The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See

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Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate:

American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore. Here is an example of part of the map, the state of Pennsylvania. Please avoid buying one of these for about 10 more minutes (just long enough for me to order my copy before they sell out).

Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually

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Larry Downes, writing for Forbes:

First comes the strategic bankruptcy, well in progress at Best Buy, where management’s sole focus is improving some arbitrary metric from last quarter, even when doing so actually interferes with customers trying to buy something else. The financial collapse comes later. But if history is any guide, the second part, once it starts, will be quick. Downes puts in writing what I've thought for several years now but never really thought enough about to put into words myself. Best Buy's customer service is horrible. Most store employees behave as if they were used car salesmen who try to peddle one or another bad product on their customers depending on which ever product management is trying to push that day. Whatever you buy they try to sell you an "extended warranty", which is how Best Buy makes a lot of their profits. When doing so, they promise (and sometimes lying to do so) that it will cover any possible circumstance. If you ever actually need to use the warranty however, there will be complete reversal from the sales pitch and instead find every reason that whatever circumstance you have encountered, is not actually covered under the warranty. Their entire business is predicated on scamming their customers. How is anyone surprised that they're now on a downward trend that will lead to their bankruptcy in the next 5-10 years?

My Year In Cities 2011

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This will be my third year keeping track of this, having done so for both 2009 and 2010 previously. In 2009 I saw Jason Kottke do this and liked it, so I decided to do it too. Once more, one or more nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days Alexandria, VA*
Wirtz, VA*
Barboursville, VA
Baltimore, MD
Chevy Chase, MD
Toronto, ON, Canada
I'm down from last year's nine cities, back down to six. Still, an improvement over 2009's list of five.

Here we go again...

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Yet another Presidential election year is upon us and again, the Paultards are out in force. Every time I mention one of the many things Ron Paul has said in the past which makes me oppose him as a candidate (for anything), or any of the other crackpot, crazy ideas that he touts, his supporters come out of the woodwork like cockroaches white-knighting for his cause. One particular rebuttal is that he voted to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell. What they fail to say (and probably don't know) is that he supports DOMA, the Marriage Protection Act, and the We the People Act which explicitly allowing discrimination against homosexuals. Is he homophobic? I don't know. Is he interested in protecting rights of homosexuals? Clearly not. He doesn't want the federal government meddling in people's affairs, but he has no problem at all with state government banning same-sex everything if they so choose. I don't think he is racist or homophobic, but it doesn't matter because he'll allow the racists and homophobes at the state levels to write racist and homophobic laws. Being the president is a practical job, and he's a philosopher with no concern for practicality or the real-life consequences of his philosophies. I shouldn't have less rights than my compatriots just because I was unlucky enough to born in a certain region. And I shouldn't have to wait 50 years for bigots to learn better either.

an update

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I missed this yesterday because I was visiting with friends back home until late last night and then spent most of today on the interstate driving back from southern Virginia. Mike Krahulik (Gabe), has posted an update to the Ocean Marketing saga over at Penny Arcade:

I just wanted to post an update with some of the stuff that has happened over on my end with regards to all this Ocean Marketing stuff. Around midnight last night Paul sent me a mail saying that I could expect to hear from their attorneys. As of right now that still has not happened and honestly I don’t expect it will. Our attorneys (who are real people with an office and everything) are ready should it get to that point though. Head over to Penny Arcade to see the rest.

Just Wow!

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Mike Krahulik (Gabe), writing at Penny Arcade:

I got an incredible email today from a Penny Arcade reader. Dave shared with me an email chain between him and Ocean Marketing (the folks behind the Avenger controller) Trust me when I tell you that this is one wild ride. I’m serious, Mr. Toad would look at this ride and just give a slow clap while shaking his head. I have tried to arrange this as best I can in chronological order. I’ve also removed email addresses and other private information. So let’s just jump right in, here is Dave’s first mail to Ocean Marketing: See the entire email exchange. John Siracusa, Will Shipley, and Dave Nanian summed up the entire ordeal nicely on Twitter:

Another Statement From Louis C.K. (December 21, 2011)

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Louis C.K, writing on his website:

hi. So it's been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That's a lot of money. Really too much money. I've never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we're all sharing this experience and since it's really your money, I wanted to let you know what I'm doing with it. People are paying attention to what's going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes. So I'm breaking the million into four pieces. The rest of his post outlines exactly what he plans to do with the money. Spoiler alert: he's a generous man. Andy Baio made a good observation on Twitter:

I do hope Louis C.K. moves that pile out of Paypal to a safer location, and soon.