforced concrete, 200 metres long, 16 metres wide and approximately 45 metres at its highest point. The main section of the building is formed of approximately 115 vertical chambers, all 30 metres high and up to 8 metres in diameter.” It’s in Montreal (thus the “metre” measures). What is so very cool about the setup is that you can upload sound files and hear them played to you live, via the magic of the Internet (and RealAudio). Thousands of sound files, some juvenile (cuss words), many a reflection of popular culture (Buffy bits, South Park songs), have been uploaded by the web-going public and played back.

When I first hit the site, someone(s) was merrily playing away, but I was soon left alone to try out the reverb by myself. What I’d really like to do is blast Beethoven’s 5th or Spybreak! (from The Matrix’s lobby shootout), but I’d have to do some editing (there’s a 1mb file limit). Instead I settled for the Simpson’s StoneCutters’ song, which I had handy. Of course listening from inside the silo itself is probably no comparison to a web broadcast. Hmmm, I think I’ve got a Tuvan throat singing mp3 somewhere. (And I really hope they don’t get dinged for having illegal music files on their site.) (via Yahoo’s Daily Picks)

I’ve noted some recent commentary on “mouse gestures” in the Opera browser and the game Black & White (sorry, I’m too tired to dig up links and references). The idea of gestures came up back when I was doing pen user interface programming at GRiD. The use of pie menus was often discussed as being ideal for the pen interface. You’d tap the screen and/or click and a nice round menu comes up around the point you touched, and every selection is equidistant from where your pen is. Beautiful for Fitt’s Law. No dragging down two inches to get to your selection. Where do gestures come in? Well, the pie menus would be multilayered, so picture your top level “File, Edit, View, etc” menu being in a circle, and when you pick “File”, you’d get “New, Open, Close, etc” in the next circle. Once you learn where everything is, your menu picks get faster and faster and basically become equivalent to gestures. I remember doing a bit of implementation on a pie menu system … I did a lot of math to get those darn circles and pie slices to come up where I needed them to. But it was a good learning experience, even if it didn’t go anywhere. Nowadays, people are experimenting with Java ones and sometimes I see psuedo pies in computer games.