This is the story of my new favourite word: unfusly. I’m not sure what it means yet — but you can help me decide.
So how did this word come to be and why don’t I know what it means? The answer is simple: Google. Not that anything Google does is simple, but the origins lie deep in the heart of the Google-plex. Gmail was kind enough to demand that I answer a captcha and produced the word unfusly. It seemed real enough to me — I was under the impression that captchas produced garbage text. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to save the image.
Now I like unfusly, but it needs to mean something. I have some shiny PayPal dollars (Dreamhost gave them to me for telling people about their super hosting abilities) that I’m willing to part with for some solid work. Here are the basic categories and prize-disribution as it stands now:
- Best Definition of Unfusly - $5
The one I like the best
- Best Display of Unfusly - $5
The best display of unfusly in the real-world
- Most Professional - $5
Make me think it belongs in a dictionary
Anything you submit needs to be your own, and if you’re using images they should be hosted on your own webspace or a photo-sharing site like flickr. The judging will be done by me, likely after the contest closes. Which we’ll say is one week from today (July 7th). I’m not likely to change the contest, but like anything in life, it could be subject to radical change with little or no warning. Go nuts.
Graffiti Taxonomy
A display isolating individual letters of tags that attempts to show the diversity of styles and techniques used by the artists. ¶
Canadian Parliament legalizes gay marriage
I'm going to break out the lawn-chair and a case of beer -- the onslaught of debauchery, loosening of moral values and eventual collapse of society should proove to be entertaining. ¶
A New Sith or Revenge of the Hope
Looking at the original trilogy in light of the events in the latest Star Wars movie. ¶
CJD Notepad
This WordPress plugin provides a mechanism to create and manage "notes" (if you're not a fan of creating drafts before you're actually writing a draft). ¶
Smart Goggles
They'll count how many laps you've done in the pool and what your pace is. ¶
Iraq war fatalities
A movie that places each fatality on a map in time and space. ¶
Daily Sodoku
Get a copy of today's Sodoku puzzle. I'm getting too addicted to this. Check out my Sudoku Primer for more links and details. ¶
The site appears to be borked in Internet Explorer, the sidebar floats down at the bottom. Yea CSS! I don’t care that much, but a good chunk of the people who visit still seem to use IE for some reason. Either that or they’re Or at least they’re spam bots identifying themselves as such. I should really redo the template. There are lots of things that should be redone though.
Summer Moon Illusion
If you were wondering why the moon looks so large this week. ¶
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
The latest offering from Cory Doctorow is available for download now. ¶
The Art of Science
An exhibition featuring imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science. ¶
Posted on June 18, 2005
I pulled my camera out of my bag this afternoon to snap a photo and was confused by an entirely white lcd screen. Then I noticed a little black blob in the corner. And that’s pretty much how it’s apt to stay. I forgot to take it out of my bag last night and must have stepped on it at some point. Normally, stepping on the camera in the bag probably wouldn’t have done anything, but there was an uncapped pen in same pouch that was likely positioned directly under the screen.
The camera can still takes photos and is capable of transfering them over to the computer, but all of the advanced features are unusable. Without the screen, it’s essentially been reduced to one of those 35mm knockoffs you buy at a drug store.
Can’t really say whether I’ll try to get it fixed or pick up a new one. The camera wasn’t that old, only about a year and a half, but there are much better ones on the market now. I was planning on riding this camera out for another year or so before I invested in a digital SLR. The current cash situation probably won’t faciliate the purchase of an new SLR, but it’d be nice.
I unscrewed the camera housing and found that the screen looks replacable, but Sony’s likely to charge me over a hundred dollars to have a new one put in. For a little bit more money, I could probably invest in a newer camera with more dohickeys.
Doggles - eyecare for dogs
Now you can have the phatest looking dawg on the block and protect them from UV too. ¶
Omar Omar Omar!!!
One of the most profane and disturbing writers that I know has infiltrated the ranks of Canada's prestigious national newspaper (for the business section no less)! This post also flies in the face of the one exclamation mark per hundred-thousand words rule that we learned in creative writing! ¶
Homebrew air conditioning
This could proove useful, the apartment is kind of hot in the summer. ¶
Cineplex Odeon bought Famous Players
It won't mean much to the non-Canadians, but round here it makes for a near monopoly on movie theatres. ¶
There’s a bit of a new look around here, mostly the same but some minor tweaks. I got rid of the nav bar at the top (a smaller version is present in the footer), amalgamated some pages, moved the core sub-pages into the sidebar description, changed those links to red, and added 23.7% more whitespace.
Brendan points out the sort of hive-mind thing that happens purposefully or not within the various weblogging communities. Maybe everyone gets fed up at the same time, who knows. I’ve never really been able to stick with one template for too long, they’re always evolving. I should probably take more screenshots.
The top 100 newspapers in the world (by cirrculation)
The first American paper that appears on the list is the Wall Street Journal at #19. ¶
Free flickr schwag
You just need to send them a self-addressed stamped envelope. ¶
Mathematics and mathematicians in the Simpsons
There are some smart people writing for Matt Groening's shows. ¶
Sodoku
It's kind of like a crossword with numbers, I found one of these in the Toronto Star a couple weeks ago. ¶
YubNub, a command line for the internet
It's an interesting idea -- essentially putting all of your internet searches and tools into one box. It's pretty cool, but the number of commands could get out of hand relatively easily. It would be a good candidate for using a live search. ¶
"Do you really think they could miss an ad that is placed in a very well-respected textbook?"
McGraw-Hill is trying to sell ad-space in textbooks. The very-well respected bit probably won't last long for anyone associated with this garbage. ¶
The NYFD is introducing a newer and more modern safety system: a rope with a hook
The escape system is a revolutionary change from the simple one New York has used in the past, a bulky but weaker rope that was phased out in 1996. ¶
On the state of filesharing and Canadian Copyright law
There are interesting rammifications to the possibilities of file-sharing lawsuits in Canada, namely the status of blank-media levys and a statute that enforces a realistic penalization. ¶
Full-size live-action Pac-man
Researchers augment reality by overlaying a field of dots on a university campus and trying to catch 'em all. You think portable music creates anti-social zombies? Just wait until everyone actually is in their own little world. ¶
Be the hottest chick on the block this summer
An Austrian firm designs clothing for our fowl friends. ¶
Queen’s has given me another piece of paper today, this one entitles me to one (1) Bachelor of Education. It also entitles me to expound at great lengths on various subjects and pretend that I actually know what I’m talking about. Here’s the photo-set on flickr.
Overall, the education ceremony felt smaller and lighter than the science/computing ceremony last year. That said, I prefered the speakers last year. Karen Hitchcock’s speech was pretty dry and uninspiring; there was nothing that directly applied to our faculty and it was likely the same one she was going to read to the engineers later in the day. As far as the honourary doctorate goes, I still give top honours to Maria Klawe last year, her talk would have been more relevant to the crop of educators than someone prattling on about how little respect the art of dance gets in Canada.
I’m not likely to go into teaching right away, but I will probably be working in the education field. Currently, I’m working with one of my former professors to develop an online resource-centre/community for computer science teachers. It’s developing nicely and we should have a functional prototype fairly soon. Beyond that, I’ve been reading, working on various projects and trying to decompress.
