A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

Just watched A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash Really interesting documentary. Early part of the film has a facinating high level look at the recent history of the world through an "oil lense".

Latter portion of the movie looks at what we can do to replace oil in the short term.

It's not a shiny happy movie. It's not a depressing movie, but it does illustrate the point that, eventually cheap oil is going to run out and then we're Fncked!

It should be available at your local video store, Netflix, iTunes or maybe even on that site which is a combination of what Johnny Depp is famous for playing, combined with the name of that guy who made Transformers and Armagedon.

The movie is an hour and a half and you should give it a watch, it's good.

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Let's Drop the Familiarity

Listening to alot of political shows this morning.

Why have we got to the point that everyone refers to everyone else by their first names.

Didn't it used to be that friends referred to you by your first name, and people who were not your friends, or didn't know you well, referred to you by your last name and the appropriate honorific? (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr, Senator, whatever)

We need to bring back the honorific and the last name address.

I don't believe this false friendly familiarity thing serves our society.

Also the term citizen should be reasserted over folks, but that's another rant.

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Let's Go Surfing

» Wordoff looks to be a real cool way to strip back HTML to the bare basics. Useful!

» Flash Chess Online Chess Game that works in Flash.

» Very cool Tiny USB Keyboard. $25.

» Mouseless Browsing Firefox plugin, that lets you "click" on a hyperlink simply by typing a number on the keypad.

» Portable Piano gloves for $70

» Google Moderator Let's you create a place to submit questions for moderation for a forum. Interesting... but not terribly intuitive yet.

» Papercraft Puppets of Obama, McCain and Hillary too.

» Put's the size of the Earth in perspective abit.

» Ah L'Amour - Excellent Boy meets girl documentary

» Ok, now here's a great reason to get a Google Phone. This is going to be a killer app for me. GeoLife [video]

» Sarah Palin Swimsuit competion video surfaces. Thank god there's no Cheney swimsuit competion footage out there.

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» Planet McCain

» Don't ditch David Letterman

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Google Android

Google Android on T-Mobile looks nice. Hopefully by the time it gets to Sprint it will be even better.

However, it doesn't do video capture. Unless someone writes a nice Video Capture/Upload to Youtube or Upload to Flickr App, I don't see myself getting one of these anytime soon.

Everything else looks great, but the ball is currently dropped on video.

And I really love shooting video on my phone. :(

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Adobe CS 4 came out today

Take a look the New Features of Indesign.

Particularly the new Indesign Export to Flash. It let's you use Indesign to Export Multiple Page Flash documents with Page Flips etc. that you can embed in a Web Page as simply as a Youtube Video.

Scroll down to "Interactive document design with SWF file export" in the left column and click the Blue "Play" arrow by the unshaven guy.

Illustrator finally has multiple pages

Photoshop will paint on 3D models and you have to check out the "Content-Aware Scaling" It let's you scale images without distorting the people.

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Billy Mires the Straight Talk Express Bus Driver

Hey look, John McCain's Bus Driver is doing video blogs. ;)

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Lets Go Surfing

» If you have to make some diagrams or process charts. Portable Dia might be a good freeware app to take a look at. The fact that it is portable is nice too since you can have it on a USB Stick.

» Plorf Search and download Mp3s.

» Adobe Air is now in Beta for Linux I installed it on my Eee PC and it works well.

» Favtape is like Muxtape but with the ability to find songs by people you want to find songs by. Try the search. Whoa. (Here's a U2 Search Click on a Title and it will start playing.)

Random Non-Sequiters

Despite the anemic list of links above, I actually spent a fair amount of time surfing the internet today.

There's always lots of random stuff to look at. But it seems to be more mindless web channel surfing than anything else of late. Or maybe I've just commented on most everything on this blog in the last few years and I'm just a little jaded when it comes to new web stuff.

I don't know.

Is there anything you've been excited about on the internet lately? Anything I'm missing?

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A zefrank video

zefrank did a short video on his Flickr account.

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Microsoft: I'm a PC

Well it took them long enough to respond to the Mac Ads.

Well done.

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He will make Cheney Look like Ghandi

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O taking it up a notch

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A friend sent me this link to a cute cat video.

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Wolverine and the X-Men Animated

The entire first episode of Wolverine and the X-men is online. It's pretty good. If you're into this sort of thing, give it a click and watch it.

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Esquire Cover

Was in Barnes and Noble yesterday and I got the Esquire eInk cover.

The cover itself was on the third shelf in completely buried behind two other rows of magazines... which of course negated any passerby attraction the cover could have, since you could not see it.

The eInk is very cool but the screen backing is not an active matrix, it has a segmented backend similar in function to an LCD style lowend video game.

If I was designing this cover, I probably would have went with a more pictorial approach, a series of animated pictographs or cartoon characters, something that people would want to take apart and hack or at least display.

The Ford ad on the inside is a complete waste... the overprinted graphics almost completely obscure the eink itself. The designers do not seem to understand that eink is not a light emitting technology, it is in fact reflective like real ink, so designing an ad that would function best with flashing light behind it is puzzling. They would have been better off just using a blinking Ford Logo in some way.

Overall, I'm still very excited by the technology, but this implementation is less than inspiring. For $6 however, it is cool to have some functioning eInk.

Sony eReader

Also saw the Sony eInk, eReader in Target this week. $299, very very cool. Not sure if it's worth $300 yet. for $150 I probably would have bought it right there and then though. I'm guessing it's going to be a little bit before the price gets down that far.

If you get a chance to see the eReader at Target (look for it on an endcap in the electronics dept) Do so, also make sure you push some buttons. I'm guessing most people will walk by it and due to it's reflective nature, will not realize it is a working unit and instead they will think it has a fake paper screen.

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Hooray!

My good Friends Adam and Comfort have released the 4th issue of their comic book!

The Uniques #4
Karaoke Night

After some successes, our team is feeling good about themselves. But a celebration of their accomplishments and revelry in growing friendships takes a terrible turn as they find themselves caught up in a dangerous game that could cost them dearly.

It's only 99¢ for PDF or CBZ ($5 Printed copy will be available soon!)

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It's the Stupid People stupid

Just watched last night's Real Time with Bill Mahr and I have a thought.

Here's a possible reason why the Republicans are still doing so well, despite every reason why they shouldn't be.

People who vote for Republicans don't want to be considered stupid.

Democrats are not stopping at saying the (R)s are wrong, they're going as far as saying the (R)s are stupid. Perhaps not the (D) candidates themselves, but the rest of the party really wants to call the R out on their stupidity.

The Ds think that they are justified in calling the Rs stupid. By all rules of reason and logic the D's are justified. But you can't win that way. The Ds are attacking the R's where a large portion of their base is most vulnerable, they're attacking the Rs self-esteem.

The Ds are leaving the Rs nowhere to go and no way to save face and no way to regain their dignity. The Ds want vindication, they were right and the R's were wrong. The Ds want vindication more than they want political victory. The Rs want their dignity and to save face more than they want anything in their economic or social interests.

It's an emotional argument. And the D's are trying to use reason and logic to win an emotional argument. You can't use reason and logic to win an emotional argument.

Every time the Ds attack the Rs, the Rs can point out, "See the Ds are calling you stupid again." That is going to resonate with people with low self-esteem. People whose self esteem is attacked will try to protect their emotional well being even before their economic or physical well being.

As a side note, I think this is why the Republicans attack the Department of Education. Educated people generally have higher self esteem, and then those people would not be able to be manipulated by this very emotional technique.

The sad thing about my little rambling above... Rs are going to see me as calling them stupid too.

That's not my intent, but that emotional trap is a black hole and any reason or logic is enough to set it off.

Sigh.

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Palin inteview with Charlie Gibson.

Q. "Have you ever met with a Foreign Head of State?"
A. No.

Canada's Prime Minister must be feeling dissed right now, because I believe she's met with him, Canada would be a foreign nation.

Q. "Do you believe in the 'Bush Doctrine'"
A. Basically she did not know what the Bush Doctrine was.

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Let's Go Surfing

• Interesting Office on Wheels Volkswagen Concept car. It's probably easier to just use an RV or customize a mini-van though.

• Does anyone make a small cheap wireless keyboard that can be used with PCs?

• Kinetic Cellphone Chargers. Now that would be cool, just walking around would charge your cellphone.

• Bus Stop Swingset, just don't jump off into traffic.

• Etch a Sketch or My Documents Laptop cases are pretty cool.

• Wii Fit Balance Board and Goole Street View combined to let you walk around Google Maps. (Includes video.) Neat.

• Ok now this Drum program is the killer app for the Microsoft Surface Table.

• Kid's Treehouse Bedroom Really Really cool.

• Um... That Aquaman Costume really doesn't work and they should probably keep those three in the dark :)

• Here's a better version of Green Arrow and Black Canary from Katie Can Draw.

• Very cool $27 4GB Key Ring USB Drive.

• You should view every Lego mini fig video at this link. They are fantastic!

• Open Srcphp looks to be a neat guide to various open source php software. You can find the engines to duplicate some of the functionality of your favorite services within your own site here.

• PDF-XChange Viewer Nice freeware PDF reader. Very easy to comment on a PDF file and then export to an image. I can see alot of ways I can use this at home and work.

• Unmentionables a different type of greeting card. Click the link and then click View Inside Pages. There are about 20 cards.

• Legally recognized friendships? So umm... how would you break-up or divorce your friend? Seems like a weird government involvement. Seems like it would be better to just remove government completely than start legislating different legally binding levels of relationships.

• Interesting Magazine Coffee Table concept

• Scientific American Article that suggests praising children for how hard they worked, instead of telling them how smart they are. Interesting.

• Neatorama had this Seperated at Birth Photo of Christian Bale and Kermit the Frog.

Wow, that's two Kermit posts in one blog entry.

• HP is going to start selling Laptops in Recycled Messenger Bags instead of Boxes. Cool.

• Apple Computers may soon be watching your hands for gestures as well as watching you type.

• Green Lantern Movie Concept Art. No white gloves? Oh, you really should do the white gloves, somehow, there needs to be some white on those mits. Anyway, a couple more concept pictures at the link. Hopefully this movie does not get made, because y'know most movies suck, and they're just going to flood the market of what is a nice niche thing for me with lots of crappy merchandise.

• If you leave your computer on all night, and sleep within earshot of it, you might want to try Sleep.fm a social networking alarm. You can set alarms on it and friends can even leave messages for you to wake up too. Interesting.

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Let's Go Surfing

• Not quite sure what the point is to in car Wi-Fi

• MotionX Dice looks like a neat dice rolling program for iPhones and iTouch. You roll the dice by shaking your device.

• Vid2mp3 is a neat service that will convert Youtube videos to audio Mp3s.

• Simpson-ized Superheroes

• Breaking up is hard to do? but the web makes it easy.

• Convert any USB stick into a security key for OSX.

• College vs. Certification tests What do you think?

• Cool Tiny Camcorder Ball

• Thinkpad laptop with built in Wacom tablet.

• Nice browser Vectoroids game

• Mobile Microwave Now finally, Hot Pockets on the go.

• After having heard about it for quite some time I just listened to the Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech. eh, really didn't do much for me.

• Pixlr is a nice Browser based Photoshop app. Never have much use for these, as I'm never at a computer that doesn't have an image editor. But still nice technology.

• Opentape is some really slick open source php code that lets you host your own muxtape style site. Unfortunately it requires php 5 and and my host is running php 4 something.

• I downloaded and installed Microsofts Virtual Desktop Manager PowerToy Basically it gives you the abillity to minimize and maximize groups of open applications at the same time.

• Frets on Fire Open Source Guitar Hero for OSX, Windows or Linux.

• Ubiquity is a really slick addon to Firefox that gives you command line like functionality and natural language processing for the web. Reall neat.

• TVWeb360 streams video of lots of streaming tv stations.

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