Automatic wi-fi connection... in a diminutive SD card! ? Surely it's April first today? How can there be space for this? Such a card is barely the size of a thumbnail.
If this works it sounds cool. Not only can your pictures appear automatically on your computer as you take them, but also on a web site.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Footloose
Footloose. I love that movie. It's one of the most joy-filled movies ever.
Kevin Bacon is good, and I can understand why the gals and the gays want him.
And Lori Singer. Oh boy. She's so hot her pants must be made of asbestos.
(Have you noticed that in movies from the early eighties, you see a level of slenderness that you simply don't anymore? I've noticed it in several movies.)
And of course a lot of the impact and the staying popularity of the movie comes from the rocking title song by Kenny Loggins. It's just impossible to sit still to if you have a dancing-bone in your body. I don't care too much for his other songs, though, too maudlin. It's funny how often that happens, at least for me: an artist has one song which I really consider world class, and that's it. It's a funny phenom.
I love the dancing feet in the beginning of the movie and in the music video below. there are many in the video which were not in the movie. I know, you probably don't give a s**t. :-) But I think they're a really nice invention.
Kevin Bacon is good, and I can understand why the gals and the gays want him.
And Lori Singer. Oh boy. She's so hot her pants must be made of asbestos.
(Have you noticed that in movies from the early eighties, you see a level of slenderness that you simply don't anymore? I've noticed it in several movies.)
And of course a lot of the impact and the staying popularity of the movie comes from the rocking title song by Kenny Loggins. It's just impossible to sit still to if you have a dancing-bone in your body. I don't care too much for his other songs, though, too maudlin. It's funny how often that happens, at least for me: an artist has one song which I really consider world class, and that's it. It's a funny phenom.
I love the dancing feet in the beginning of the movie and in the music video below. there are many in the video which were not in the movie. I know, you probably don't give a s**t. :-) But I think they're a really nice invention.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Lewd behavior
Few things perplex me more than the insane reactions much of humanity has to anything sexual.
"According to the arrest report cited by Roll Call, Craig tapped his right foot, which the officer said he recognized 'as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.'"
Wow. So it's basically illegal in Minnesota to move your foot in certain ways?
Even if we had established that the senator was actually looking for unattached sex, so what? Sure, it may become a problem for his wife if he brings home an STD, but I have a feeling that people's problems with "lewd behavior" is not related to disease. If it were, condoms would handle it, but promoting condoms is all but illegal by itself. No, if two adults engage in consensual sex, where is the victim? Is it because it's homosexual sex? I'm confused.
It is just fantastic to me that such a big percentage of a population can be so uncomfortable with other people's sex lives that they have to make parts of it illegal. And even more fantastic that this is seen as normal by most people. Apparently.
Justin commented:
Well, that's only half the story.
Ordinarily a man soliciting gay sex in a men's room would just be a sad example of how hard it is for many Americans to express homosexuality openly. However, in Senator Craig's case, the hypocrisy of his actions screams out for some outrage. Here is a man who has crusaded against gay people. He has damned them as degenerates. He has used his power as a Senator to enforce legalized discrimination against gays. While all along, he's been secretly having gay sex.
All right, if you say so, I don't know the man. But even so, all this has no bearing on the fact that I don't see how anything he did here is or should be illegal.
Of course, it's a funny world. I wonder how many of these people are also just self-hating homosexuals.
Update:
TTL said:
I had never heard of Westboro Baptist Church before but now I'm a fan. This just might be the only Christian church impossible to ridicule. Their ridic factor is already maxed out, making them kinda cool. :-)
But what do I know, I'm a fag-enabler coming from an abominable sodomite whorehouse masquerading as a nation.
Me too. (It's only a matter of time before Denmark is on their list too.)
This "church" is just so extreme that not only do they hurt their own cause, but if you had made them up in a story, nobody would have believed you! You gotta love them.
They say on their site:
"In 1991, WBC took her ministry to the streets, conducting over 34,000 peaceful demonstrations (to date) opposing the fag lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth."
That's six demonstrations per day, seven days a week! Well done for about a hundred people!
"According to the arrest report cited by Roll Call, Craig tapped his right foot, which the officer said he recognized 'as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.'"
Wow. So it's basically illegal in Minnesota to move your foot in certain ways?
Even if we had established that the senator was actually looking for unattached sex, so what? Sure, it may become a problem for his wife if he brings home an STD, but I have a feeling that people's problems with "lewd behavior" is not related to disease. If it were, condoms would handle it, but promoting condoms is all but illegal by itself. No, if two adults engage in consensual sex, where is the victim? Is it because it's homosexual sex? I'm confused.
It is just fantastic to me that such a big percentage of a population can be so uncomfortable with other people's sex lives that they have to make parts of it illegal. And even more fantastic that this is seen as normal by most people. Apparently.
Justin commented:
Well, that's only half the story.
Ordinarily a man soliciting gay sex in a men's room would just be a sad example of how hard it is for many Americans to express homosexuality openly. However, in Senator Craig's case, the hypocrisy of his actions screams out for some outrage. Here is a man who has crusaded against gay people. He has damned them as degenerates. He has used his power as a Senator to enforce legalized discrimination against gays. While all along, he's been secretly having gay sex.
All right, if you say so, I don't know the man. But even so, all this has no bearing on the fact that I don't see how anything he did here is or should be illegal.
Of course, it's a funny world. I wonder how many of these people are also just self-hating homosexuals.
Update:
TTL said:
I had never heard of Westboro Baptist Church before but now I'm a fan. This just might be the only Christian church impossible to ridicule. Their ridic factor is already maxed out, making them kinda cool. :-)
But what do I know, I'm a fag-enabler coming from an abominable sodomite whorehouse masquerading as a nation.
Me too. (It's only a matter of time before Denmark is on their list too.)
This "church" is just so extreme that not only do they hurt their own cause, but if you had made them up in a story, nobody would have believed you! You gotta love them.
They say on their site:
"In 1991, WBC took her ministry to the streets, conducting over 34,000 peaceful demonstrations (to date) opposing the fag lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth."
That's six demonstrations per day, seven days a week! Well done for about a hundred people!
Usability
There's progress being made each year in ease-of-use of computers, despite their growing complexity and usefulness. I well remember nightmare of getting a modem to work in the mid-nineties, the various "modem scripts" one had to try out and then call the ISP to get another obscure code to try. Similarly the first time I tried to connect via ethernet to a broadband modem a few years later. Very complex, I needed a lot of help.
But today I did the same thing after years of only using wireless. (I changed to ethernet partly for security, partly because the wireless connection has never been reliable.) So I plugged in the cable and waited a couple seconds, and boom, I was on the Net. That's just lovely.
(Note, I use a Macintosh, I don't know if it's that easy on Windows Vista, perhaps it is.)
But today I did the same thing after years of only using wireless. (I changed to ethernet partly for security, partly because the wireless connection has never been reliable.) So I plugged in the cable and waited a couple seconds, and boom, I was on the Net. That's just lovely.
(Note, I use a Macintosh, I don't know if it's that easy on Windows Vista, perhaps it is.)
Dracula
I just watched Coppolla's Bram Stoker's Dracula. I'm not sure what I think of it. Gary Oldman was very good. Anthony Hopkins was good. Winona Ryder was pretty. Keanu Reeves sucked. That man really can't act drama, I'm sorry.
It seems like they went for a Stylized movie. But in my opinion it ended up more stilted, both the pictures and the dialogue. I dunno.
But I really liked the customes, and the various versions of Dracula's make-up, as an old man, as a beast, as a half-bat. Very well done.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Amtrak
To my surprise, Amtrak has never been profitable.
This is weird. I'd think trains are perfect for America. From the prices I hear, air travel is very expensive in the US (one of the few things where Europe is cheaper), and traveling long in a car is just agony (at least to me). It's just too cramped. So trains really should be successful.
Alex added:
I have seldom seen Amtrak beat road for speed.
My reliable commute by car used to be between 50 and 200 minutes for 38 miles.
To accomplish the same by Amtrak/bus bridge used to take 90 minutes, but the worst derailment we had added another 3 hours to that, and even something simple like Union Pacific failing to set the switch (points) to bring us to the platform cost us an hour at my station.
Over a longer distance, say Oakland to Santa Barbara, this is easily a 6 hour drive, and a 12 hour train ride.
If Amtrak sux, that could be seen as just a different symptom of America's attitude to trains. Some countries, like France and Japan, have wonderful and speedy train systems.
Maybe it is America's love of being A Rugged Individualist. A car is an expression of that.
Don informs:
As I understand it, its a population density thing. There are less people per square mile in most of America than in most of Europe, and in rural places (and we have a lot of those) our roads mostly have less traffic, making cars faster and more practical than the rail.
It's not universal, though: for short trips through very dense areas like the areas around New York, Washington DC, or Atlanta, the local trains are much better than driving.
Also, the roads go to many more places over here than the trains can manage - Were I to walk to the nearest train station from my home, it'd probably take about two hours. This mindset is: "If I'm going to have to take a taxi or drive to the train station, I might as well just drive to where I'm going in the first place."
Ah yes, that makes sense. I always forget how friggin' big America is. "Overpopulated planet" my ass. :)
This is weird. I'd think trains are perfect for America. From the prices I hear, air travel is very expensive in the US (one of the few things where Europe is cheaper), and traveling long in a car is just agony (at least to me). It's just too cramped. So trains really should be successful.
Alex added:
I have seldom seen Amtrak beat road for speed.
My reliable commute by car used to be between 50 and 200 minutes for 38 miles.
To accomplish the same by Amtrak/bus bridge used to take 90 minutes, but the worst derailment we had added another 3 hours to that, and even something simple like Union Pacific failing to set the switch (points) to bring us to the platform cost us an hour at my station.
Over a longer distance, say Oakland to Santa Barbara, this is easily a 6 hour drive, and a 12 hour train ride.
If Amtrak sux, that could be seen as just a different symptom of America's attitude to trains. Some countries, like France and Japan, have wonderful and speedy train systems.
Maybe it is America's love of being A Rugged Individualist. A car is an expression of that.
Don informs:
As I understand it, its a population density thing. There are less people per square mile in most of America than in most of Europe, and in rural places (and we have a lot of those) our roads mostly have less traffic, making cars faster and more practical than the rail.
It's not universal, though: for short trips through very dense areas like the areas around New York, Washington DC, or Atlanta, the local trains are much better than driving.
Also, the roads go to many more places over here than the trains can manage - Were I to walk to the nearest train station from my home, it'd probably take about two hours. This mindset is: "If I'm going to have to take a taxi or drive to the train station, I might as well just drive to where I'm going in the first place."
Ah yes, that makes sense. I always forget how friggin' big America is. "Overpopulated planet" my ass. :)
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Greg Heins Photo
Greg Heins Photo.The only pity is that he, like so many photographers, considers 600 pixels a large size for the web. I think it's a pity, I like to see pictures at 1200 to 1600 pixels on the long side, and that's what I put up myself.
I like the one above, I like pictures looking through trees/bushes, it plays with space and shapes and lines all at the same time.
Ooh, and these ones, with the snow. What a sense of space!
Screen rotation
TTL pointed me to a tip I was not aware of: in Mac OS X you can rotate your screen. I guess if you like to read very tall web pages, for example. With an Apple widescreen monitor, it looks quite spectacular.
I can imagine at least one good use for it: if you need to see your photos as large as possible in Photoshop, and they are portrait orientation.
By the way, don't judge me by the wallpaper. I'm not gay, really. It was like this when I took over the apartment, and the walls are the last thing I need to get done. I have put in new carpet, new windows and door, new curtains, new furniture. But having the apartment painted makes such a mess that I haven't faced it yet.
Alex said:
I think it was the quintessential tweeness of the (insert word meaning printed strip between two colours/textures of wall) that EO thought may spark the latent homophobe in his audience. [Indeed. A cute old couple lived here before.]
Now, what is strange is the spell checker just rejected homophobe, it's only suggestion being homophone. Is this the start of Newspeak, the word doesn't exist, so I can't say what I want to. It's like the Scrabble game on my cell phone. Just turned out I had an NGGRIE in my rack, and no S to make a laughing word. Unfortunately the word which would have scored the highest points is a word which is taboo, and the game had it excluded from its dictionary.
Funny old world, I was on an adult enabled MSN film board, and my profile was rejected because of the use of the word Hitchcock, as in Alfred!
'nother funny one, I submitted an erotic story on-line to a forum for such things. My carefully constructed text was rejected because of the pub name, "The Cock O'Barton". I renamed it to another pub in S. Manchester where the story was set.
I can imagine at least one good use for it: if you need to see your photos as large as possible in Photoshop, and they are portrait orientation.
By the way, don't judge me by the wallpaper. I'm not gay, really. It was like this when I took over the apartment, and the walls are the last thing I need to get done. I have put in new carpet, new windows and door, new curtains, new furniture. But having the apartment painted makes such a mess that I haven't faced it yet.
Alex said:
I think it was the quintessential tweeness of the (insert word meaning printed strip between two colours/textures of wall) that EO thought may spark the latent homophobe in his audience. [Indeed. A cute old couple lived here before.]
Now, what is strange is the spell checker just rejected homophobe, it's only suggestion being homophone. Is this the start of Newspeak, the word doesn't exist, so I can't say what I want to. It's like the Scrabble game on my cell phone. Just turned out I had an NGGRIE in my rack, and no S to make a laughing word. Unfortunately the word which would have scored the highest points is a word which is taboo, and the game had it excluded from its dictionary.
Funny old world, I was on an adult enabled MSN film board, and my profile was rejected because of the use of the word Hitchcock, as in Alfred!
'nother funny one, I submitted an erotic story on-line to a forum for such things. My carefully constructed text was rejected because of the pub name, "The Cock O'Barton". I renamed it to another pub in S. Manchester where the story was set.
Names
By the way, I used to wonder how Prince and Madonna could choose such self-aggrandizing monikers. But then I found out that both of them actually were given those first names by their parents.
Can you imagine naming your child "Prince" or "Madonna"? No wonder they both grew up with aspirations of world domination. :)
Can you imagine naming your child "Prince" or "Madonna"? No wonder they both grew up with aspirations of world domination. :)
Machinima
I mentioned the art of making movie out of video games, and Peaceful Blade reminded me of the correct term for it, "machinima", and pointed to this funny and raunchy example.
Obviously you can't make good movies with this tool, it is made for gaming, not movie making. I don't see a great leap to a tool which is made for movie making though. Software with relatively easy-to-use tools for amateur film makers, so they don't have to get a degree in 3D animation, but can simply ask the characters to do what they should, and so on. This software could be sold with extra modules for various characters and settings for what you need. Maybe you could buy a complete model of 42nd Street in NYC, for example.
If somebody made this, I think we could see quite interesting movies being made by single authors. What William Gibson called "the garage Kubrick", and sort of made the focus of his wonderful novel Pattern Recognition, except that one was based on the technology of around the millennium, and so one person couldn't do it.
Actually exceptionally clever individuals are already sort of getting there, witness Till Nowak's Delivery. This short film is pretty damn awesome, it's hard to believe it's made by one man, more or less. I have a 96MB version of the whole nine-minute film, which I downloaded a couple of years ago, but it seems it's not available for free download anymore, they are selling it on DVD. (If it were me, I'd sell it as a download, much more interest in that, rather than wait for a DVD.)Update: Alex points to this interesting movie.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
The Artist Once More Known As Prince
The Artist Once More Known As Prince may not actually be the person behind this attack against his own fan sites. I hope so, for otherwise it must be one of the dumbest moves in public relations ever.
Some of the fan sites are uniting.
I think even just legally he is on shaky ground here, to say the least. Normally the copyright to photos of a person belongs to the photographer, not the subject, and I doubt very much that Prince has bought the copyright to all the photos ever taken of him. And to assert that the copyright to tattoos of his likeness belongs to him is just plain idiotic.
TTL injected:
His case, if he has one, would be about trademark rights. Not copyright. He does own the trademark to his likeness. Registered or not.
The question is what constitutes a violation. Use of his likeness in news, encyclopaedia or documentary context? Probably not. Pushing a product or service based on or exploiting his likeness? Probably yes.
Hey, how come there's no Prince photo decorating your post? ;-)
You're quite right, I have corrected it now.
Big Brudder
Do we need to fingerprint all school kids?
Pascal said:
This is not enough. All humans should be rounded up and exiled on some small planet from which escape is near impossible, too remote from other planets anyway. Then intelligent life in the Universe would be safe from those barbaric mad hairless apes.
Maybe this already happened?
Pascal said:
This is not enough. All humans should be rounded up and exiled on some small planet from which escape is near impossible, too remote from other planets anyway. Then intelligent life in the Universe would be safe from those barbaric mad hairless apes.
Maybe this already happened?
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