January 2009 - Posts
Old Jews telling jokes (NOTE: Headphones just in case. There's an unexpected F-bomb in that first one.)
Dear
Photojojo, here's one that's
fun, cheap and easy (but not without an artful challenge).
Steven Johnson talks about
the different software he's used to write books. I have to say, using any software to write always slows me down. I could have the world's greatest idea and be awash in flowing creative juices and as soon as I look at the bald white screen and touch those hard plastic keys.. blankness. Pen on paper doesn't have that effect.
Song.ly explains why I see so many people on Twitter sharing things like "song of the day." Relatedly,
Muxtape is back but instead of using your own songs you can only use songs from bands they've signed up, which makes it kind of like
Playlist.com I think, but I do prefer the Muxtape pages to MySpace band pages.
Measurement Lab Checks if Your Connection is Being ThrottledsmARThistory - An art history "Web-book" designed and composed by art history teachers dissatisfied with traditional teaching materials. (and it's free)
Graphic analysis of Pitchfork Media's 100 best tracks of 2008. (Mental note: visit
Very Small Array more often.)
That state park down the road on the riverbank with nothing to do or play on and that's too wind-swept to be particularly enjoyable?
It is good for one thing.
This guy's
amazing photos/photo-illustrations of his kids was just one of a list of links I noted to share from
John Nack on Adobe. So many that you might as well just go there and forget getting anything done the rest of the day.
Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie - Is this as easy as it looks? I want to make one!
Words I learned from David Foster Wallace - Bad news: They're reading Consider the Lobster so that's no help to my Infinite Jest efforts. Good news: I already knew "vertiginously."
Scriball is only 43 levels, which seems like an achievable goal through most of the game. Sadly, no.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall - fascinating interviews with photojournalists assigned to George W. Bush when he was president.
aMap - causing arguments since 2008. After playing with this for a little while I think I'm beginning to get it, though I'm not sure I want to play.
I do like the display though. You should check that out at least.
You might have a juvenile mind if you think the
audio samples on this entry are funny
NOTE: Headphones!. (You might also end up saying, "Sumbich" in your mind all day.)
The Kitty Cam - a live streaming kitty version of the recently wildly popular puppy cam.
ObamiconMe is why is seems like everyone has those Shepard Fairey portraits for personal pictures in IM/Twitter/Facebook lately.
It only stands to reason that Google Street View would capture
battling samurai. I mean, the real question is why we don't see more. Cover up?
A cease and desist tweet? That's gotta be a first.
Lovely package - devoted to packaging design.
Is that really
Sly Stallone's 62-year-old body? I can't think of a plastic surgery that can do that.
By way of
random news of a model being beaten by her rock star boyfriend I scrolled through
the model's blog. A fun read with compelling photos.
That big wide photo of mostly hipsters in Germany was done by Simon Hoegsberg who I didn't realize I kind of know by virtue of having looked through
his other galleries.
Speaking of big wide photos,
this one of the inauguration is pretty amazing.
Creative food sculptures(*Unexpected computer problems kept me from publishing this last night.)
The David Lee Roth "Runnin' with the Devil" soundboard.
Previously: Just the vocal track of the full song.
Have you watched any of the Target Women series? This gal blasts the way advertisers portray women. I haven't seen one yet that wasn't wicked funny.
DressRegistry.com lets you officially declare the dress you're wearing to a big event in the hopes that you'll avoid having someone else show up at the same event in the same dress. It doesn't say who's wearing what, just the designer and the dress.
The Emma Hack body art series (her site is here but the collection is viewed more easily here [and NOTE: These are painted naked women. I saw at least one nipple and it's not clear what they're wearing on the bottom exactly but the whole thing is probably a little too close to naked for work.]) remind me of these much safer for work Vogue photos from 2007.
If you're suffering Rick Warren controversy fatigue you may find it more rewarding to focus on Barack Obama's poet selection for the inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander.
That Kathy Griffin New Year's slip. Since it's always annoying when there's something being reported in the news that the news isn't allowed to explicitly say, here's the clip of Kathy Griffin shouting an off-color retaliatory insult at a heckler. It comes at the very end of the clip. NOTE: Not a curse exactly but a vulgarity using the word "dicks" and yes, it's weird that I feel comfortable saying "dicks" here but not comfortable writing the phrase she shouts.
Cancer Cured headline of the day: "A woman from London will give birth next week to the first British baby screened to be free of an altered gene which causes breast cancer." I wonder if the idea of "cures" will ever seem old fashioned compared to genetically phasing out disease. Science may not cure you but they'll make sure the next generation of babies has some innate ability to avoid getting what you've got.
Did you see the story of all of those Zunes that went dead because of the leap second? Here's what the code looks like (or so I believe, I'm not reporting this with any Microsoft insight even though MSNBC.com is partly owned by Microsoft). You don't have to understand computer code to appreciate a little look under the hood and recognize what's going on. The time keeping starts at line 249. You can see how there is an allowance for a leap year but then down at line 314 we see how it turns seconds into hours and there's no allowance for that leap second that was added this year.
For the end of the year, a nice collection of "the end" frames.
Here's the time lapse video of the construction of the hockey rink in Chicago. I wouldn't have guessed it would take that many days to make a hockey rink. I've always thought it would be cool to work for a place like the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in New York, which can have a rock concert one day, a monster truck mud show the next day, a hockey game the next day and a lacrosse game the next day, all in the same space. Maybe my imagining of how quickly the space is converted for use is a little off.
The winners of the Go Miniman Go Lego video contest are so fun you'll soon find yourself on Amazon looking for video cameras with single frame features.
For some reason I can't stop looking at this photo of a dog literally sitting.
I spent a fair amount of time this break reading backward through the Online Photographer's blog. For folks like myself who are still early in the learning stages there are few things as valuable as reading someone with strong opinions to help shape the parameters for judging your own work.
This guy made a hoverboard with a leafblower.
JPG Magazine closed.
Double checking the medical accuracy of the story lines of the House TV show. What's interesting about this, beyond the content itself, is that I'm sure the show uses real medical consultants of some kind. I wonder how much of the details caught on this site are also by the show's medical consultants and overruled by the writing staff.
Here in New York City there's a local TV station that does a daily review of headlines in New York's newspapers called Today's Papers. On weekdays, the job is handled by near-cult favorite anchor Pat Kiernan. The segment is wicked handy and arguably prototypical video blogging and now he's doing it on his own site, Pat's Papers, and including papers outside of New York City.
"A tiny microscope that employs the same kind of chip used in digital cameras can produce high-resolution images of cells without the expensive, space-hogging lenses that have been part of microscope design for centuries."
I think it's safe to say that the light saber is objectively cool, meaning even outside of the Star Wars milieu.
Commuter Click: This 2003 New Yorker piece on Albert Ellis and the psychological philosophy that is essentially "get over it." It reminds me of a huge fight I got into with a college housemate in which I insisted that sadness (in this argument, parents grieving over a son lost at war) was not a right but a choice. (Her: The death of one's son is objectively sad and a person in that position can't help but feel sad so they're perfectly within their rights to do so. Me: How one feels about the death of a son at war depends on how they feel about death, war and sons and it's entirely possible to imagine a perspective that would not see it as a sad situation and therefore grieving parents have chosen their grief and are not to be pitied.) Of course I was a huge, arrogant jerk and made my housemate cry with frustration but it's nice to think back with slightly more maturity on the ideas that were stewing in my rotten little brain back then.
Skate and Annoy - as cited in this NYTimes piece on skating the pools of foreclosed houses.
How cool would the job of movie location scout be?
