This is what happens when you've lost yourself to the cult worship of a personality. All the nasty reviews of Britney's trainwreck of a performance at the 2007 MTV VMA awards is too much for this Britney fanboy (or fangirl?).
Alex the African Gray Parrot, a subject for study at Brandeis University, has died at the age of 31, seemingly of natural causes.
This particularly intelligent gray parrot has been trained when presented with several objects to identify, distinguish and speak the object's color, shape, and material. He can also correctly tell which object is bigger or smaller than the other. Moreover he's been able to count items up to 6, and what's even more remarkable, may have some notions of the concept of zero.
As an aside, I love hearing stories about animals that display signs of the capability for reasoning. I like to think that mankind's role on this planet is like that of a caretaker, more like a gentle big brother and less like a domineering overlord. My thinking is that some people may feel justified in treating them as mere objects for consumption or exploitation, if all creatures were dumb or unthinking brutes. However, if some species show some evidence of logical reason, I would hope that we humans may feel more of a kinship towards them, and perhaps in the future we may become better guardians of their fate (and ours). Wouldn't that be nice?
Back to Alex. It is true, that being called a birdbrain has never been a compliment on one's intellect. However the person who came up with that epithet presumably has never met Alex the parrot.
Link: NYTimes
This has been out for a while but I came across this commercial only recently.
At first I thought this guy was a total jerk and felt very little sympathy towards his situation if at all. However the ad reveals his true identity in the last 10 seconds, and at that time I instantly and completely understood his character. It's a brilliant ad.
2 minutes is a long running time for an advert, but I don't think you could have sufficiently told the story and built up the emotional volume in less time.
What has this got to do with Cadbury's milk chocolate?
I don't really care. All I need to know is that there's a gorilla hitting the drum solo from one of my all-time favorite songs.
Really good CG, I must say.
Still not gonna get me to buy Cadbury's chocolate bar though. I don't like milk chocolate.
It's brand new, but already I hate bacn. Just as much as I hate leetspeak. I hope this newly-coined term goes the way of the "nybble" before too long, but unfortunately somehow I doubt it. Not while it's enjoying the kind of coverage it's getting in the major blogs, though it appears that like me, many of them think the term is kind of silly.
Unlike spam, the kind of email you don't want, bacn is defined as "email you want, but not right now". Email alerts such as Twitter updates, Facebook notifications, stock alerts, etc.
I get it. It's not quite spam, it's bacon. But why the hell did they foist upon us this annoying argot?
Maybe they thought that we'd confuse our email alerts with the cured strips of pork belly? Let's think back to spam for a moment. I don't know about you, but I can surely tell when you're talking about junk email as opposed to luncheon meat.
Or maybe they sought to prevent carpal tunnel in our wrists by saving us from typing in that extra "o" in the middle of the word?
Still, I can't begrudge them too much: It's a clever idea, giving us a new term for what I've been awkwardly referring to as my "necessary spam". But please, don't get too cute.
Spell it B-A-C-O-N.
Misspellings. One of my pet peeves. I don't even know why it bothers me so much, especially since English wasn't even my first language. I mean, if I can use and spell these properly, why can't youse?
Definately: I want to claw my eyeballs out whenever I see someone misspell this word. There's no A in "definitely". Just like there's no A in "moron".
Aggravate: It means "to make things worse". People confuse this word with "irritate", which means "to annoy". Use it properly, or you'll aggravate my irritation.
Accept/Except: Simple rule. Only use accept when you're receiving something.
Desert/Dessert: Just like sand, a desert has one S. Sweets, like dessert, have two.
Its/Your/Their: Used to indicate ownership. Its toy. Your book. Their car. Don't confuse these with the It's/You're/They're contraction. It is toy? You are book? They are car? Makes no sense.
It's/You're/They're: It's not that hard to use these. They're contractions of "It is", "You are", and "They are" respectively. If you're still confused, just stop using them.
That's enough for now.
Wow, I remember these characters from when I was a kid! They're soon to have their own show on the Cartoon Network. For some reason, probably because of their simple geometric shapes I thought there could not have been more than about ten characters altogether, until I went to their Wikipedia page. I hadn't even heard of most of them.
Will Mr Strong be making an appearance on the TV show? That kindly egg-gulping red square was my favorite. Maybe the Egg Board should adopt him as a mascot.
Ouch. Ok, sorry for the pun.
After escaping from his cage at the Mississississippi Zoo the first time in July, Oliver the capuchin monkey busted out again, even after his handler had installed a new $300 lock.
It was unclear if Oliver had shown himself to be a capuchin Houdini or if he had a human accomplice
Catching up on my TV programs.
A 4-gig MS can store almost a full day's worth of TV shows. I record all my shows using GB-PVR (free) on my home computer, then transcode them (substituting a version of ffmpeg that I grabbed from pspvideo9) into a video format that's compatible with the PSP. Each morning I copy a few episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report onto my memory stick to watch later that afternoon. I usually watch news shows, documentaries and other programs that doesn't require me to actually watch the screen full time, since I usually work while I watch. Subtitled anime for example, would be really bad for my "productivity".
Listening to music.
I load up my memory stick with some MP3's from my home collection for listening at work or in the car. The PSP doesn't really support playlists, so I have to organize my music into various folders. For example I have a folder with slower tunes for chilling out at work, and another folder with more upbeat songs for when I'm driving. I have to say though, using the PSP buttons for controlling your music really sucks. Why didn't they use the analog joypad for scrubbing forward/backward through each song?
Downloading audio podcasts.
Probably my favorite feature of the PSP, the one that puts it far above the iPod. If you use an iPod, you've got to use iTunes to download your podcasts onto your computer, then finally sync it to your iPod. With my PSP, if I want to listen to last week's broadcast of This American Life, I just go find myself a hotspot, and use the RSS browser to stream the audio over the net, or save a copy of it onto my memory stick. I wish I could do this with video podcasts too, but the PSP can't readily play video content meant for the iPod.
Surf the web. Kind of.
The connection speed is pretty slow so you have to wait a while for pages to load, and when it finally comes up more often than not the layout won't look quite right. Something screwy with the page rendering algorithm that the PSP uses. I limit myself to checking the front pages of news sites like the BBC or Google News, doing simple tasks like checking in for my flight, and checking my email. That's checking, not writing email. Writing a novel on your mobile phone would be a walk in the park compared to composing a sentence using the PSP's input system. Lastly, I also use my browser to read my RSS feeds using the mobile version of Google Reader.
Annoy my friends with my vacation photos.
"Hey, how was your trip?" They'd ask, to which I would reply while firing up my PSP slideshow, "It was great! Here, I got a few hundred photos for you to look at!"
Read a book.
There's a pretty good text/pdf reader called Bookr, that I've used a few times to read some books like Grimm's Fairy Tales that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. The display is crisp and very sharp, and you can choose to read the text using the default landscape orientation, or rotate it 90 degrees the way I like it.
Play games.
Oh yeah, I use the PSP to play games, too! I installed the open edition firmware version 3.40 OE-A, which allows me to use several homebrew emulators on my PSP. gpSP lets me play GameBoy Advance games like Super Mario World. Firmware 3.40 OE-A also includes classic PlayStation 1 emulation, so now I could also relive the days when I was playing Gran Turismo 2. There's also Daedalus, which emulates the Nintendo 64 on the PSP. As far as the native PSP games go, of the few games that I have bought, the only UMD that sits in the drive bay of my PSP these days is still Lumines.
I love Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo's fun new clock, featuring music by Fantastic Plastic Machine. I could keep it running on my web browser all day.
Ooh, I just noticed you could download it as a 33-MB screensaver.
If I weren't an ape, I'd be (such) a pig. :)
Via Notcot
Engadget has a LOT of photos and a pretty thorough writeup on Red, which is Virgin America's in-flight entertainment system. My thoughts on some of the features:
I must be getting behind the times. I just got turned on to this, almost 3 full months after it was mentioned in NPR. Nevertheless, this is pretty damn spiffy. Flickrvision shows you (almost) live Flickr images as they are uploaded from around the globe. You can't just click on the picture to go to the Flickr page, it seems. You have to use the 2D Classic View and expand the pics to get a link to the original page.
What's next you think, YouTubeVision?
Link via Notcot.org
Next time I get on a long haul flight, I gotta remember to bring my marmoset.
A man has been questioned by police at LaGuardia airport in New York after smuggling a monkey onto a flight from Florida by hiding it under his hat.
I just finished watching Blur Studio's most excellent recent short film, A Gentleman's Duel as part of the Siggraph 2007 Electronic Theater. This entry was easily my favorite out of all of the shorts I saw. It had a great story, the animation was well-acted, pretty good lighting, and to top it all off, the main characters dueled each other aboard cool steampunk mecha!
What I really noticed the most was the character design in this film. It may very well not be easy to design human characters for an animated film, but a lot of major studios seem to go out of their way to make their CG humans look creepy.
I mean, compare these ugly characters from another film franchise. They all look like transgendered clones of John Lithgow. These characters are utterly bland:
Now look at the characters from A Gentleman's Duel. With these characters, you only need a quick glance to divine their individual personalities:
The character designers used a more cartoon-style plastic-like solid surface with painted streaks to represent hair. These guys decided not to have them fitted with CG hair, which I think worked out for the best. CG hair is a pain in the ass to achieve the right look, and if you don't get it just right, it will look odd and swishy, ultimately distracting the viewer from the story.
Great job guys!
Take a urinal, fit it with pressure-sensitive sensors and then hook it up to an LCD screen, what you get is a pee-controlled driving game. Brilliant!
Saatchi & Saatchi was asked by the Frankfurt Taxi Services company for a fun way to remind bar revelers to take a taxi instead of driving home. What they came up with was a quick game in the mens room to test the user's quick reflexes. Crash your car and a message would pop up along with the taxi company's phone number.
On the downside, guys with small bladders like me would likely have to drink another two beers just to be able to write their initials in the hi score.
What about a game for the ladies?
Link via Designspotter
What worked for U2 ought to also work for Nintendo.
According a post on Joystiq the Nintendo DS Lite will sport new fashionable colors in bold red and black--er, Crimson and Onyx, pardon me. It will also come in a bundle along with Brain Age 2, and go on sale August 21 for $150. As I still do not yet own a DS, this may just be the one deal that I've been waiting for.
Link via Engadget
I used to browse the streets of LA using the now-defunct BlockView feature of Amazon's A9 directory, but sadly they've since pulled the plug on that site. That functionality was recently resurrected in Google Maps' Street View, though it was only available in select metro areas. Now at last they've expanded it to include LA, though not yet in high res. I am now again able to check out the many neighborhoods in LA without leaving the relative safety of my darkened cubicle.
Here are some other cool spots:
Walt Disney concert hall, LA City Hall, Rodeo Drive, Sunset Strip, Santa Monica Pier, Abbott Kinney Blvd, Koreatown, and Thai town
