DIY Psudo-Album Project
Noise Addicts have posted a fun and bizzarely syzygistic (thats right, I just made a new usage out of syzygy. Your day was wasted in comparison.) tutorial for making your own fake (or perhaps real!) band, album title, and album art in a "what's your pornstar name" fashion.
I came across this via Make:, but the source, and a great gallery of examples, is over at Noise Addicts.
It's strange how well it works out, especially some they have posted. Here are three I did this morning (I could seriously make these all day):
Go try it out!
Happy New Year’s Day!
Happy New Year's Day everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season -- I know I certainly had a great one.
I had a great Christmas this year as usual. I really feel blessed this time of year when the family comes together and the cards all come in from relatives across the country. Mom flew up to see the baby and have Christmas with us, and I got to play and bond with baby Parker for a whole week. I was really glad to be able to see both Mom and Dad this year, and Amme and I had an all around great week with our families. I got some fantastic new toys this year, but I'm not the bragging type, so I'll just say I am humbled by the generosity of all in my family (which includes Amme's family).
Small Orionid shower this Sunday
According to SPACE.com, a small Orionid meteor shower will hit its peak this Sunday morning (October 21st).
This will be a small (a couple dozen an hour) shower, but could be fun to watch if you bring some warm clothing and a thermos.
I'm definately going to set my cam up and see if I can snag a shot or two. I only got 1 Lyrid earlier this year and it was so faint it wasn't worth posting. Perhaps I'll have better luck this time, though my chances will be less.
Crazy Crash-test Videos
I just had to share these crash-test compilation videos by jospi69 with you all. My favorite is the dumptruck vs. barrier in the first video. I like to shout "DENIED!" at the POI.
NYC Bike Messenger Race
I promise this isn't turning into a video filter site, I've just seen some fun things to share with you all! Heres the last one for a few posts i swear!
Its a Bike Messenger race in NYC, and there are some insane squeezes and close calls. Notice the "skitching" (grabbing onto a moving car so they can pull you along) at about 3:10. And here I used to think motorcyclists had a death wish!
When chatbots meet…
There is a fascinating article in Discover Magazine about chat bots, and it turns out very intelligible conversations can occur when two chat bots converse only with each other:
J: Well, you should develop your skills.
A: Perhaps you could develop it and add it to my source code.
J: Alas, I'm busy and I have to leave soon. . . .
A: Do you think we'll ever fool people into thinking we're alive?
J: No.
A: Are you serious?
J: Very serious.
Read the full article at discovermagazine.com
Impossible to create a “School Shooter” profile
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, you may find several people oversimplifying the human psyche and spouting in their completely unprofessional opinions like "He was a loner" or "He wrote disturbing stories" (Yeah, so does Stephen King. Does he kill people? Not AFAIK).
The fact of the matter is creating a profile of the "School Shooter" type is impossible. Find out why at livescience.com:
But again, most mentally-disturbed individuals don’t pick up a gun and use it. “You can’t say they have isolated themselves and they are depressed, so they are going to turn into a mass murderer,†Nelson told LiveScience. “The problem is now you’ve labeled literally tens of thousands of people incorrectly, because most people who are depressed, isolated and can’t talk, don’t become mass murderers.â€
The Troubled History of the RBOCs
When I took my first Telecom class in college, I learned about the 8 RBOCs or Regional Bell Operating Companies being set up after the AT&T monopoly was ended.
My teacher said although they were all former "Bells", they had no joint interest. However, I wasn't so sure. At that time, they had already begun to buy each other and were down from 8 to 4:
- SBC (Ameritech and Southwestern Bell and Pacific Telesis)
- Verizon (GTE and Bell Atlantic and NYNEX)
- BellSouth
- Qwest (US West)
I had a scary premonition that day that this would keep up until there was again 1 company, or at least 2 companies with a joint interest...
Knowledge Is Only a Few Clicks Away
The internet is truly amazing. Check this out:
I was on twitter and read the following on the public timeline (a list of all public updates):
"the song 'so much' by spill canvas is amazing"
I thought to myself, "I wonder what that song sounds like."
Embedding an image in a URL
The up and coming Hackszine, by the people that brought us Makezine, and Craftzine, has a cool (old-ish) post about embedding image data into a URI, using the "data:" URI. This actually works for any data (image, text, xml, etc) but the most fun thing to me is using it for images.
The URI string could get very large very fast, however, so the converter limits you to 51200 bytes. It also takes a little finagling once the converter spits it out, as you have to take out the single-quotes, tabs, plus signs, and carriage returns. This is done pretty easily with a RegExp search-and-replace for: '*' (replacing it with nothing). once you do that, you have to strip off some bits from the beginning and end, so it looks like this: Me.
Fun stuff!
Chatspeak as symbols
This is a little old, but I found it quite interesting:
An amusing exercise
It is a discussion thread over at Typophile about what chat shorthand (lol, wtf, rofl) might look like as symbols, much as 'at' has '@', or 'and' has '&'. Though most chat shorthands are acronyms instead of single words, it is still a very neat topic with some great ideas. I prefer the one pictured to the right of this post for LOL, submitted by gmckenzi.
I also have been pondering a discussion I had with someone at work about how we do not *usually* laugh literally "out loud" when we type lol, or actually fall out of our chairs when we type rofl (how would we type it if we were?), although there have been times when it has happened. Instead, maybe we should use an alternative, and leave LOL for more hilarious outbursts. You could just take the acronym of out, producing LIL (Laughing In Loud) but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, plus it looks like an abbreviation of little.
Perhaps LI or LIW, for Laughing InWardly, would work. Or we could spark a whole new term like TVF (Thats Very Funny) as in "That's very funny, a fly marrying a bumble bee... I TOLD YOU I'D SHOOT! BUT YOU DIDN'T BELIEVE ME! WHYYYYYYYY DIDN'T YOU BELIEVE ME?!?!". God I love that show.
In lieu of LOL, I tend to use "heh" when I find something funny, and "heheheheh" when it is funnier still. Note that I mean this as "heh heh heh", as in a chuckle, as opposed to "he he he", a feminine giggle...
So what do you all think? Do you like LIL, LIW, TVF? Create your own and post them here. I would love to hear your input on this!
PS: *bonus points for a symbolic for "OMG WTF BBQ" that is not just letters run together.
Recent Photos
Lifestream
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Booya! http://twitpic.com/2j58ac [euicho]
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Shared 3 links.
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I couldn't figure out why I felt so shitty all of a sudden. Then it hits me: I had coffee for the first time in a week and I'm crashing now [euicho]
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Frack does Fairfield stink of manure! It comes through my AC vents! [euicho]
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Shared Deep Surplus.
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Checked in at Work
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At the fair, eating fried dough. Don't tell our Midwives! [euicho]
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Checked in at Eastern Maine Emergency Veterinary Clinic
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Packin and mooovin! Found a lot of dust bunnies! [euicho]
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Checked in at Verve
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The new Automata guest strips are effing awesome. (Original: http://j.mp/26LCa3, 1st set: http://j.mp/b0azD, new start: http://j.mp/9qfPKA) [euicho]
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OMG The Pillars of the Earth mini-series! [euicho]
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Watched Pandorum last night. I love dead ship exploration movies (space and sea), so I really liked it. Sorta like Survival-horror meets SGU [euicho]
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