I predict the imminent death of email, instant messaging, faxes, and phones of all kinds. Someone working for HP Labs has developed a robotic helium blimp to deliever messages (in post-it note form) throughout an office. With something that cool, why would you need any other form of communication.? The way I see it, this might even replace talking. The coolest thing is that this wasn’t even part of his job, he just did it in his free time. I wish I still had the motivation to work on cool personal projects. Be sure to check out this video of the blimp in action. The best part is at the end when guy receiving the message acts suprised and gives the blimp a big hug. Good job, robotic blimp!
Monthly Archive for May, 2004
Ok, my math’s been a little rusty since I left school but it looks like 2/4 The Promise Ring + 1/4 The Dismemberment Plan = Maritime. I’m not sure though, I keep thinking Planck’s constant should be in there somewhere. Whatever the formula, this is Eric Axelson’s (bass player of the Dismemberment Plan) new effort after the break up of the D-Plan. I didn’t know what to think at first since Davey von Bohlen’s (formerly of The Promise Ring) voice has always been kind of a love/hate deal with me, but I just listened to several songs on their site and he’s much better than I remember. It sounds like some good, good stuff; Hooky, melodic pop driven by bouncy bass lines.
Ok, I’ve been having CSS issues for some time and I’ve decided they need to be resolved since its bugging the crap out of me. I don’t know if any of you using IE have noticed an issue where the text in the entries seems to disappear but will reappear if you highlight it or scroll the page. It’s as if the background color is being drawn on top of the text randomly. Doesn’t seem to happen when viewing with FireFox, so I’m thinking its one of those Microsoft related CSS inconsistencies. I just can’t seem to find out what. Anybody out there ever run into a problem like this with your stylesheets? Any suggestions? (Other than switching to Mozilla/FireFox/Opera full time. I’d still like the page to render right in IE regardless of what browser I personally use.)
If you had told me prior to last night that a movie featuring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Christopher Walken could be so completely and thoroughly mediocre as Envy, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But, as Jolayne and I found out last night, I’d be wrong and you’d be right. It had a few scattered bits of moderate funny, but mostly in just a quick gag or two. Nothing about the plot or characters was really that memorable or funny and in the last 5 minutes or so seemed to stop trying entirely. As a side note, I don’t know why all movies with Christopher Walken don’t contain the credit “…and starring Christopher Walken as himself” because let’s face it that’s pretty much what he does. Not that I don’t appreciate it. The bright side of the whole thing is that we saw a trailer for Napoleon Dynamite that we pretty much laughed straight through. That looks like its going to be the most friggin’ sweet nerd movie ever.
The developer release of MovableType 3.0 was announced today and it looks like there’s been a good deal of fallout about it, primarily around the new licensing structure. The new model would only still be free if you were limited to one author and 3 weblogs. Anything beyond that starts costing $$$. I’ve only got 1 author and 2 weblogs right now, so I could upgrade to 3.0 for free, but I don’t know if I want to. I don’t have any plans to do any multi-author stuff or to create more blogs but its good to know that I could if I wanted to. Unlimited use is a pretty powerful draw, even if you don’t plan on really using that. Also, I don’t really have any complaints with version 2.661 aside from comment spamming which hasn’t been too bad so far. If that gets a lot worse, it might prompt me to upgrade. And if the plugin architecture for the new revision is as good as its supposed to be and a ton of awesome plugins start coming out, that could maybe pull me in as well. I don’t have a problem with the fact that they’re charging now, it makes sense to me. However, the pricing seems a little steep, so if I did upgrade I’d definitely be staying within the 1 author/3 blogs limit.
.kkrieger is a pretty graphically impressive and very short on plot or explanation first person shooter game. Apparently plot is one of those things that you sacrifice to fit the game into 96 KILOBYTES!!!!!. Holy crap. The average FPS almost certainly has single textures bigger than 96KB, and here they’ve put the whole game in that amount of space. It does take a really long time to load up, so I’m guessing they must be pregenerating just about every texture on the fly. I can’t really think of any other way they’d accomplish that. It’s a bit demanding on system resources, but worth checking out at least once. Besides, it’s not like waiting for a 96KB download is that bad anyway.
I bought this case, slightly used, from a guy at work this week, for a little less than half of what it goes for new on NewEgg. Probably should have tried to talk him a little lower, but oh well. It’s a slick looking case and will make a fine body for my TV recording/game console emulating entertainment machine. The front usb ports should be perfect for hooking up game controllers. The only pieces I have left to get are a power supply and possibly a hard drive. I probably don’t really need another hard drive, I should just take one out of my current box but you know how I am about storage. Also, I need to invest in some kind of super-remote control that can be used to launch and switch between programs. If such a device exists, then I’m set.
I picked up lunch today at Taco Bell to, you know, celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Below is the complete text of the email I sent to Taco Bell’s customer service department immediately following that. Based on a true story.
“Today I placed an order at this location that included a Taco Supreme. When I got back to work, I found that I had only been given a regular Taco, not Supreme. And this on Cinco de Mayo of all days. For shame. I would like restitution for the difference between a regular and Supreme taco, or to have a portion of sour cream and chopped tomato with a market value equivalent to that sum delivered to me. I have always been a loyal customer and would like to continue to Make a Run for the Border or Think Outside the Bun or whatever the current expression is, but this matter needs to be resolved. I trust that you will see to this. Thank you.”
I’m hoping to get a taco coupon or something out of it, but I think it would be awesome if they actually sent me sour cream and tomatoes. At the very least I hope that a customer service droid experienced a mild flash of amusement upon reading this. Immediately followed by a deep sense of regret. They did ruin my Cinco de Mayo after all.
My number 2 (that’s number 2 as in secondary, not as in going number 2 although in this case that works too) monitor died this morning. Goodnight, sweet prince.
Even though I already get site statistics, including referral information, over at SiteMeter I decided to install Refer from Textism just because it looked kind of interesting. As you can see here, it does just what it claims to do. Unfortunately, this also gave me my first encounter with referral log spamming, since random pr0n sites are popping up in that log. I’m fairly certain they don’t actually link to me. Once again this confirms the idea that spammers are out to ruin anything and everything they can get to. It’s weird though, since I’d never seen any of this under SiteMeter (and in fact, the junk referrals still don’t show up there). I figure either SiteMeter manages to filter out the junk somehow, or spammers specifically target sites with an installation of Refer.
[Listening to: Damien Jurado - Tornado]
Elsewhere