The Front Fell Off!

It's not real as circulating emails claim, but still very funny.
By John Clarke and Brian Dawe.

Googlighting

Apparently this is Microsoft attacking Google Docs. It's pretty weird.

To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios

To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, hardcover book.
[High sticker price, but notice you can get it much cheaper, even new.]

I couldn't find this book as paperback or ebook, but when you get it, you understand why: it's a gorgeous and huge hardcover, big in every way, including page count. And it's beautifully produced, big color pictures everywhere, high-rez renders from Pixar films, sketches, and photos.

I warmly recommend it if you like Pixar movies or you're curious about how an animation movie studio is run, or at least can be run if it's done by these people.
This is a company I'd love to work for. People there work very hard*, but they are inspired to do so, and they are supported from every side by a company who loves fun and cooperation, and does everything it can to make both happen. For example, their third home was built from the ground up to have all the communal facilities in the middle, so everybody would get to see everybody else daily, instead of being cut off into segments by roads and separate buildings.

Fun fact: the bulk of Steve Job's fortune actually came from Pixar, not Apple. And also, when he bought Pixar in the eighties (and he supported it through a whole decade of running in the red), he thought he'd bought a computer company, which it was, with a small animation department which very few people thought was very important.


*Toy Story II was finished under such enormous time pressure (a lot had to be remade if the film were to be really good) that a number of people ended up with actual health damage from it. And Pixar took big and permanent steps to prevent this kind of thing happening again, both with scheduling of films, and with in-house ergonomics experts and such. 

A Gallery of the Most Accurate Female Video Game Costumes

A Gallery of the Most Accurate Female Video Game Costumes, picture post.

"Failure notice" spam (updated)

In the past week or so, I seem to be getting great amounts of those "failure notice" type mails you get from a mail server when an email could not be delivered. But they are not answers to any mails I've ever sent. I think they are some kind of spam (which is sometimes confirmed in the middle of all the code and tech-talk, "spam likelihood 99%" or such). But they don't have links to any sales pages, so I don't know how they are supposed to work.

Does anybody else notice a rise in this phenomenon?
Know how it works?

Update:
Thanks to commentors. Indeed it seems related to an old email address of mine (maccreator.com) having been used as fake return address on spam. Not long ago I took an old main address off a spam filter service, and I'd forgotten that the other email address was forwarded to that one for filtering.

Mr. Inappropriate

Well, we all do that, although we can hope for more subtle endings.

And she didn't even show anything much. But then Danish princesses tend to be beautiful. 

Women usually don't understand this kind of behavior. I think they don't have that kind of addiction, not to that degree. For us men, it's like living in starvation and then finding yourself in a room with a huge, luxurious free buffet which only opens in 20 minutes. It's inhumane to expect you to just ignore it.

The odd thing, and little known fact, is that "eating" (if you catch my subtle metaphor here) really never satisfies, though one continues to believe it will. It's a no-win game.

Michael Reno Harrell - Southern Suggestions

[Thanks to Lou]

SLR camera simulator

Thanks to Ray for pointing to this: DSLR camera simulator.

It simulates the effects of various settings of an advanced cameras. Some of the results you only see after pressing the shutter button.
This one for instance was "taken" at 1/10 second, and got shaken.

(I should say that shake-safe shutter speeds vary a lot with the person, the lens, any built-in stabilizor mechanism, and not the least luck (take several pictures if you're in doubt and it's an important picture).

King, not the King

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

  -- Fred Allen

I can't understand why anybody would pay to get a novel, when he can write one himself and earn a million doing it. 

  -- Stephen King

(OK, King didn't say that, so far as I know, I made it up, but I thought it a nice counterpoint.) 

Nothing mad doing

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

           -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

I think that's a quite pessimistic and cynical view. I've occasionally been mad at a good friend of mine, and then I've seen her as a controlling bitch. But when I'm in a good mood, I see her as a lovely person with a good sense of humor. Which view is true? Perhaps neither, or both. But if I have to choose, I'd take the latter. Not only is it more pleasant and fun, but I do think it's more likely to be the truth, since anger is such a strong emotion that it tends to skew one's view of anything. 

Bar side wall at night

(Clickable) 

Fuji X10. Taken around midnight hand-held, just one street light, quite dark. I'm a bit amazed I got detail in the black-painted door and window. In fact I could have lifted the detail up quite a bit more in Photoshop, but then I lost much of the "midnight feel" of it, so I gave that up. 

I think it has a peculiar atmosphere to it, the formality of the composition gives a strength to the spooky, scruffy, lonely street/house. It has life to it, the building is being used every day, but it's a sort of twisted, neglected life. Or at least it seems to to an immigrant from Denmark, where you have to go very far to the edge of things to find any buildings in this kind of bad repair. Here in Northern UK they are everywhere. 

Tiny Robotic Bee doesn't work?

Tiny Robotic Bee Assembles Itself Like Pop-Up Book, article and video.

This is interesting, but unfortunately it also exemplifies what's rampant these days: unclear, sloppy, and inconclusive "reporting".
I wrote in their comments:

It's a *bit* of a flaw in the article that it does not state whether this little robot works in any way yet. I guess not. But it would be nice to have some statements about how far it is from working. I see it needs an external power-source to flap the wings, that's not promising, and the video does not show it flying. 

"...have been working on bio-inspired robots that are about the same size as a bee, can fly and can work autonomously as a robotic colony." ... sounds like it is working. Not clear writing, folks.

This is from Wired, one of the largest tech-oriented publications we have, both on paper and digitally. Shouldn't there be a minimum standard for completeness of articles in such a publication? Surely the question of whether the technology they report on actually works yet or not, is one of the most essential elements to make clear.