I’m going to look for a video clip of this ad.

Scene: A poorly lit room is filled with 4-8 year olds. They are watching Saturday morning cartoons. A video tractor beam is projected onto their face, originating from the screen. They are slowly floating towards the television.

In walks dad with a dozen donuts. It’s family time! Hooray, your children will temporarily spend time near you because you peddled them sugar. Now watch them bounce off the walls for the next three hours.

It’s disgusting, but it’s a 0/10 compared to, oh say the childrens’ crusade.

Anyone who is interested in a few rounds of layer tennis with a focus on vectors and illustrator, drop us a line.

Either start with a link to a file, or an introductory email, and we’ll start the first volley.

No rules, unless you need them to focus.

I’ve got the ability to scan your attachments for viruses and the know-how to find out where you live, so no funny business.

South Park has a really funny episode about the recession.

Favorite scenes:
Stan opens up a savings account and the money is gone before the account is even finished opening up.

A reporter is asked about the situation and blows his brains out in response.

Timothy Geitner uses a combination of a decapitated chicken and wheel of fortune to determine what to do with a failed insurance giant.

vai [I needed something to watch while eating kefir and yogurt]

Tommy Sparks “She’s Got Me Dancing” from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

That’s Eric Wareheim of “Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job” fame. The video does more to capture the internal workings of my mind and is a microcosm of the human condition.

The freeze frame pretty much says it all.

Dancing hippies? Overweight musclewrestlers? Hopping/popping emo kids? An overly muscular woman shooting lasers out of her eyes? Girls in Xena garb eating ice cream cones?

Everyone who thinks my flare for the dramatic borders on attention whore should take note: I am severely underclassed and underdressed:

“The vast majority of the hit casual games are written in C++,” said David Fox of iWin at his talk at GDC’s Casual Games Summit on Monday, as attended by Gamasutra.Nonetheless, he took a look at the wide variety of tools, engines, and middleware that can make development of casual games easier and more profitable.

Gamasutra – News – GDC: Tools Of The Trade For Casual Games

This is a nice brief overview of various indie game platforms. Word to the wise, don’t write your engine from scratch. It’s 2009. You have more interesting things to do.

Not mentioned is the Lassie Adventure Studio, which I plan on using when it is released later this year.

I will, however check out the list in more detail if I become one of the laid-off masses with delusions of indie game glory.

via [googling for some unrelated code advice while working late because you have to share lab equipment with a midget]

Y chromosome – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Today, the human Y chromosome itself contains only 78 working genes,^[9] compared to close to 1500 working genes on the X chromosome. In some animals, Y degradation is even more severe. The dunnart, a marsupial carrying a 10-12 Mb Y chromosome, has only four characterised genes; among them the SRY gene, is the smallest known mammalian Y chromosome.”

Via [wikipidia while writing a dirty rap and forgetting which chromosome the mens have]

Some duchebags are proposing that you should use as much electricity as possible during earth hour. It’s funny and I get it, but it won’t be funny in 100 years when people are fighting and dying because of the pollution and energy consumption.

I know that repeating this crap is the worst thing I can do for it, but you should be aware of who you share your world with when you are considering saving it:

 
60 minutes of Anti-Earth Hour

View Current Signatures   –   Sign the Petition

To:  World Population

I am proposing a worldwide strategy to discredit the theories of man-made global warming, starting with the 60 minutes of ‘Anti-Earth Hour’. On the same date and time as Earth Hour, March 29th, 2008 at 8pm, your local time, join the fight against the lights off hour by turning your lights ON.

In fact, turn everything on! Below, I will provide you with a list of all potential items and objects that you can turn ON as a way to counter the effects of Earth Hour.

-all household lights
-air conditioner
-heater
-automobiles (your ride)
-automobile headlights
-washer
-dryer
-dishwasher
-stove/oven
-put on oven’s self-cleaning cycle
-microwave
-any/all kitchen appliances
-television
-dvd player
-game system
-stereo
-and any other electrical equipment you can think of

Please sign this petition to indicate your support and participation to 60 minutes of ‘Anti-Earth Hour’.

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any actions that result in damages or harm, such as but not limited to, burning down your house due to faulty wiring, etc. Participation is at your own discretion.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Save the Date

Mark your calendars for Friday, MAY 29th!

threewalls is hosting its unforgettable spring fundraiser:

You Oughta be in Fangs
Written and directed by Death by Design

Decadent 1920s party-goers in search of hot-jazz and free-flowing booze, head to an underground speakeasy run by conjoined whisper sisters, but discover cold bodies and free-flowing blood. Assisted by a team of waxen virgins and undead goons, Vampires move incognito through the euphoric crowd, adding to their brood.

Come and enjoy an evening of cocktails, live entertainment, and delectable Vampire bites.

Food created by Bleeding Heart Bakery

Event will be held on May 29th, 2009, details following soon, so stay tuned and be reborn this spring as the eternally undead!

Threewalls info (not sure if this is the address):

    *  119 n. peoria #2d
    * Chicago, IL 60607
    * 312.432.3972
    * info@three-walls.org

via [threewalls pr email]

Let’s say you’re playing tech support for your loved ones.

Let’s then say that they have a laptop by ACER (Aspire 5050) which has ~100 GB hard drive with two partitions of about 50GB apiece.

Let’s then say that said loved one has never put data on the second partition out of ignorance (the kind of ignorance divorced from shame).

You _could_ repartition the hard drive by first deleting the unused partition and expanding the primary partition using the Disk Manager.

But, if you get this error “cannot be converted to dynamic or the volume being extended is a boot or system volume” when you try to expand the primary partition, don’t fret.

Simply _shrink_ the drive. I did it by two bytes. When the disk manager returned from that dialog, it took up the whole 100 GB. It’s a bug, but when a bug does something useful it’s called a feature.

Btw, I’m sorry you’re working on a loved one’s computer.

Dlisted | Be Very Afraid

“The Smoking Gun reports that the methed out version of Billy Mays was arrested in Miami last month after he got into a brawl with a hooker! It all started when Vince picked up the pussy peddler, Sasha Harris, at a night club. The two new lovebirds went back to his room at the Setai Hotel where Sasha told Vince it would cost him $1,000 to slap and chop her snatch. Vince agreed, and so the fun and games began. While they were making out, Vince told the police that Sasha bit down on his tongue and wouldn’t let go. This caused Vince to punch her several times until she let go.”

CAZWELL

YouTube – CAZWELL – I Seen Beyonce At Burger King featuring Jonny Makeup.

Synthesia made a piano learning  tool that looks strikingly like Piano Hero (it was actually called piano hero, but there was an uptight lawyer afraid people might confuse the two). Although there have been piano and midi teaching tools before, this one looks like I might give it a go again. I just hope they build in support for all my extra moog knobs.

AFK JFK | Thinkin’ Lincoln : A Weekdaily Webcomic by Miles Grover

Marilyn62: r u pooping?

Priceless

“One day after publisher Random House signed former President George W. Bush to write a presidential memoir entitled Decision Points, Mr. Bush announced that he had tapped former Vice President Dick Cheney to write the memoir for him.

“This book will detail the twelve greatest decisions I’ve made in my life,” Mr. Bush told reporters in Crawford, Texas today.  “The thirteenth greatest decision was hiring Dick Cheney to write about the other twelve.””

via [borrowitz report], via email suggestion.

Try it, you’ll like it. The Borrowitz Report is great for worktime RSS feeds. It’s short, humorous, and packed with humor. It’s like a long-form satire article boiled down to the bare minimum.

From craigslist:

“Are you hosting a corporate event, a trade show, sci-fi convention, or
even a private function? Looking for a unique way to make any gathering
of people unique and memorable? Look no further! Our Minneapolis,
Minnesota based DeLorean Time Machine rental is an excellent means of
creating unique memories that will last a lifetime. Companies such as
Hyatt-Regency Hotels, SystemWare and more have used our time machine to
enhance their corporate events by creating a time travel theme. The
ways to wrap the theme of time travel around your event are endless.
Need advice? We have worked with numerous creative event agencies. Drop
us an email and let’s talk
“

Check out the details here http://timemachinerental.com/

The rates are pretty good, too. It’s $2 for every mile of travel from
minneapolis plus $750 for the first day and $500 for each additional day. That means it would cost me $1759 to have it hang out in my back yard for a night. “Hey baby, you want to black out and let me have my way in this totally awesome replica of a time machine from 1985? Drink up”.

A college friend of mine just concluded his Thesis Defense. Dr. Wagstrom successfully defended his thesis on Open Source Software and communities.

It’s a little heady at over 200 pages, but it’s good reading if you’re into seeing how OSS communities function and how to exploit/coexist if you’re a big company.

The thesis includes an investigation with Eclipse developers, for those who are interested.

A photobug was recently describing the benefits of a view camera. I always thought they were just old-timey cameras. What I didn’t realize is that the rear section where the photo is exposed could move towards/away from the front, up/down, or tilt. Those features give you an amazing amount of control over the way an image is captured. You can even take a picture of a tall building close up by kajiggering the camera correctly.

It’s weird that we’ve got these fancy digital cameras, but have lost many of the abilities of this old machine.

Let’s hear it for those who have come before us!

Play Sirtet.

It’s like tetris, but
1) You only drop single blocks
2) Blocks only disappear when they form tetroids
3) If you have more than four blocks of a same color touching, they are now dead and can’t be cleared.

It’s fresh. [Try it] via [ironic sans] via [thinkin-lincoln]

I was hunting for a way to send midi messages into flash/actionscript for some live animation hijinks. I would use my midi controller to trigger animations using commercially available sequencing software to record / retrigger once I had the sequence right. I mean, building all of that functionality into flash would be fun, but I’m only going to be alive another 30-50 years, so wheel reuse is sometimes preferrable.

Unfortunately I’ve not found any native support. Just when I was considering creating a midi translator, somebody beat me to the punch. It’s a java application that takes the midi messages and connects them into flash.

Abumarkub via

I’m going to try out some print-on-demand.

I’ll post the shirt, buy one, and see how I like it and get back to you. But you can buy it now, if you like _heavy_ metal.

BTW, you can customize the color and type of shirt.

They’re going for $5.50 (or best offer) apiece if you buy the whole lot:
Link to eBay auction.

Free shipping. Ooooh. Free shipping.

It’s not that funny, except it’s underwear pervert humor applied to the flaccid economy.

xkcd – A Webcomic – 1000 Times

I use the above comic to precede a harmless anecdote. The economy is such that corporations are doing things to conserve money. Sometimes misguidedly so.

My company is now trying to save money by doing calibration of a subset of our electronic equipment in-house. It can be done in such a way as to not ruin the measurements of our equipment. I will remain skeptical.

An engineer responsible for the process came up to me with a calibration procedure. “Where can I get a 10^12 Ohm resistor”. I thought he was kidding. “You want a tera ohm? Seriously?, you’re going to have to buy one.” Next logical leap. Connecting resistors in series adds their resistance. “Well, can’t we just make one? What’s the biggest resistor size we have?”. “100 Mega Ohms. Don’t even do it. Just don’t. You will be a laughingstock”. Sometime between getting the idea and putting in an inventory request for 10,000 100 Mohm resistors, they realized how long it would take to solder those together.

Proportion. Scale.

After watching some old Episodes of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, I felt like creating a website to announce the secret word of the day.

Rule 1 on website creation: search for prior art:

http://twitter.com/Pee_Wee_Herman

Secret Word

I would like to think that my design would be cleaner and more ad free, but I also think that function precedes form, so enjoy the websites. Take your pick.

(My idea actually would make the action change from day to day. Things like shimmy, dip, pogo, drill, etc

The coconut crab is the largest terrestrial arthropod. It is expected that this is the largest that they _can_ get, which is very fortunate, because along with flying kittens and flying snakes, giant arthropods are creatures who don’t exist but could which would dominate humans very quickly.

Found while doing drawing research.

I went out with a friend of mine and we were remincing about Phil Harman. I found this audition tape of him on the YouTubes:

Holy Schneikies!

One of my favorite games for the NES, “A Boy and his Blob”, is coming to the Wii. They could have made it with nubbin 8-bit graphics and I would have come running.

By the way, there is an awesome remix from ocremix.org of the soundtrack.

Update: I found some video of the gameplay. From the video, it looks as if you have an unlimited number of jellybeans. I’m not sure how to feel about that, because the jellybean scarcity made the game challenging. It was also a little bland and monotonous after the first few hours of play, so maybe this is a bonus. I still can’t get over how gorgeous the graphics are.

 
Dot for Meggy Jr. – demo + screencast from make magazine on Vimeo.

Meggy Jr RGB is a handheld platform for developing your own pixel-scale video games. Featuring a fully addressable 8×8 RGB LED matrix display, big fat comfy button switches, customizable handles, a lo-fi audio transducer, and even 8 extra LEDs for lives, score, ammo, or level, Meggy Jr RGB is a little kit you won’t want to miss. Meggy Jr is fast, programmable, open source and hackable.

Stuff like this is hard for me to resist. You can pick one up here and get some code for it here.

There is a pink dolphin.

Maybe now they will overturn Proposition 8.