After the first welcome page, you do NOT have to click anything…
Bit of a brain bender at first, and then you get used to it pretty quick.
Maybe one day, the next big thing will be the NO-button mouse.
Via Pharyngula.
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Also Known As “I think I just crapped my extreme depth suit.”
Kinda freaky when you look at the images on WikiPedia (that’s the link above), but way more schpookie when you see this video (apologies in advance regarding any offensive popups or anything on the sidebars of the link’s video site or whatever).
Happy nightmaring, kiddies.
Posted on September 16th 2006 in Places
The coolest video you’ll see this year (if you like lots and lots of cars flying around)
5 Comments »http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/02/the-coolest-video-youll-see-this-year/
Someone crammed 1,000 cars into a physics engine. It’s sorta freaky beautiful, and I wanna know what kinda hardware was running that demo (which looks much smoother in the screen that the above pic may lead you to believe).
So Johnny Vancouver and I sat down once again (after only, what – six/seven/eight months?) and did a show. This one’s longer than our last, at something silly like 1hr 25mins.
Here’s the main link (right-click to download, or hit the little blue arrow to play it via Flash, which will start streaming sooner, but has no search forward/backward capabilities).
Once again, we had a rill rill good time doing this, and hopefully by the next time we do this, we won’t spend an hour+ futzing around with cabling and feedback before we actually put together a playlist of any sort (which we then toss after starting the first song).
I’ll do a proper playlist tomorrow, if I have some time (hah!).
Enjoy, and watch out for the Myspace page, coming soon to a social network near you.
There’s probably not too many of my readers who’ll remember this application from when it first came out, but Bryce 5.0 is now free for download (the latest version Bryce 5.5 is still about $100).
Wanna make shiny balls that hang in the air, and huge burning planets in the background, like this one?
Get your Bryce on.
{via DownloadSquad, which is like mana from Heaven for a “God of Small Apps” like me}
I don’t know how long they’ll keep it free, but www.hullo.com has released a beta of their foray into the VOIP arena. You can give it all of your phone numbers (I’m just waiting to see if they start spamming me with marketing calls or something), and you can dial out to land lines for free (for now, at least).
The UI isn’t TOO attrocious, either:
One major difference in the way it works though:
BOTH parties are phoned by the system when you place a call.
So, if I’m calling you from Hullo, I punch in your number in the program and hit connect.
My phone rings. I answer.
Your phone rings. You answer.
See what’s different?
The computer doesn’t handle the VOIP traffic – it only deals with the call management. We BOTH get to use our “real” phones.
It also does neat things like let you switch from a call at your desk to a cel without having to do the “let me call you right back” thing.
Very cool. Free, for now.
No more wearing those goofy-looking headsets.
Oh, and the Caller-ID comes from Quebec, so this might not work in all areas, but it is pretty neat for now.
So, I’m playing with the mind-gobblingly well-done new theme [Visitered Little] on my WordPress (go [here] to see it, if you’re reading this via RSS or LiveJournal, or something).
What do you think?
Now I just need to find a picture that I took that I want as wallpaper.
Vacay06 Day Two: In which our heroes drove & flew and sat around, and then flew and drove again.
6 Comments »We’re here, and it’s late (for here), and so this’ll be short.
We were only “those people” with “those children” for about 15 minutes during the first (and longest leg) of our journey, so all in all, it went really well. Ripley looked out the window at stuff, and Tate was just cute and sleepy most of the time, and there was a moment where were were a little row of three nerds, playing Mario Kart on a fire-engine red Nintendo DS (Ripley), Sudoku on a sexy blue/black Nintendo DS SLIM from Japan three months before they were available in North America (Arwen) and Burnout Legends on a funky PSP (Me). Sometimes, it’s good to work where I do.
DORKS!
Look at us: We hardly look insane at all!
Okay, maybe a little.
Three hours in the back row of a 757’ll do that to a person.
Multiply that time by three for each child under 6 you’re traveling with, and we were in the air for about… nine days.
Mostly though, things went great, and here’s some pics to prove we were in the AIR!
See that? Mt Baker looking all majestic and stuff, instead of that sorta grimey look it gets when looking at it from my patio on the 19th floor at work (through the smog of 90 gatrillion commuters-worth of cars). It was beautiful up there.
After the trip to Cincinati, we ate at the Outback, and Arwen and I had to actually pull out my Blackberry to find out what STATE we were in. So much for making fun of Americans for not knowing anything about Canadian geography, I was totally lost.
…and I sorta enjoyed that feeling.
After a 2.5 hr stopover, and some time where Ripley could play with his multitude of rubber snakes, lizards and spiders, we were back on a much smaller Delta Connections flight, with Ripley having a seat to himself, and Arwen and I on the other side of the isle. Watching the sun go down when you’re *just* above the clouds is beautiful – something I haven’t remembered seeing since my trip to New York when I was about 12.
When we were landed, and taxying (sp?) into the gate, I spotted fireflies, and when Ripley saw them out HIS side, he got so excited he started yelling (his ears hadn’t popped yet, and hey, he’s four) about “I’ve never seen flier fies before ever!” then we were off and standing on the ground…
Another one-hour car trip along the various highways of Indiana (why do I always feel like I’m driving West when there’s no Ocean, Sun, or Mountains for a BC boy to navigate by?), and we arrived at Grampa Virgil’s house in Goshen. He mentioned as we were pulling up that he paid $11,000 for the place 60+ years ago, and figured it’s be worth maaaybe $80G now…
This house, my friends, would pull an easy $800,000 in Vancouver’s market right now… Guh.
After much conversation about airflow, and new paint, and putting fans in the windows upstairs while opening the windows downstairs, we’re all in bed now.
So I’ll sign off now with this little bit of highway wisdom: When you hit a firefly on the highway, the little glow bit gets left on the windshield.
and this little bit of airplane wisdom:
People who fly have a different view of the world than those who spend their lives on the ground. A very wise man once wrote a poem while he was flying, and he called this poem “The God’s Eye View,” and he said that this view was entirely different than the view he always had on the ground, which he called “The Bug’s Eye View.”
Out there, somewhere, in the air we fly through, exists an old Persian legend much like this poem about a bug who spent his entire life in the world’s most beautifully designed Persian rug. All the bug ever saw in his lifetime were his problems. They stood up all around him. He couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool in the rug to find the crumbs that people had spilled on the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this: that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life inside something which had a pattern. Even if he, this bug, had even once gotten above the rug so that he could have seen all of it, he would have discovered something – that the very things he called his problems were a part of the pattern.
Have you ever felt like that bug in the rug? That you are so surrounded by your problems that you can’t see any pattern to the world in which you live? Have you heard anybody say lately that the world is a total mess? That, my friends, is the Bug’s Eye View, and seeing only a little of the world, we might be inclined to think that this is true.
Edit: Oh, and if anybody was wondering: “linksys” in Goshen is an unsecured WAP. Thank you, whoever you are, and I promise not to do anything alarming on your node.
Folded Space has a great colleciton of links for video clips from Sesame Street.
Awesome.
From the site:
I state quite confidently that this is the best entry I’ve made in five years of weblogging. Go away if you have work things to get done. This is an enormous time-waster.
Below you’ll find a fantastic collection of Sesame Street video clips. These are great. I remember many of these from when I was a kid. I’ve tried to organzize them as best I can. If you know of more Muppet/Sesame Street clips, please let me know.
Just now, ’cause I’m such a HUGE sap, I teared up when I heard the a-b-c-COOKIEMONSTER! clip when Kermit storms off the set ’cause the little girl keeps saying “CookieMonster!” instead of the letter, and she replies with “I love you…” and then Kermit comes back and she gives him a kiss on the forehead.
And then there’s THIS:
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.
