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):
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).
We’ve been getting inundated with snow this winter. Something I was afraid I’d not see again after the terrible winter we had last year. I believe we’re up to 4 or 5 major snow storms this year. And today we’re getting another 5-8 inches on top of the 8 we got two days ago! I can’t wait to go to the mountain for some serious powder carving on my snowboard!
Trevor came up again this year and spent Christmas with his mother before heading up north to visit with us. Alyssa got Guitar Hero 3 for Christmas and got Amme and all of us guys hooked on it. After arriving back in Bangor I borrowed GH 2 from my friend Carl, then rented GH 3 and We Love Katamari, so we’ve pretty much been playing PS2 non stop for the past few days. We’ve beat both Guitar Hero games on easy mode and are half way through both on medium difficulty.
Trevor is a minor scrabble deity (he has to do EVERYTHING to an extreme) so I’ve been getting coaching from him on becoming a better player. I was fairly dreadful before (I had no strategy to speak of) so I’m excited to play more. Theres a great free program by www.ISC.ro that lets you play scrabble with other people or computers, and they’re all rated so you know everyone’s relative skill level. I was playing earlier today and almost got trounced by Trevor came to my rescue during the last few seconds of play to win by a scant 12 points.
Every year I hold a New Years Eve party for the Caribou gang, and we usually have some fun idea or gimmick. This year Trevor brought up the idea of building a Rube Goldberg Machine, and though neither of us were sure that we’d have the drive to see it through to completion, it ended up being a great success. Trevor and I did the preliminary setup on the 29th and 30th, and Doody and Jason helped bring it all together on the 31st. Though our engineers Zach and Jesse couldn’t make it home, they were definitely there in spirit, and mentioned them a few times while trying to solve various problems. We also missed Jalbey, Johnny, Evan, Justin, and everyone else that couldn’t make it up. We hope they all had great times anyway.
Our original intent was to set it off and have it finish its task exactly as the ball dropped in times square (our task was to have a “Happy New Years” sign be raised on a string), but we were sure it would fail in some way at the crucial moment so we set it to record on the DVR just in case. That ended up being unnecessary, however, when it not only worked perfectly when the moment arrived, but also was timed to the second! We took a video of it with Doody’s camcorder and threw it on YouTube, you can check it out below or see it on my www.youtube.com/euicho page.
Again its been a fantastic holiday season and thank you to everyone in my life for making this past year great. I can’t wait to see what 2008 brings for us all.
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.
moonset is around 1:30 a.m. local daylight time on Sunday, and that’s a good time to begin preparing for your meteor vigil. At its best several hours later, at around 5:00 a.m. when Orion is highest in the sky toward the south, Orionids typically produce around 20 to 25 meteors per hour under a clear, dark sky.
“Orionid meteors are normally dim and not well seen from urban locations,” said meteor expert Robert Lunsford, adding, “. . . it is highly suggested that you find a safe rural location to see the best Orionid activity.”
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.
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!
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?
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€
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…
And wouldn’t you know it, SBC aquired and changed its own name to AT&T, which then bought BellSouth (down to 3), and Verizon bought MCI for good measure.
Thats scary enough, but it I never even thought about cellular. You see, if we back up to before the SBC merger:
Cingular (owned by Bell South and SBC {no joint interest???}) bought AT&T wireless, changing it all to Cingular and creating the largest cellular network in the USA
Then SBC bought Bell South and AT&T, and that whole mess becomes AT&T Inc
Finally AT&T bought Cingular back!
Confused yet? Thats ok. On top of all that mess, AT&T sold its unprofitable Rural New England operations to Fairpoint (pending approval).
The bottom line: I’m scared about when this will end, and if my premonition about the 1 or 2 final Telecom giants ruling the USA will come to pass, leaving us all with crappy service and soaring rates due to a lack of competition. Of some comfort is the fact that I can switch to VoIP for land-line service, use small-company DSL or cable from the big evil Time-Warner, and have a little choice in cellular too.
The whole thing that brought this up is the fact that I was telling B about how AT&T bought Cingular back, and he pointed out that the Colbert Report had just done an explanation that both out-does mine, and is funny as hell (as usual). So if my explanation confuses you (hell it confuses me), See the slightly less in-depth video here.
UPDATE: Sadly the video has been taken down by Viacom. I can’t seem to find a replacement anywhere…
Now, when I was younger I’d have to go to the record store and buy it to find out if I even liked the band. Today, instead, I went here, which brought me here, which gave me the song.
Three hops to sample the full song. And if I like it, I can buy the album on iTunes.
Don’t ever take this wonderful thing for granted, because it could be destroyed as fast as it came into being.
PS: Its a very good song. You can tell when a person feels real love. I know, because I feel it too.
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.
