Friend Jeff sent me this.

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Amanda Waller JLU Action Figure

Cool.

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Lennon OLPC Ad

It's one thing to use someone's image in an ad. It's quite another to fake their voice and have someone endorse something that didn't even exist at the time of their death.

Poor taste.

FAIL.

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Random Non-Sequiters

To point out that experts are wrong, however, is to misunderstand the purpose of them. Their function is not to provide knowledge, and still less clear thinking. Instead, it is to provide certainty. People hate dissonance, doubt and uncertainty. Experts help dispel these.

Let's Go Surfing

» Some character head shots friend's Adam and Comfort did of the cast of Pushing Daisies. Such a bummer that show got canceled.

Oh and speaking of Pushing Daisies, the actress that plays Chuck, Anna Friel, stars in the upcoming Wil Farrell Land of the Lost thing. I was pretty much planning to ignore seeing that movie until I learned she was in it. Now it looks like I'll see it. I like Chuck. Damn it.

» Batman and Robin Illustration I saw on someone's tumblr.

» Simple Java based Gif Animation Maker Runs on Win/Linux/Mac if you have Java installed.

» CaseConverter.com is a simple website that can convert your text case (UPPER, lower, Sentence, etc.)

» Tableizer is a web tool for converting Excel or Calc spreadsheet date to HTML tables.

» Kirk yelling Kahhhhhnnnn! action figure.

» Sharetabs is a tinyurl like service that lets you create a tiny url to a whole list of links. You put your list of links in, and they gie you one tinyurl that links to a page of thumbnails of those links that also can be loaded all at once.

» Program for Merging Mp3s together.

» DSpeech is a nice freeware text to speech program for windows.

» Fables might be an ABC TV series kindof a bummer since this show really should be on cable to do it justice.

» GMail added a Task/Todo list a little while back. I haven't used it much so far, I actually use a Google Doc list for a task list more at the moment.

» There has been talk that we may eventually go to a new more open office plan with half height cubicle walls. If we do, I think I'll buy myself this chair.

» If Twilight was 10 Times Shorter and 100 Times More Honest. If you are a guy that sat thru the Twilight movie, you'll find this hilarious.

» AIV DVD Cutter looks like a good win program for grabbing snippets off your DVDs.

» 20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving you Twitter Experience. Endless Tweets is really good, it lets you keep scrolling to the bottom of the page instead of hitting the "older" link.

» Got an Eee PC or something you ned basic ftp access with? Try FireFTP.

» Portable version of Open Office 3.0 which will read docx files.

» Mailboxmap.com finds Mailbox, post office and UPS locations.

» Left 4 Dead in 4k. Slick.

» share1t.com (notice that ONE instead of an EYE) looks to be a pretty easy file upload service that provides you a tinyurl style link.

» Capture.net is a weird looking little windows program with a swiss-army knife array of odd little features, but the one that is really usueful is the screen capture utility which is really easy to use for grabbing a specific section of your screen.

Videos

» Somewhat creepy, but very impressive video when you consider that the whole thing is comprised of Still images from a Nikon D200 DSLR camera.

» Jetpack Dreams book trailer.

» Don Hertzfeldt, Rejected. A seriously deranged collection of stick figure cartoons. NSFW.

» Mac vs. PC... Um not what you think, or maybe it is, dunno, anyway this is pretty cool.

» iPhone, iBoobs app. Not sure how often someone really would need this application.

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Random Thoughts

Been out of the random blogging mode for months now. Blame Twitter. It sucks up alot of the time I'd usually spend on blogging.

Been going through my starred items in Google Reader. I "star" items to mark them to look at later. Sometimes I don't have time, often I want to remember to blog or send the item.

Beyond, the Twitter, I've also been sharing Google items by email more. It's just so easy to to hit that Share with note button instead of blogging. So for the 5 or 6 people on my regular email list, some of this stuff might seem like reruns. Most of the below, I originally starred between Nov 24 and Dec 7th.

» I was pretty happy to find out earlier in the month that Caprica the Battlestar Galactica prequel show has been picked up for the whole first season. I hope that means that the creators have had alot of leeway to develop the show without much network interference. I also hope they can catch lightning in a bottle a second time.

» In March Coby plans $100 PCs for places like Rite-Aid and Kroger. Not sure how hackable these will be... but this is a pretty big game changer. The $265 Eee PC has been great, but getting the price down to $100, even if a limited device changes the entire tech landscape, especially if these things turnout to be fairly ez to install your own flavor of Linux on.

Let's Go Surfing

» Make an iPhone stand out of a couple of Bulldog paperclips.

» Citymelt provides and absolutely insane amount of demographic and census data on over 50,000 cities. Great site.

» Twitpay (a site that lets you send someone money as easy as sending a direct message.) seems like a really neat idea. but with everyone passing out their twitter passwords to every possible service, there may not be enough security left to make twitpay work. In anycase, Twitpay doesn't actually work at the moment for anything other than playmoney anyway, since at present there is no way to initially fund or cash out from the service.

» I have an older keyboard at work that I love, it has a very noisy click. ClicKey is a tiny piece of freeware that will click everytime you hit a key... it's really obnoxious.There are 26 different key press sounds to pick from.

» Bunches of Photoshop Brushes

» Would buying a Kindle save you money? Probably not. But they are still neat.

» Make a Papercraft Hall 9000 with cute little Feet

» Stinto.net is a neat service that lets you create instant disposable chatrooms online. They are in a Tinyurl like form so you could Twitter them too.

» It's pretty neat that there are Netbooks like this Dell Mini 9 that are coming standard with 3G built-in. Wi-fi is great, but ubiquitous 3G enabled laptops will be a game changer even more than Wi-Fi.

» This Wall Chess is a great idea

» Phoload has software for various phones, lots of Javabased stuff there. I originally discovered Twim a jar twitter client for my phone there.

» Great Weather Site goingtorain.com.

» Nice photo heavy article of Monochromatic Photography

» Really cool laptop chair. I'd love to have one of these.

» Here's a program that will let you use multiple keyboards and mice on a windows computer two people can pass control back and forth. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks useful for niche needs.

» Compfight.com is a great Flickr search program for fining comps for design jobs.

Videos

» Mega Man Fan Film Trailer.

» Olivia Munn Dancing

» Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart make mashed potatoes

» Milionaires, Movie Stars and Rock Gods. This was posted on friend Dan's blog awhile back.

» Jon Taplin America 3.0 Rebooting after the American Crash

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The Spirit

I know it's going to be bad but...

The Spirit is currently a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I'm having second thoughts about seeing this.

"There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material."
-Roger Ebert

"The best thing about The Spirit is that it was directed by [Frank] Miller....The worst thing about The Spirit is that it was written by Frank Miller."
-Giant Magazine

"A disaster in nearly every way. Samuel L. Jackson seems to be channeling Grace Jones by way of Uncle Remus from Song of the South."
-Movieboy.com

"Fuck the spirit was one of the worst movies i've seen in a long time. I knew it would be bad, but not that bad".
- A guy who dressed as Wolverine on Halloween that really loves Comic Books on my Twitter list.

Should I go see it this weekend?

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Facebook

I just got a friend request on Facebook today. It was someone I'm friends with, so I accepted it.

I am not a big fan of Facebook. I rarely use it. I have my Twitter and Flickr set up to autopost to it, so that it looks more or less like I'm participating in Facebook, but I'm really not.

People on Facebook are so locked down. 90% of the people I find on Facebook live in it on a gated protected page. In that regard, it seems antithetical to the internet to me. I see the internet as open, but Facebook will not even let someone look at an open profile (like mine) without signing in first. That's just not in keeping with the spirit of the internet to me.

I do log in to Facebook on occasion, but only because there are people I like, who use Facebook as their only online internet channel, and if I want to keep up with those friends online, it is the only channel for me to do so.

I prefer, Twitter, Blogs and Flickr however, they are much more open, in every sense of the word.

(But Facebook friends... keep on keeping on... I'm glad you're digging it.)

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I saw this on a twitter person's blog. It's really cool. Watch it.

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Endless Tweets

If you have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox and you use Twitter, you might want to install this Endless Tweet Script (Install button is in the upper right corner). Once it is installed, you can endlessly scroll down Twitter pages as the script will automatically in that ajaxy sort of way load the next page's tweets and append them to the bottom of the page. No more clicking the older button!

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Chip Kidd Google Talk.

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Interesting Youtube video about the creation of the Obama campaign logo

Creative director Sol Sender tells the story of conception and birth of the Obama 08 logo, including the strategy behind it, developmental concepts and finalist designs for the identity not chosen by the campaign.

Part 1 | Part 2

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The web wants to know who I am

Ok... I'm seeing alot of buzz about OpenID, Some Facebook login thing or another and now Google Friend Connect.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but all the above seem to be a scheme to create a single sign-id for the web. (Am I off base on this???)

I just noticed that you can now log in to this friend connect with a Twitter ID. You can also log on to Friend Connect with a Google ID. does this mean that eventually someone is going to be able to wrangle their way into my Google account using my twitter ID?

Also how does this whole thing work with Phishing? Should I really be typing my Google or Twitter ID into any service that has a Google connect badge?

If I log in to one Google Friend Connect site will all other friend connect sites instantly recognize who I am if they also have the friend connect stuff running? What does that do for anonymity?

Is it that hard to keep track of multiple passwords? for those that don't like to do that, don't browsers already do a good job of auto completing the field?

Is this convience worth the security and anonymity tradeoffs?

I'm not sure I'm down with this whole concept... but with all the existing services I use moving toward this, it seems less and less likely that I will have a choice to participate or not.

Am I off base on this? Is my paranoia unfounded? What are your thoughts? Post in my comments.

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Wow, Great Lecture

Arithmetic Population & Energy By Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus, Department Of Physics, University of Colorado At Boulder lecture titled: The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our Inability to Understand The Exponential Function

It sounds incredibly boring, and the production values are really Open Access Cable, but it's a really incredibly eye-opening lecture.

Everyone should take the 75 min or so and watch it.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Direct links to the parts:
Part [1], Part [2], Part [3], Part [4], Part [5], Part [6], Part [7], Part [8].

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The Day the Earth Stood Still

I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still at the AMC Alpine Star last night.

Random non-structured thoughts on it below.

Not a bad movie but it is sort of a slow and plodding one. Can't say that there is anything too terribly original in it either. Keanu Reeves did a good job playing the most wooded version of himself possible. That fits the character he was tasked to play however, so I didn't find it to be much on an issue.

The movie does wimp out a bit, I would have liked to see it get a little preachier. It definitely needed a more climactic ending. Most of the heart of the movie comes from Jennifer Connley. I think she does a good job with what she has to work with. Wil Smith's son Jaden Smith plays the kid. He does a fine enough job for a child actor, but most of the movie you really want to just slap the kid, something that Jennifer Connley's character really should have done at several points.

Much too much of the action is given away in the commercials and trailers. Had you not seen some of that so much in the lead up, it probably would have been more powerful on screen.

In closing, I think I would have prefered to have seen this movie as a television fugitive on the run type show instead of as a movie. With more time, as a TV series, I think they could have explored the subject matter better, I would have been especially interested in a TV show that focused on more meet-ups like the one in the McDonalds.

There's not much out at the moment, so you could go see, but really you aren't going to miss out on anything by waiting to see this on the small screen either. Sci-fi fans should see, but don't worry about being in any hurry about it.

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The Uniques #5 99¢ Digital PDF or CBZ NOW Available!

My good friends Adam Withers and Comfort Love have just released Issue #5 of their Superhero Comic Book Series The Uniques!

Issue #5
Goth Girls

The team has been kidnapped and their only hope for rescue lies with... Singe and Kid Quick. Darkness falls on our heroes in Uniques #5: The Goth Girls!

It's a great book. If you've been picking it up, you'll continue to enjoy the series with #5. If you haven't got it yet... then I'd recommend picking up all five issues, they're only 99¢ each and you'll get hours more fun out of reading them and only spend half as much as you would on a movie ticket.

It's Good stuff! BUY IT NOW!

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