Month: January 2003
What if Amazon was free?
From SearchDay: The Online Books Page has links to more than 18,000 English works in various formats that are all free for personal, noncommercial use. That’s right: You can read and download nearly 20,000 books free of charge. The site is ten-years old this year, and is one of the best research sites around, especially so for folks who don’t live near a major library.
Sportsmanship at its finest
From Dave Barry’s Blog: The way it works is, if your team wins, you celebrate by wrecking stuff, and if your team loses, you celebrate by wrecking stuff.
First ChromaKey attempt
Chromakey: technical term for “greenscreen” special effects…where you film on a solid color background (green or blue) and then remove the background and replace with something else (compositing).
Myself and a coworker (Jason) put this together late Friday night. Its basically testing my greenscreen to see if the color is usable.
Lame Hand Puppeting (7.5Mb mpg file)
Lighting was far from perfect, and we only used Premieres built-in chromakey…After Effects does a much better job…yet the overall results were amazingly good!
Also, its is supposed to go black for a couple seconds…just to prove this is greenscreening. (you don’t see the greenscreen because it remains transparent throughout the clip)
I’ll put up some more experiments as soon as my firewire card starts working again. Unfortunately, I think its all Windows XP’s fault…and I’ll have to reinstall XP.
Unique Figurines
A co-worker shared this site: http://redgeomatica.rediris.es/elenza/caganers.htm
Its safe for work. I can’t wait to give one as a gift…
“Your guy grabbed his crank. That ain’t right”
If you’ve ever felt like your freedoms have been tampered with because of airport security, Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) has a great story about how he was frisked at Las Vegas’ Airport.
It’s Super Bowl Sunday
And you’re actually reading this? Find a TV, and go watch the Super Bowl (and of course the commercials) which will probably be better than the game).
Dave Barry has a blog!
Dave Barry, arguably one of the funniest columnists and writers of all time, now has a blog. It’s only been up a couple days, but just the little minor notes have been funny as heck. An example:
It’s cold tonight, even down here in Deep South Florida.
Q. How cold is it?
It’s so cold that we lit a fire. It’s really great — toasty and warm.
Of course it would be even better if we had a fireplace.
Keep an eye on it!
Finally, a new laptop
Granted, it’s owned by the company, but it will be primarily mine to use. It’s nothing fancy, but using my reseller status with Sager Notebooks I was able to get a good deal:
For a price that’s better than you’ll get elsewhere, that’s for sure. $1450, and I’ll hook you up with one. It’s not top of the line, but it’s more than I need, but if you see anything at Sager Notebook’s web site that you like, e-mail me and I’ll hook you up. I sold a 5660 series to a customer who just LOVES it (I would to if I had a bit more money to spend — I got the 6160 series)
If you were offline for 8 years, what would you do when you got back on?
Kevin Mitnick was arrested 8 years ago, and that was the last time he was on the Web. The notorious hacker spent five years in federal prison for various crimes. Upon gaining his freedom in January of 2000, Mitnick’s probation forbade him from connecting to the Internet or sending e-mail, although he was allowed to use unconnected computers, cell phones and his ham radio under the strict supervision of his parole officer. Travel and employment were also scrutinized.
Mitnick’s parole expired at midnight, Jan. 20. He partied, and then the next day joined the crew on the TechTV show Screen Savers with a live Web and TV audience watching to see where he went first once he got on the Web. So where does he go on this momentous occasion? Apparently the first place he went was his girlfriend’s blog so he could see what she was saying about him. Go figure. Full story on Wired.
A picture of the occasion was posted on Wired’s site as well. Well, the Farkers got ahold of the picture, and Photoshopped the living heck out of it. Hilarity ensued.