A day in the park with friends, celebrating another little one’s 1st birthday…
Click here to see the rest.
Okay, maybe I haven’t been pooped on by a bird recently, but I did get attacked by a crow this morning. Bounced off my head after yelling at me from the ground while I walked by. Think it might’ve been due to the fact that I’m wearing the stupid white headphones that go with my iPodMini.
Still… OW!
[Edit: I suspect, after thinking about it for two days, and talking to Arwen about it that what may have happened was that I was too close to a young crow, and that I wasn’t attacked by a young and ticked-off crow, but the mama crow, which performed “death from above” before taking off in another direction.]
Posted on June 6th 2005 in General
The Intellectual Property Wage Slave, or Why You Should Quit Your Job Interesting read, but I wonder if this 26-year-old would have the same things to say if he had a wife & two kids… :)
Posted on May 22nd 2005 in General
Found today at Engadget, and looks like it’d be kinda fun at a club or something…
Also good for reminding people who talk really loud…
The Noise Shirt is a machine washable, wirelessly rechargeable garment that measures ambient sound via an LED equalizer bar on the chest. An embedded microphone measures the environmental noise level and displays it as a vertical 5 step EQ bar, in which the top two lights represent noiselevels beyond recommended limits for hearing protection. A small lithium-polymer battery in the shirt contains a wireless recharging induction loop in the neck tab which, when conjoined with an inductive coil on the shirts specially designed coat hanger, will recharge the shirt in about three hours. The next step is to add a mobile user interface to the device in order to access outside services and applications, giving it functionality beyond reminding everyone at the next Mudvayne show that theyll eventually be going deaf.
There’s a thing in the LA Times today, about a group of police that spend all day, every day, hunting child porn creators. I just simply don’t know how the hell they do it. There’s a new thing that they’re doing now (now being over the last two years), where they literally photoshop the victim out of the photo, and then circulate the images and try to figure out where the photos have been taken. They’ve made slightly more than 500 arrests (world-wide) in the last couple of years doing this sort of work, but I can’t imagine the soul-crushing and nightmares that would come along with this sort of monster hunting. The article is not a happy-funtime read, but it is a quick peek into what’s being used these days, and a fairly simple method of tracking down where these things are being created.
Other things are not so easy to shake. Gillespie says he has nightmares about the young girls beyond their reach. While shopping at Wal-Mart, he sometimes finds himself staring at children, thinking that he has seen them online. Krawczyk says that after three arrests of Boy Scout leaders in Canada in the last six months, he won’t let his son join the local troop. Bulmer says he walks down the street looking at other men, thinking, yep, he looks like a pedophile. Yep, that guy is one for sure.
If I got into that kind of hunting, it would be extremely difficult to not go outside with a baseball bat in each hand, going “What?” at everyone who gave me the slightest creepy feeling. I’ve thought about it: working for the good guys, but I would end up just hating the world in very short order.
I remember once I was driving along Broadway, about to cross Cambie, and I stopped at a red light. My friend Emma and I sat there talking about nothing in particular, and someone was walking in front of the car (in the crosswalk). Nothing special about them, I don’t remember any details about the person at all, in fact. As he walked in front of the car, Emma’s foot slammed into the carpet on the passenger side, and she braced her hand on the dash. She looked at me with this “What the hell are you doing?” expression on her face.
The car hadn’t moved. Neither had I.
But I sure as hell felt it.
I wanted to run that guy the hell over. Wanted him dead. I was angry, mean, and strong.
For no reason.
My ol’ sensei, David, would’ve said that it was the “grandfathers” making the call. During my training, there were always questions about how much force was used, and how to deal with something random. David always said that you simply defended yourself and/or those that couldn’t defend themselves, and let the grandfathers decide how much force to use, or when to stop.
This guy with the car though? It made me wanna jump out, grab him, and yell “What did you DO?”
I wonder if these cops can still hear the grandfathers, and grandmothers, and the kids that weren’t saved before it was too late.
Bulmer, a goateed 16-year veteran with bleached spiky hair, speaks longingly of finding an 11-year-old girl he has tracked since 2002. After extensive analysis of online videos of her, the team has pinpointed her location to a city in the American Northwest and handed the case to the local police.
“Why can’t they find her?” he asks. “Give me a plane ticket and I’ll go there and find her myself.”
Bulmer, you let me know she’s in my city, and I’ll pick you up at the freakin’ airport, baseball bats in hand.
Posted on April 27th 2005 in General
Jinzora is a web based media streaming and management system, designed to stream audio and video files to any internet connected computer – anytime, anywhere.
Yet another tool pulled off the BatBelt of spammers: ASCII-Art Spam
It took me a second to figure out what I was looking at, but it was made up of urls, and used teeny tiny fonts to make up the “graphic.”
Neat trick, buttheads.
No way to really block it, either. Easy to make it say just about anything.
Here comes another wave of annoying-looking spam.
Posted on April 20th 2005 in General
Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.
In other words, random stuff mixed with random stuff is REALLY random. The fun part is that your brain keeps trying to put them together anyway.
Finally got the oh-so groovy StatTraq statistics thing installed. Very cool to have this working under WordPress 1.5 Yay them!
Be prepared for stuff where I’m talking about my referrers a lot.
Beautiful short film. Digitally animated.
Took me quite a while to find it, since it’s called The Delivery, and that is, not surprisingly, a common phrase around the internet. Thank goodness for MetaFilter…
