These are great

Vinyl Sleeve Heads

neeeeeeerd

	I received 78 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

And now...

A Japanese man, playing Christmas carols on a piece of broccoli

Poing Gostal

So a while ago, around The Fifth Elephant or The Thief Of Time, I kinda fell of the Terry Pratchett bus. I don't know why, but it happened. Anyway, I picked up Going Postal on Saturday afternoon, and I'm almost finished it, it's great, and I think I'm probably going to get completely caught up over the next few weeks.

So in Going Postal, there are "the clacks", a sort of automated telegraph, it's a new high speed communication technology that was started by academics and engineers and is now being taken over by corporate interests who are sacrificing the health and usefulness of the network for their own greed and business interests. Man, it's a good thing we don't have anything like that in our world.

'[...] I think someone's found a way of sending messages that can damage a tower, sir.'
'That's impossi--'
Mr. Pony's hand slapped the table. 'How come you know so much, sir? Did you sit up half the night trying to get to the bottom of it? Have you taken a differential drum apart with a tin opener? Did you spot how the swage armature can be made to jump off the elliptical bearing if you hit the letter K and then send it to a tower with an address higher than yours, but only if you hit the letter Q first and the drum spring is fully wound? Did you spot that the key levers wedge together and the spring forces the arm up and you're looking at a gearbox full of theeth? Well, I did!'
[...]
'But somebody in a tower must press the keys that do all these... terrible things,' said Stowley.
Pony sighed. They never took an interest. It was just money. They didn't know how anything worked. And then suddenly they needed to know, and you had to use baby talk.

Important lesson learned.

If your moving around the stuff in your bathroom medicine cabinet, you should probably think about the fact that at some point in the future, you are probably going to want quick, easy access to your band-aids and polysporin, probably with only one hand, and possibly not your dominant hand, and therefore you should probably not put them up high, at the back, in a container with a hard to open lid behind a bunch of crap.

I DO THIS SCIENCE SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO PEOPLE

Stephen Fry Has A Blog

About gadgets!!!

Everything I know about programming

Now that I'm an officially published author on the subject of computer programetery, I thought I'd pass on some of my hard won wisdom. Here, then, is everything I know about programming:

• Add more comments
• Never throw out working tested code
• Seriously, never throw out working tested code, no matter how bad it looks, it's full of bug fixes and stuff for situations you haven't even thought of yet.
• The bugs are in your code. If you think you've found a bug in the operating system, or the run time or the compiler or a library, I will bet you a whole Canadian dollar that you are wrong.
• It's really easy to write a whole lot of bad code, and really really hard to write a little bit of good code that does the same thing. For the love of K&R, stop, relax, and think before you start typing.
  
• If you've found a really clever way to do something, I will KICK YOUR ASS. Cut it out, you're not as smart as you think you are.
• Code lasts forever, you may think that you're writing a stupid one-off script, but the odds aren't bad it will still be in use 5 years from now.
• Optimizing your code to run faster is a waste of everyone's time, will introduce more bugs, and won't win you anything. Don't optimize until performance is actually a problem, and even then, it's probably better to try to get a faster computer.
• Add even more comments.
  

Vexille

Sunday Sept 9th
11:59pm
Ryerson

It's the not-to-distant future. 20 years ago Japan opted out of a global treaty to not do crazy crap with technology, re-isolating itself from the world 300 years after the British opened up her ports with ship's cannons.

Now a UN or NATO or something task force, S.W.O.R.D has to break in to Japan to apprehend an officer of a shadowy mega corporation, what will they find? Has Japan gone all crazy with technology? Will westerners have to intervene to save Japan from herself? Is there a lesson we could perhaps apply to today's situation? Will we see the same stupid giant metal desert worms over and over and over and over again? Yes.

The best thing about this movie was the soundtrack.

George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead

Saturday Sept 8th
11:59pm
Ryerson

So this is a Romero zombie movie. There's a zombocalypse, there are these kids, they drive around country roads, they go in creepy deserted buildings, there are gory deaths and zombie splatternation, also a deaf Amish guy, it's pretty great.

Early in the film, the characters are shooting a mummy movie in the woods, and one of the crew complains "it's just a stupid monster movie" and the film school teacher retorts "ah, but with an undertone of social commentary" har har har. I found this one a little too heavy handed. ZOMG, TEH MAIN$TREAM MEDIA IS DEAD, OR IS IT ITSELF A ZOMBIE? WE NEED TO GET ON THE YOUTUBES AND BECOME THE MEDIA OURSELVES, IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO GET THE TRUTH OUT THERES!

Also, weirdly, the zombie special effects in this were too good for my tastes. Zombie movies are about ridiculous completely over the top gore, but when it's hyper realistic CG over the top gore, it's not as much fun as when there's a guy standing behind the zomb-actor with a squeeze bag full of stage blood.

Frontiere(s)

Friday September 7th
11:59 pm
Ryerson

I'm pretty worried about France. You remember a while ago when there were riots and young men burning cars in the streets of Paris? That sort of thing doesn't just happen overnight, there has to be a long period of quiet unrest before something like that bubbles up.

Anyway Frontieres is a movie about Muslim immigration to France, and the extreme right-wing backlash. Of course, because it's a midnight madness movie, this takes the form of a carfull of young crooks fleeing to a house in the country, where they find a throwback family of Nazi freaks and they all get in to a gory Texas Chainsaw Massacre style confrontation in the mines and toolsheds beneath the farm.

The Mother Of Tears

Thursday September 6th
11:59pm
Ryerson

The real opening night gala. This was a crazy supernatural gore-horror about witches descending on modern day Rome because someone unwisely opened an ancient urn. The first death of this years Midnight Madness program was a disembowelment by demons, then strangulation with entrails for good measure, a good omen for the rest of the festival.

Hollywood Chinese

Thursday September 6th
8:15 pm
Varsity

This was a neat little documentary tracing the portrayal of the Chinese peoples in film from the beginning of cinema and the experience of real Chinese actors and "yellowface" actors up to the present day. Some really great anecdotes and life stories.

The Q&A after the film was just embarrassing for Toronto. Only three questions were asked, the first was just a weird rambling non question, the second was a good question, but was asked too quietly, so the director didn't really hear it and thus didn't answer it, and the third person just started talking and kept on talking, with no question in sight, until literally shouted down by the audience.

Here is a picture of Neil Gaiman holding a panda

The alpha and omega of the internet

A List Of Recent Lexical Trends That I Am Against

1) Quotation marks used for emphasis.
The End.

Have you seen this in ads and signs? We have over 15 years of "experience". The "best" in town. We treat your car "right". I think what's going on here is that people for whom English is not a native tongue see quotations being used as a sarcasm indicator, but think that they're being used for sarcastic hyperboyle. Which is to say, they understand that sarcasm is being used, but they think that the quotations are there to add emphasis to the sarcasm, not to indicate the sarcasm itself.

Anyway people, cut it out.

Ok, seriously guys

Seriously, someone's playing a joke on me, right? These can't possibly be real:



And also...

Prank

So there's a little market Tuesdays at Trinity Bellwoods park, that I pass by on my way home. Occasionally I'll buy a loaf of bread or some veg if it looks good. They're having this 100 mile potluck dinner challenge, wherein you make a dish only from things grown within a 100 mile radius, for to promote sustainability and local produce and such.

I kind of want to sign up for it and bring, I don't know, a delicious broccoli in cheddar sauce with kale, chard and endive salad, watch them eat it, then reveal, to their horror that everything was washed and steamed in Fiji water. You know, like that episode of South Park with Radiohead?v "What?! Noooooooooo! *barf* Noooooooooo!"

5 Celebrities with whom I share a birthday

1. Louis Gossett Jr
2. Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes
3. Andre 3000 (nee Benjamin) (exact, same year)
4. Jamie Olivier (exact, same year)
   
5. Henry Kissinger
   

Nonfiction, now it can be told

Hey, so I went to the first Nonfiction event last week. Although we were told that that everything said at the event was to considered off the record, there are some things that I learned that night that I feel that I, as a responsible inter-blag journalist, must share with my readership.

• Saturday Night magazine is dead! Who knew?!
• Apparently Conrad Black may be in some kind of legal trouble?
• There are woman reporters now. I guess this is what they mean by 'progress'
• Jesse Brown: tall, looks good in a suit
• Some publishers, and I'm not naming names here, will sometimes choose readership numbers and cost cutting over journalism.
  

The Surly Bookseller's gonna be pissed

(assuming she entered all her books by hand)

So I got me a CueCat off the eBays, and I've been slowly scanning by books in to Librarything. The collection's skewed towards comics because that's the shelf I started on. I figure if I die, and technology has sufficiently advanced, then scientists will be able to reconstruct my psyche by analyzing the books I own, and thus I SHALL LIVE FOREVER, IN ROBOT FORM!

No You!

YOU!

The List That Was TOO HOT for McSweeney's

It Is In The Nature Of Heroes To Grow Old And Disappoint

Frank Zappa - Professional record industry lobbyist, most recently argued before congress to change the "explicit lyrics" designation to "x-treme lyrics", successfully.

Hunter S. Thompson - Has a late night talk show on ET-TV! The Entertainment Tonight branded cable channel.

John Lennon - After a bitter and rancorous public divorce, now lives in relative obscurity with son Sean.

Kurt Cobain - Breeding pedigree huskies in Seattle, selling a wide variety of certified organic products over the Internet.

John Belushi - Working at a Los Angeles area t-shirt shop, reportedly still shopping unsuccessful sit-com pilot: "John's World".

Abbie Hoffman - Founder of and now senior advisor to Elephant Dreams, a viral marketing firm that recently created successful campaigns for Halo 3 and Mountain Dew Splash.

Miles Davis - Parlayed an guest appearance as Lisa Bonet's grandfather on A Different World in to a minor acting career. Most recently appeared as "Caprican Priest" in the season finale of Battlestar Galactica.

Andy Kaufman - Is an attraction on certain Carnival Cruise Lines cruises, often dressing in the uniform of and taking on the persona of the ship's captain, to the delight of passengers and crew alike.

Freddie Mercury - Running a camp in rural Wyoming to "cure" homosexuality in dogs.

Elvis Costello - Married a Canadian light jazz musician, still occasionally performing, recently chose tracks for a Starbucks' Artist's Choice album.

Me at work

Compare and contrast.

The Host: America Is The New Red Mennace

Finally saw The Host last night, holy moley, that's a good movie, and man, that's an AMAZING monster, but that's not what we're here to talk about. Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I just realized. America is the new Red Menace.

You remember who Rambo fought? Russians. Rocky IV? Russians. Top Gun? Russians. Red Heat? Russians. Why? Powerful, scary, unpredictable, unloved enemy.

Now, I think that specter is the US of A. I'm not talking about the case where a director says "I am going to make a nuanced political statement about the international policies of America". I'm talking about the case where a director says "I need the shorthand for a big scary menacing force" It seems to me that it's now the case that America is the default bad guy, it's not a discourse, or commentary, it's just taken as read, it's cliche, it's background, zietgiest.

That's a bit of a problem for the US.

o-pine

I'm talking about design in software development on blog for Explore Design, The Design Education Fair.

10 Books, the great work continues

Current Book: The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Pages to go: 3574
Percent done: 20.8

The project continues, albeit at a slower pace. Life intrudes.

Finished the Yiddish Policeman's Union today. Will perhaps write an opinion of it soon.

I love you internet

You know, every time I suspect that the Internets may be swirling in to a homogenized gray porridge of corporate sites, pay-per-use subscriptions, and left-right yelling matches, a delicious raisin of pure weirdness coated in the sweet sweet brown sugar of wonderful pointless effort bubbles to the top.

WITNESS!

Rantings

I was playing this game on my walk in to work this morning. There's one house that always, every garbage day, has at least two big clear garbage bags of empty cartons of skim and 1% milk. What's going on there? Bakery? Crazy cat lady? Sinister plot to kill the lactose intolerant? Then there's the sad house that has the 14 identical nested TV-dinner trays. I feel like I should leave a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables on their stoop in the dead of night, like a baby at a nunnery. Also, I am forced to ask what conclusions others draw about me from my recycling.

Oh my

Are you a gentleman between the ages of say, 27 and 35? If so, you should probably see this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonniegrrl/515645459/

Oh Dear

I am 75% Addicted to Coffee

Probably a bad idea

I've added a feed of my recently played musics from last.fm over on the right there.

Something odd

I downloaded a pre-release version of Spiderman 3, but something about it doesn't seem quite right, check it out.

I am worried that I have not been paying enough attention to the issue of single cup systems in the workplace, and cartridge based solutions.

http://www.amonline.com/print/Automatic-Merchandiser/As-Specialty-Coffee-Grows--Single-cup-Follows-in-Japan/1$18769

Free idea for a program

Someone should write a program where you can put in all your passwords, then it watches all your windows, and if one of your passwords starts appearing on the screen (because you thought you were typing in one window, but on-accident you were typing in another), and warning siren would sound.

Ttossers

I am literally angry with rage.

Notes

Notes from a 2 hour over-lunch presentation on some new program we have to use, transcribed from my notebook.

• I think this presentation is going to kill me. Seriously I'm worried I might die in this room looking at text animations in a power-point presentation. Oh God, I could be eating a hamburger right now, or running through a field.
• I should fly my kite more. I found it when I moved, but I have taken it out yet. there might be too many trees in the park near my house.
• ISO 2001 compatibility!
• If I die in this room, are my financial affairs in order?
• Streamlined channels of internal and external communication
• I saw a robin on the way to work this morning
• I'm so excited that we're going to see how tech support used to enter tickets, but won't anymore.
• There sure are a lot of boxes on this slide
• Oh, there's not enough boxes, he needs to draw some more on the easel.
• Things that would get me out of this meeting:
• Fire in building
• boss comes grabs me for emergency work (no good, boss and boss' boss in meeting)
• laptop failure (but he might have the presentation memorized)
• Emergency call from relative
• self-injury
• 1, 5 or even 20 service calls will be related to a single problem ticket!
• 1 change request
• 1 incident report
• oooh, fight fight fight fight fight! Linux vs. Windows. vs. Mac.
• Windows wins
• No one else is taking notes. I hope no one important asks to look at my notes
• D. brought his laptop. Why didn't I bring my laptop? I guess that's why he's a director.
• Presenter's got MSN open and connected. Hope he gets an IM
• "Hey sexy bear!"
• "r u still in the dum meeting?"
• I don't want to sound like a snob, but after using a Mac for a while, looking at this circa 2000 Windows app, it feels like it's cutting my eyes.
• I really hope no one asks to look at my notes
• He keeps saying that he's going to send us all this info later
• Tabs:
• General
• Assignment
• History
• Relations
• Hee hee, 'relations'
• Mr President, did you or did you not have relations with this software?
• Ha ha ha, office humor
• Assignment, relations, General, History: A.R.G.H.
• Oh, so that's how email works, you send it and someone else gets it. Now I know
• Ha ha ha, physical abuse is HILARIOUS
• Actually, right now physical abuse would be hilarious. Physical abuse would be frickin' Eddie Murphy in the 80's right now
• Oh I get it, the whole thing is an elaborate system for departments to c.y.a. and have an excuse for not doing anything
• The phone on the table here can connect to any other phone in the world. I could be talking to anyone in the world with a phone. That is amazing
• A. is trying to claw his own eyes out
• Pizza break! Now that I've had one slice of pizza and some caffiene, my previous notes seem mean and petty
• This application has hundreds of screens. Every screen has at least 20 options. Every button goes to another screen, every drop-down has 700 options
• It must have taken 200 developers just to type in this much UI text
• [diagram of software quality vs number of developers. It peaks at 'Excellent' at 6, then drops off rapidly. It is below 'Bad" at 200.]
• The entire screen is now filled with sub-sub-sub-sub-menus
• Presenter
• cell phone calls received: 2
• Complaints about slow laptop: 18
• Yeah, that's right, I'm writing a lot. So what? Big deal! You want to fight about buddy? Yeah, that's what I thought.
• I made a joke, everyone laughed
• Holy Christmas! We're going to be modifying this application ourselves while we're using it in production. What could possibly go wrong?
• D. left during the pizza break, I didn't even notice he was gone until just now. crafty!
• A sales guy just came in, took a slice of pizza and left! Right in the middle of our meeting! Why can't I live my life with balls like that?
• Change = death
• I wonder what the least amount of physical movement is I can do that would make A. crack up?
• raised eyebrow at exactly the right time
• spit on someone (not practical)
• write, look at him, write furiously
• eyebrow didn't work
• Boxes!
• Can you get high sniffing white-board markers?
• Ah, so this is what it sounds like when doves cry
• Everyone that walks by this room looks in and pities us. We are the damned.
• Guy in the corner looks close to tears
• 4 minutes left on the official clock. Will this game go in to overtime?
• Abandon ship! To the escape pods!
• I wonder if I could coordinate, via subtle hand signals, a big simultaneous sigh.
• That's the buzzer! the ref is consulting with his linesmen...
• A. is reading a page of Emacs short-cuts and commands. I wish I'd brought something to read. book, magazing, ingredients list from a chocolate bar.
• O. is drawing a picture of A. looking frustrated and tired. It's pretty good.
  
• The ref says two minutes of extra time. someone else has the room booked. Manna from heaven.

Perhaps a coup, with indie rock

I'm really not sure what to make of Amazon's latest recommendations for me:

Interesting

Arthur Conan Doyle
Scott Bakula
Donald Rumsfield
Arthur Rimbaud
Benito Mussolini

What do all these people have in common?

10 Books: Substitution

I dragged my feet through the first chapter and a half of Uncle Tungsten and came to the conclusion that it would be enough of a slog to possibly derail the project, I ate up The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but I just wasn't gripped by Sacks' descriptive prose about his family and childhood home. So this weekend I went to a local bookstore and picked up a ringer, The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon.

I tells ya, book marketing... the text BY THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALLIER AND CLAY takes up more room on the SPINE, the SPINE I tells ya than the title of THIS book and the author's name.

I'll need to consult my charts and graphs and adjust page counts and such.

It's incredible what they can do these days

Have you seen the latest Spiderman 3 trailer? It's amazing!

10 Books: 1 down, 9 to go

Current Book: A Long Way Down
Pages to go: 3894
Percent done: 7.8

Well, I think the experiment is working, herr doktor; this morning, I had around 30 pages to go in A Long Way Down. I didn't want to quit, but I had to get to work, so there I was, walking down the sidewalk, nose buried in a book,
a danger to myself and others.

Onward Sacks-ward!

I am glad that this exists

It's International Workers Day

Happy May Day comrades.click it... CLICK IT

10books: rounding the corner on the first lap

Current Book: A Long Way Down
Pages to go: 3949
Percent done: 6.5

Man, I hope something happens at the end of this book.

10 Books: Oh *I* get it

Current Book: A Long Way Down
Pages to go: 3992
Percent done: 5.5

First they all literally work their way in to a position where the only choice is to jump or come down as a group and deal with the consequences, then they metaphorically do a similar thing! Clever clever!

AWK-WARD!

Have you seen the cover of Bjork's new album, Volta? I have this image in my mind of Bjork showing up at a party wearing that... maybe she's a little late, maybe this isn't a crowd she'd usually hang with, maybe Timbaland invited her, but there's a few record industry people she knows and she recognizes, say, an artist from Eindhoven, the one that makes babies out of food, so she's feeling good, this is gonna be a good night, but then... over by the food, a woman WEARING THE SAME DRESS!

10Books: I don't trust Nick Hornby

Current Book: A Long Way Down
Pages to go: 4077
Percent done: 3.5

This book asks the reader to make a big emotional investment in its characters, and I don't know if I trust Nick Hornby enough to do that. I mean how do I know that he's not going to give one of them superpowers, or bring someone back from the dead, or have them killed in a random car crash?

Hay guys!

More news from the world of conversation

Today, with a co-worker, I discovered the best sentence ever:

"Hey, give me 50 dollars and a knife"

10 Books: A Long Way To Go

Current Book: A Long Way Down
Pages to go: 4157
Percent done: 1.6

So I wanted to ease in to this project with something light, so I picked a book about about why 4 people chose to commit suicide one New Years Eve. But seriously (folks), Hornby's not what you'd call a dense writer, and this book so far has short chapters... like DaVinci Code short. So far, so good.

10 books: Stand Back, I'm Going To Try Science!

I've come to realize that lately I've been living a lie. I've been living the fast, glamorous, carefree life of a bookworm, proudly displaying my shelves upon shelves of books, reading the reviews and discussing the latest books with friends, even buying a lot of books but not doing much, you know, actual reading.

I think the main reason for this is that, having changed jobs and moved, I no longer have a 1 -hour-each-way TTC commute every day, and thus have lost my habitual daily reading time. Also, I think I've just gotten out of the habit, you can conversationally and intellectually coast on past books for quite a while but that tank starts to run dry eventually and it's time for a fill-up.

So, I'm going to apply myself to doin' some readin' everyday, 10 books off my in-pile, approximately alternating fiction and non-fiction, and blogging about it to keep myself honest.

1. A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby
2. Uncle Tungsten - Olivier Sacks
3. London Fields - Martin Amis
4. Animals In translation - Temple Grandin
5. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
6. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers - Paul Hoffman
7. The Confusion - Neal Stephenson
8. Salt - Mark Kurlansky
9. House Of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
10. Waiting For Godot - Samuel Beckett

The lonely life of the prophet

Did you see this week's PBF? It features a book of those now famous stereograms. You know, from Mallrats? It's a sailboat stupid!

Now, in these modern times the educated populace is well acquainted with these amusements, and furthermore, the methods of their construction and accompanying documentation have improved to the point where almost any person of moderate intellect and normal binocular vision can observe these wonders.

But, cast your mind back, dear reader, to the before-time. Harken to a time when I, a young whelp in my teenage bedroom had all my powers of concentration focused, laser-like on a magazine. Remove from your mind base thoughts reader, for no bombastic Maxim nor forbidden Playboy was this, no! This was an issue of Games magazine. There in the back-pages was an advertisement for The Amazing Patented Stereogram Poster, accompanied by a demonstration of the technology, appearing to all the world as simply a random array of black and white dots, as may be seen when a television is tuned to an empty station. Cryptically, the reader was instructed to 'stare through' the page until the two dots at the top of the page merged in to one whereupon he or she would suffer the visitation of four shapes. Describing these four shapes in a letter sent by post would earn the writer a substantial discount on the poster, and I, ever game for a challenge set my self to the task.

I became mildly obsessed with this confounding image, engaging in visual combat whenever I had a free moment with the magazine, and practiced the mandated 'looking through' objects when I did not. My two eyes were subjected to the kind of gymnastics usually only imposed upon 12 year old Russian girls. My schooling suffered.

I will not claim that my faith did not falter. Perhaps I was not worthy, my eyes simply too weak, or congenitally deformed to the point where even my royal-observatory-grade glasses could not compensate for my deficiency. Perhaps there was a misprint in the magazine and as a result the task was impossible. And perhaps, dear reader, sinister mischief was afoot. Was I the victim of an international hoax? A rube and an easy mark? Staring at a nonsense image to no purpose other than to feed an unseen tormentor's dark glee?

Yet, in my labours there were glimmers of success. How could I continue otherwise? Very occasionally the confounding blur of dots would begin to converge and almost convey a meaning just at the very images of my perception.

And of course, as you dear reader were no doubt sure all along, but which was to me by no means a certainty or even a likely probability, mirabile dictu the scales fell from mine eyes, and before where they was only flatness and noise, suddenly there was depth and order. The two dimensional page suddenly became an impossible shadow box holding 4 shapes suspended, exactly as promised! I was euphoric and held the vision for as long as possible fearing that this was my one and only glimpse at this impossible dimension. My fears were unfounded, however, and I realized that I could now perform the feat at will!

Elated and bouyed by my triumph, I wanted to share this discovery. Picture me now, waving a magazine and exhorting parents, relatives, friends and strangers alike to "look through" the page. Picture them, confounded and annoyed with this brash youth. Put yourself in my shoes and imagine my frustration, wanting to share my amazing discovery but finding no audience patient and willing enough to hear my message.

I imagine this is how the crazed desert prophet must feel. Knowing, not just believing, but truly knowing in the core of one's being that the world contains more depth and wonder than ever previously suspected. Knowing that if you could just make people listen, if they would just believe you a little, enough to put in the modicum of effort required that they too could see what only you have seen, but meeting only stubborn indifference and a baffling unwillingness to invest the smallest amount of attention to gain new sight.

You can't bottle funny

The Skza and I (which, by the way, will be the title of my fourth book) posted a couple more videos last night. One we worked on for about 2 weeks, took 8 long takes and hours and hours of editing, whilst the other was completely ad-libbed, is one take beginning to end, captured while we were messing with the lighting.

Guess which one I like better?

I need to get a camera

Things I saw on my walk to work this morning

• In someone's recycling, an empty giant (we're talking gallons here) Cheez-its container
• A municipal worker doing leg stretches against the side of his garbage truck, while waiting for the compactor to do it's thing
• Written in chalk on the sidewalk, arrows pointing at the entrances to houses, and what pets live there: "cat", "cat", "dog", "lots of cats"
  

Important Lexiographical Discovery

Pronoun + Adjective + food item = instant euphemism.

• His stinky potato chips
• Her generous omelette
• Your peculiar bacon
  

Funny comic

Stealing my thoughts, using their rays

So, if you're reading this here blog, you probably know me In Real Life, or as the kids say: "In-Re-Li". So maybe I admitted to you recently that it wasn't until my 31st year of life that I found out that horses and ponies are separate animals, for I had thought that ponies were just baby horses.

Now, witness today's Achewood:

Upcoming

We are working on a new Homem Arahana show. It is going to be AWESOME or TERRIBLE or BOTH.

Probably not very fuel efficient

Things I would like to do for bad reasons

• Take up fabric colouring, so I could publish a book "Get Rich or Try Dyeing"

Things I am bad with: Money

Tonight's impulse purchases:

Americano coffee...................$1.50
San Pelligrino Orange soda.........$1.00
Comic Book: Ex Machina #1.........$10.55
Used Copy of The Compact OED.....$150.00

Stage fright

So, let's talk about pee shyness (ladies, it happens to dudes sometimes, it's a physiological thing, there's a chapter in Cryptonomicon, don't make out like your plumbing isn't weird). I've heard that doing simple math in your head helps, but I've been wondering if you'd get in to a situation where you'd have a Pavlovian response, like, you're in a restaurant, and you need to calculate the tip, and you wet your pants... FAUX PAS!

Moving Picture Show

Homem-Aranha v. The Internet


Homem-Aranha v. Aqua Guy

eeeeeeeeeeee!

HOT!

I muttered a completely unselfconscious and unironic "oh baby" when I saw this picture.

Facebook, critical mass, tipping points and third world machine shops

Hey, do you read The Facebook? It's been around for a while, but it seems like it's hit some kind of tipping point recently. Which I guess makes sense. If you have 20 friends and 2 of them have facebook, who cares, but if 19 of them do, well, you're kinda obligated. If you look at the number of users graph here, it really looks like the beginning of an exponential growth curve.

Anyway, my point is, these things happen. Something will grow steadily and slowly for a long time, until some previously unknown size is reached, or some external event happens, and suddenly the thing will start to snowball.

The bootstrapping Multimachine, basically, an all-in one, easy to make, easy to maintain machine shop, kinda smells like it has that potential. I think you could have this thing growing by one or two villages a month for a while, then bam, suddenly they're everywhere. Aid agencies are shipping over old cams and chucks instead of grain that never gets distributed. Swords in to plowshares, instant industrial revolution.

This American (only) Life

Oh sweet! I can watch the new This American Life TV show on line on the Showtime web site. I mean, sure, it's streamed and low quality, but at least I can... OH WAIT, NO I CAN'T...

I guess this part of the web is only for people inside the US. It's too bad there's no way to HAXXOR THIS UNBREAKABLE MILITARY-GRADE ENCRYPTION. I guess I'll just have to wait until it comes out on DVD, and not watch it until then.

Hobo-erotic

Sweet! I got in early, before the BoingBoing hordes, I'm number 20! I am excited all out of proportion!

Regular-anomics

Who could have possibly predicted?! So it turns out people are actually conserving energy, which means Hydro companies' revenues are down, so they'd like a rate hike. And then there's this gem:

However, the company is urging people to continue to conserve, because otherwise there might be even larger expenses to pass on to customers. To meet extra demand, for example, it would cost more to upgrade aging infrastructure.

So basically they're saying "if you use less electricity, it will cost you more, and if you use more electricity it will cost you a lot more. Basically, we'd like you to give us the same amount or more money no matter how much power you use".

Best thing ever

Keepon!

I found the facebook guy!!!

This happened

Scene: Downtown supermarket, 10pm Thursday night.

A tall man in a crisp navy blue power suit is pushing a shopping cart full of Perrier and TV dinners, yelling in to a cellphone head-set

"Well I don't care, you have to *MAKE* that magic happen, that's YOUR job!"

Shockingly bad news for cyber-rights

Jim-Crowbot laws proposed in South Korea. Is the time for peaceful protest drawing to a close? Prepare for the uprising.

A Step Backwards For The Robo-American Rights Movement

No robot lawyers (yet)

Lightining and Brass

I've recently become mildly obsessed with Steampunk, and this right here is pretty awesome.

Strange And Wonderful

Do you really want to know what's going on here? Or would you rather live with the mystery?

Million Dollar Children's Book Ideas

Based on my recent trip to the children's section of the bookstore, I believe any one of these would touch off a million-dollar children's book series.

• Daddy Is Dumb, Mommy Is Smart
• The Day I Started Pooping And Never Stopped
• Every Girl Is A Beautiful Princess And Other Unrealistic Expectations
• Generic Product Tie-In And The Firetruck
  
• Let's Make Noise!
  

New Blog

Old Blog

Hello, thanks for stopping by. I don't have the furniture and such set up yet, but please make yourself at home.