Does that artist look familiar? It should.
It’s Biff from Back to the Future! www.tomwilson.com
Tom Wilson will be at Disneyland doing an artist signing November 4th if you’re looking for a painting or poster or autograph or what-have-you.
Archive for August, 2006
LikeIn my office at work I’ve got this torchiere light and because I’m lazy I have it hooked up to a wireless power switch. With a flick of the battery-operated switch on my desk the light turns on and off.
This setup has worked well for over a year. Until now.
Yesterday my light started turning on and off all by itself. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, but today the same thing happened around 10AM. Repeatedly.
I am now engaged in a daily battle with an unknown opponent. Someone in this building must have the same type of transmitter, and by chance it also happens to operate on “Channel E”. (The channel is not changeable – you’d have to buy a whole new switch that uses a different one.)
When he turns my light off, I turn it back on, which probably turns his off, and we go back and forth for a little while.
Sometimes things will be fine for an hour or two, then the light will go off again and we’ll get into a heated battle of flickery switchitude! Or switchery flickitude. Whatever you want to call it, it’s ON.
Eventually I got tired of fighting and tried to send him a morse-code SOS. dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot.
I don’t think he knew what I was trying to do because he just flicked the hell out of his switch after that.
Then I tried to send him a message in the UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF MATH. Unfortunately the Fibonacci sequence was lost on him/her/it because I got nothing back.
I have no idea what to do at this point. I could go around to all of the other building tenants within a 100 foot radius of my desk, angrily waving the switch in the air and be like “DUDES. WTF! Let’s be friends.”
Or I could just continue this battle and hope the other side gives up.
Passive-aggressive works for me!
According to this supposedly leaked speech from Nintendo, the Wii is going to launch in the US on October 2nd for $175. They’re allegedly throwing a ton of peripherals into the box, too… A white or black Wii, a Wii remote, a nun-chuck connector, a classic controller, a sports game, and a voucher of “1000 coins” to buy games online, a-la Xbox Live Arcade.
I’m a little skeptical that this speech is the real deal…It announces a VR head-mounted-display peripheral. WHAT.
Nintendo IS making some kind of announcement on September 14th, so we’ll just have to wait and see…
edit: The paper is crumpled in exactly the same spots on each page. Nice work, Photoshop Master!
This vocoder tutorial celebrates the almighty power of the vocoder!
The tutorial includes before and after mp3s and the results are astounding. What started off as a nerdy-sounding Finnish guy singing mostly off-key has been transformed into a robot singing in perfect pitch in a space-synth extravaganza!
You have to hear it to believe it. It actually makes me want to go out there and start making music.
Hey guys, check this out.
Wooden Indian, I challenge you to a staring contest!
YOU TOTALLY BLINKED! HA HA!
What’s missing from this picture?
My wedding ring.
I lost it on our trip to San Francisco. Tammy and I had just finished up a morning at the Bliss spa. She got a massage and I got my first facial ever.
The facial was nice. Astrud Gilberto and Norah Jones quietly sang to me through a speaker in the ceiling while I lay in a towel-covered lounge chair in a darkened room as as a nice lady rubbed nice-smelling things all over my face. I even had cucumbers on my eyes – the whole bit.
This facial included an arm/hand and leg/foot massage, complete with massage oil! That was super, but it left my fingers and toes in a greasy, slippery state. Somewhere between leaving the locker room that morning and sitting down to lunch that afternoon my ring must have just slipped off.
I’ve retraced my steps and made all kinds of phone calls. I’ve been checking the lost and found at Craig’s List San Francisco every single day. So far nothing’s turned up, and I’ve pretty much lost all hope.
Today, on my three-year wedding anniversay, I really miss it. 
My eyes are going bad.
I’m 28 and I’ve never had to wear glasses. In the past two or three months, however, I’ve noticed that I’m starting to have trouble focusing on my computer screens.
I guess I only realized the problem a few days ago. I was thinking to myself “I used to be able to read that text without squinting, and now I can’t. Wait a…OH GOD MY EYES”
That realization scared the hell out of me, and I knew I had to take action! Desparate times call for desparate measures, so that night I went to the grocery store and immediately put myself on an all-carrot, all-the-time diet.
I had hoped that this would shock my system with enough Vitamin A to snap my eyes back into their awesomely perfect state toute suite.
Unfortunately after a day and a half of eating nothing but carrots, my body fought back with some hardcore diarrhea. See what happens when you try to do a good thing for your body? I guess I put my colon on fiber overload. Sorry, colon.
Anyway I did some research and found that carrots are *a* good source of Vitamin A, but probably not the best source for a significant amount of it. So I quit my diet right then and there.
Yesterday I switched to taking Vitamin A supplements. 8000 I.U. per day is 5000 more than what the government recommends, so I am expecting RESULTS. The tolerable upper intake level for a human being is acutally 10,000 IU per day…any more than that and it’s HELLO CANCER! Or osteoperosis. Or a host of other equally scary medical problems.
Like you, I always assumed that poor vision was not reversible. This is mostly true. However I have read reports of malnourished prisoners in other countries who have had their lousy eyesight magically healed after a few weeks of eating good food and taking the right vitamins.
I hope this works…
Internet Explorer is not the greatest web browser in the world. That’s not news.
What is news is that IE7 (in beta right now and due before year’s end) really is going a long way toward fixing IE’s legendary and historically broken CSS implementation.
The IE developers’ blog explains a lot of what has changed in IE7, and it makes me happy. This isn’t just a case of Microsoft paying lip service to a bunch of cranky bloggers. These changes are real! I’ve installed the beta and the difference between it and older versions of Internet Explorer is basically unbelievable.
For the first time…ever…Internet Explorer isn’t ignoring web standards. Pages that render properly in Firefox require little or no alteration at all to work in IE7.
As someone who has to work with xhtml and css on a regular basis, this is incredible. There’s no way I’ll switch away from Firefox, but man this will help a lot when it comes time to test across browsers.
The Sci-Fi channel seems to have this crazy habit of cancelling my favorite shows…especially when those shows are the highest-rated on the network.
I don’t understand it. First Farscape was cancelled in 2003. That broke my heart, but I got over it.
Now, ten seasons and more than 200 episodes later, Stargate SG-1 has gotten the axe.
I guess they figure the show has run its course. And if you think about it, ten years is pretty remarkable for any sci-fi show. That’s a real shame, because things were starting to get interesting again with the whole Ori/Ancient backstory…
I’m no big fan of Stargate Atlantis, but I guess I’ll have to start watching it now. Sucks.
Cory Doctorow is invading my turf!
Disneyland is pretty much ruined now. I really hope I never see him there in person. I wonder if he’s able to go 30 minutes without mentioning his DRM/Copyright crusade to anyone who will listen.
For someone who hates our copyright system, he sure loves Disney…one of the biggest users/abusers of copyright out there. Figure that one out. Cory Sucks.
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