I was feeling the need to make something in photoshop tonight, and was trying to avoid doing work on my CISC499 presentation, so I made some new wallpaper. I present you with two wonderful versions: glorious 1280×960 and magnificent 1024×768. Enjoy.
I made the image with a bunch of brushes and fonts from misprintedtype.com. Check it.
From an article about open-source software in government — China on open source software:
Countries such as China have concerns about the closed nature of a proprietary product such as Windows, and the national security risk this creates. They want greater transparency, and at the same time believe that embracing open source will spur local software development.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think China complaining about the “closed” nature of something is pretty funny.
Ohio woman gives birth to six babies in one minute:
“The speed at which the babies came out was overwhelming. It was like a popcorn popper,” the baby’s grinning father, Keith Hanselman, told reporters.
He’s also quoted as saying, “Crunchy, a little boney though,” after dipping one of the babies in melted butter and trying it out.
It was fake journal time this week, it went over pretty well. Some forum feedback: LiveJournal, GW forum. The .pdf of the journal isn’t online yet but should be soon. The wee issue of GW is up now.
Fallout includes: departmental meetings in English and Women’s Studies, email activity in chemisty department, angry TAs, confused Compsa people, Leggett throwing the paper at a secretary, irate student-president elect, and a letter from the fencing club among others. It was a lot of fun putting together and I have to say it was worth staying up until 7am. I don’t want to see the sunrise in EngSoc ever again. Big thanks to the Journal and Omar for letting us use their shit. And everyone else who was there.
Just finished up watching Dog Day Afternoon, an Al Pacino vehicle that chronicles a bank robbery in the 1970’s. Pacino plays Sonny Workzit, who was robbing the bank to finance a sex-change operation for his gay lover. The credits roll and you see that Sonny was serving a 20-year term. That means he’s out now. So, I decided to google it and see what came up, didn’t find much beyond Dog Day Afternoon stuff. I gave Vivisimo a shot, which does this cluster style search. I found an article with comments about the robbery. Not an easy thing to find info on (well, fast info anyway).
His real name is John Wojtowicz and he still appears to be alive (judging from the message board posts). This site has facts about the film and a Life magazine article about the actual robbery. Apparently, there was another movie made (The Third Memory) in which Wojtowicz reenacts the bank robbery and tells the story from his perspective. Here’s an interview with Pierre Huyghe, the artist who directed the film and a Village Voice article. Lastly, here are some newspaper clippings.
Bush backs constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:
“Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society.”
What happened to the separation of church and state? I’m glad that the monkey wants to fuck around with the document at the core of American law, the same one that guarentees freedom of expression and civil liberties.
Update: There are gay penguins living right under our noses at central park.
One of the things I still remember from my creative writing class is rule #5 of Elmore Leonard’s rules: Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
OmniOutliner
I seem to be busy these days
¶
I haven’t been around the computer much today, forgot to activate the Grey Tuesday templates. It’s a simple web protest in favour of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. EMI doesn’t like him remixing Beatles samples so much. I think it’s a pretty solid album, and there’s no way he could have afforded the rights for those songs. Go download it if you didn’t listen to me the first time.
Last week was reading week, I was in Kingston for most of it pretending to read. I managed to get a chunk of reading and work done, but didn’t feel like I accomplished much. I was planning on getting more programming done on my 499 project than I did, but it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a pretty good feel for the game-logic. I needed some relaxation time, these next couple of weeks are probably going to be on the hellish side.
I went down to Missassauga towards the end of the week and stayed with Alanah for a couple of days. Did a detour down to Burlington and visited with most of my relatives, who I hadn’t seen in two or three years. I picked up a couple of cheap cds while I was down there, including: The Darkness - Permission to Land, The Darkness - Christmas Time (Don’t let the Bells End), Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium and Nas - Illmatic. I can also recommend the movie Formula 51 if you want a really oddball mix of comedy, including Samuel L. Jackson wearing a kilt for no reason. I also saw Underworld, which is a shite Matrix rip-off with some vampires and werewolves.
On the newspaper side of things, it was a fun night last night. We took over the journal house to do a parody issue, which should go over well tomorrow. I ended up getting home around 7 in the morning, there was just a bunch of a nitpicky stuff that held us up. That said, it looks a lit more convincing than other years (yea official templates).
I’m impressed that this sentence was published:
This suggests that without human evolutionary pressure, the singing dog lost its ability to read human minds.
That’s how the article ends. That’s all reporters do to spin stories though, take a quote out of context and run with it.
Here’s an article on the the design and implementation of the TiVo remote control. I find it amusing because this was essentially the project I had to do for my human-computer interaction class last year. We were essentially told to redesign television — to come up with some sort of system, be it redesign remote, settop box, whatever.
My group came up with a remote that had a little screen on it, kind of like a pda, that could receive data about whatever channel you were on or channel that you’d like to be on. It was essentially taking one of the preview type channels and putting it onto the remote, so you could continue watching your show and browse at the same time. The biggest problem would have been cost. The other thing that we came up with was a page button, something all remotes should have, so you can page your remote when you lose it.
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Porn
An interview with Hustler founder Larry Flynt about privacy and freedom of speech
¶
I was about to click away from this relatively boring article about the US debt being over $7 trillion dollars when I notice the ad on the page. The ad is for some sort of credit card/debt reduction thing. It’s too bad there wasn’t an option in the selection box that said “sluggish economy, security and defense.” I guess it’s irony or comedy or whatever you want to call it. Regardless, it amused me. Oh, the US debt is also at $7 trillion, that’s a lot of money. Now, it’s all imaginary money, but it’s still a lot.
I’ve been sifting through some of my older stuff lately and trying to get more things onto the site. I remembered the design community we had at suffocate.org. The site died, but we had a semi-active mailing list for awhile. Cedric Dewulf paid for the hosting and stopped doing so at some point a year or two ago. I hadn’t backed up the third version of conform (old backups: v1, v2). Whoever owned the domain (i think it was nick) also let it go. It was a lot of fun. I’ve been planning on getting conform back up for awhile (I almost did last summer), but never got around to it. That’s on tap for the near future, although there’s a fair bit of school work left to do. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Cedric let me know, or any of the crew. It would be nice to know what people are up to now.
Some notes: an old article I just found about suffocate, old shift.jp issue, conform was coolstop site of the day in august 2000, suffocate in march i think.
Had a good day yesterday; ventured downtown and spent plenty of time browsing the bookshelves at indigo and the liquor shelves at the liquor store. I stopped by Dave’s place and bounced around some ideas about creating a media/recording company. My purchases from the bookstore included a cheap copy of The Hacker Ethic (hardcover with cool minimalist binding), a copy of Frank magazine, and some things for Alanah. The liquor store presented me with a couple bottles of wine, both from the Rhone Valley in France. I did a short exchange there when I was younger and liked the wine from around there.
After that was food shopping and cooking. Alanah came over, we had some wine and cheeses, then we cooked up a couple of steaks, some crazy potatoes and onions (with lemon, butter and brown sugar), a tomato and mozzarella salad type thing and some garlic bread. Ate with candles burning, sat around drinking wine and talking. She gave me a copy of Pattern Recognition, Talkie Walkie, some chocolate covered coffee beans and some Glenfiddich. All in all, a great night.
I’ve been doing some updates to the writing section as well. A good chunk of the things I’ve written for the paper this year are online (and by that I mean the eds).
Atom is a new specification standard for regularly published content. Ranchero has a beta version of NetNewsWire available that supports the feeds. I also put an atom feed up, there already was an rss 1.0 feed.
The Grey Album
DJ Danger Mouse remixes Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles White album (download here)
¶
I remember hearing about this book on weblogs when it came out, but forgot about it. Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) relicensed the book and is offering copies for free. I just started reading a copy on the palm.
My Zire has meant more reading for me this year. I’ve been through the five books in the hitcherhiker’s trilogy by Douglas Adams and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It’s mainly because I tend to have the palm around with me a lot; whenever I goto meetings or have my schoolbag with me. If I have to wait for something and get bored, I can pick up a book easily. Also, professor’s don’t mind you tapping away on a palm, they don’t seem to like people flipping through novels though.
Update: Doctorow’s second book is also available for download online.
I’ve done a bunch of a backend work and integrated the sidebar/quicklinks into the main block of posts rather than on the sidebar. It’s only on the main page, the archives will stay as they are, although I’ll make quicklink archives available. I spent some time over the last month or two overhauling how the quicklinks they were entered into moveable type, meaning I went through post by post to change them to a nicer format.
It involved a bit of work and a couple of mt plugins, but the integration wasn’t that hard. Here’s a good tutorial on how to do it, although it won’t give the setup I have. I did some tweaking and put the links at the bottom of the day’s posts rather than the top.
Omar has achieved victory. Global domination will commence shortly.
I took this BBC psych test (via tavis) where you’re supposed to identify whether smiles are genuine or not. I concur with his hypothesis that british people are ugly. I ended up scoring a 19/20, whoo.
I was playing around with photoshop this afternoon and made this graphic (small), it’s nice and colourful. It’s basically just laying a bunch of gradients on top of each with some layer effects.
Read this interview with Bush. He doesn’t come across that well. I guess that’s what happens when you have to speak off the cuff. Some excerpts:
President Bush: I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind. Again, I wish it wasn’t true, but it is true. And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is. And I see dangers that exist, and it’s important for us to deal with them.
Every president except Jimmy Carter has been involved in a war of some sort. That makes all but one president a war president.
President Bush: Now, I know I’m getting repetitive, but I’m just trying to make sure you understand the context in which I was making decisions.
Repeating yourself?
Russert: [about Kerry] Did you know him at Yale?
President Bush: No.
Russert: How do you respond to that?
President Bush: Politics. I mean, this is—you know, if you close your eyes and listen carefully to what you just said, it sounds like the year 2000 all over again.
Russert: You were both in Skull and Bones, the secret society.
President Bush: It’s so secret we can’t talk about it.
Ahhhh yes, the secret society that’s so secret that no one can talk about it. And the “If you close your eyes and listen carefully to what you just said.”
Update: An article about the speech that’s worth reading as well.
I’m giving serverside spam filtering a shot right now instead of the Apple Mail junk filters (which do a relatively good job). We’ll see how it goes, it shouldnt be bouncing anything, but if it gets filtered poorly i might not see it for a couple of days. So far, it’s not doing a great job, it let three spams in right away. I’ll give it a chance though. Now to deal with the referer log spam that I’m getting.
I’ve said before, when I’m busy I post and when I’m not busy I don’t post. Well, that’s a lie. There are sometimes that you really are busy and internet surfing procrastination (to extensive weblog levels) is impossible. It should be scaling back a little bit this week, allowing more opportunities to peruse the interweb.
Uhh, news news news… nothing too exciting. Janet Jackson showed her tit on television to shift media attention away from her brother. Oh my god! Look that was a tit on television! OMG! Shock and awe. Something something blah cultural values blah blah children fuck blah whatever. The Europeans and millions of American’s with specialty cable channels are waiting for you in full bare-breasted splendor on this side of the curtain. Join with us and we shall ride over the edge of this cliff, hand-in-hand with the devil.
Other news items to check out this article on the underground community of virus writers. Like most of the computer intelligencia they fell mistunderstood. Also take a look at this ad (local) for Microsoft FrontPage with new professional coding tools that will help you produce clean code faster. Look for the part of the ad where the make an html mistake. Oh! Laugh riot.
©1998–2008 dave kellam
