Ahhh, the irony of it all

The other day, from gchat:

mk: your SF pics are terrific
me: oh thanks
mk: what's word with you today?
me: shorter day at work, leaving in about 2 hours
whats up with you
mk: oh the usual
pretending to work, hating my job, wishing that I didn't have absurd amounts of loans imprisoning me in my chosen hell of a profession
me: yep
welcome to your 20s!
and early 30s
you should start twittering

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The Internet Strikes Back!

A Star Wars marathon is on tv tonight, hence the outward nerdiness of the title line. But here's what I've got:

• Home-brew beer with one of my favorite blogs, BoingBoing.
• Upload pictures into your own ASCII Art!
• See how the ISS stacks up to real spacecraft/
• A desktop tour of Fedora.
• A great write up of Songbird and other iTunes replacements over at TuxGeek.me.
  

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Man Man Seek Kitten

From p-fork:

Man Man are apparently seeking a cuddly cute kitten to squeeze into a miniature bowler hat on a video shoot in nyc this weekend. If only betty were a little bit smaller....

link

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INTERNET

• Don't ever run these commands, ever.
• Watchmen trailer broken down for what's definitely made it in.
• These are fun if yr bored.
• And, an eagle swimming, a cat on a roomba, and chicken police.
  

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Man's Manual For Living

List of Problems Solved by MacGyver

I'm a big MacGyver fan. I remember watching it with my older brother and thinking he was the coolest person ever. I mean he lived on a houseboat, how cool is that!? He also drove a sweet Jeep and and was a zeitgeist of late 80s / early 90s man's man fashion.

Some of my favorites include:

"In order to fix a piston connecting rod for a water pump, MacGyver makes an arc welder out of a generator, some jumper cables, and two half dollars. By running the DC current from the generator through the coins, he creates heat and electrical discharge, with which he can weld the con-rod."

"MacGyver destroys a building with a propane tank, a grindstone, and some ball bearings. He lets the gas from the tank loose and switches on the grindstone. From outside, he shoots the ball bearings into the building at the grindstone. Although he doesn't hit the grindstone, the bad guy he is after shoots a crossbow into the building, and does hit the grind stone. A spark ignites the gas, and the building is destroyed."

"MacGyver creates a diversion and a surprise attack using an inner tube, pressurized air, chloride, a catalyst, two glass jars and a gas mask. The inner tube was put in a truck and filled with air until the glass broke creating a loud noise. Meanwhile MacGyver filled the two gas bombs filling one glass jar with chloride and the other with a catalyst. Then he threw them at his attackers resulting in a reaction producing toxic chlorine gas when the two liquids mixed."

The whole thing make for great reading. Really, just scroll through it at random and stop anywhere, you'll find out how to make and do just about anything.

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Saturday Mornings with Dr. Horrible

I had really forgotten how funny Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog is. If you don't know what Dr. Horrible's is, yr finger might not be on teh pulse of the internets. Do I have to say more than "Neil Patrick Harris + Singing"??

Here's the full episode from Hulu, which is my favorite site for streaming teev on the internet. Its how I've been watching this season of The Office.

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Permanent Record is straight from Big Brother

Last night my friend James pointed me to this site, permanentrecord.com, and its actually really scary. Culling bank records, magazine subscriptions and other public information, this thing is literally a directory of almost everyone in America, with detailed demographic information and "guesses" about certain personality traits, even religion. The site is simple enough that anyone could use it. Even though its captcha protected, I don't feel any more comfortable about it.

I searched for the obvious: my name, my family's names, my friends--it had nearly all of them in its database. Not all of the info is correct, but it could potentially be enough to steal someone's identity. Here's part of the site's official statement:

Your bank. Your cell phone provider. Your water company. Your government. Your gas station. Where you buy your music. Where you buy your frozen dinners. That timeshare pitch you suffered through a while back. Pretty much every organization you can name. And a few you probably can't.

Amazingly, everything you see here is stuff that other people make public about you, right or wrong. A lot of it can be found with just a few minutes with Google. We bring it all together for you to see. We're going to shake things up a bit.

See, they've been selling your information to each other for years. It's a big industry. So fine, at least now *you* can see what they think they know about you. Of course, invariably some portion of it is wrong, so don't take this too seriously. But like it or not (and who would?) this stuff is part of your Permanent Record because this is what thousands of people and companies use to classify you. Shame, isn't it?

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Google Reader, Or How Web 2.0 is Ruining My Life

After months of holding back from using a blog aggregator to serve my internet readings, I took the plunge and activate my Google Reader account. The choice was an easy one to make because I rely on google for pretty much everything, including this little blog. I've been familiar with RSS feeds for a couple of years now but I've never felt the need to make any use of them. The stand alone readers I've come across never really did anything for me, because I prefer staying in my browser if I can. I recall preferring Safari's take on in browser rss feeds over firefox, but never took advantage of it beyond the level of curiosity.

Enter Google Reader. This is something that I admit I completely missed the boat on. If I'd know the amount of functionality and stability present, I'd have been using it for months. One of the great things its doing is allowing me to keep up on blogs that are in my bookmarks menu that I look at seldom, if ever. Considering most of them are still active with multiple posts daily, there's a lot I'd be missing out on without Google Reader. Now those blogs live in a folder in my reader account, and its so much easier to look through the post titles in list view than it is to open 15 tabs in firefox to read the same amount of info.

It's easy to see now how the über-bloggers manage to keep track of so much information. So while I'm wasting my time on my computer reading way too many articles, they're being served to the nifty little applet over there on the side bar. See it, isn't it pretty.

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Photoshop fun!

But I'm actually using Gimp, because its open source and has practically the same feature set as photoshop.

I've been using the spare time I don't have to teach myself how to photoshop pictures. I've already known how to do color correction and masking from going to film school, but I'm trying to expand my amateur repertoire. Practicing with faces has been fun, and provided a great deal of entertainment. I pulled the original pictures from this awesome blog Sexy People, which features tons of of glamor shots.

So here are some examples (thanks to Jim aka birdman for the final retouching!)

This wonderful shot of two cousins from 1990:


Becomes even more creepy with my head on Cousin #2:


This great photoshopping job by my former employee Willie (god I hope its photoshopped, that is) becomes even better when I get in the mix.




Trust me, it looks even stranger without the blond mustache and freckles.

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Google Chrome Is Out!

Google released its browser today, Google Chrome. Its only available for windows currently, but mac and linux versions are apparently being developed. Now, I don't run windows because I don't want/need to. Using it at work is enough for my tastes. So, in the mean time, I'm running vmware fusion to emulate xp sp2. The nice thing about fusion is that it features "unity mode" which allows you to interact with windows applications as if they were running natively in os x.

I've been using chrome for about and hour and it seems pretty tight for a beta release. I've encountered a little weirdness with getting certain pages not loading properly (imdb, wikipedia-both of which I use constantly), but that's potentially because of the software emulation, not necessarily the browser. 

Although its quite impressive that google was able keep this under wraps until the day before it was released. Its a bit difficult to make an accurate comparison to Firefox 3, but at this point it would be hard to get me to switch from using firefox as my full time browser. Safari 3 is marginally faster than firefox at certain things (although I've never found them), but that hasn't converted me yet. I'll just have to see the benchmarks when they come out. 79 on the acid 3 test is pretty impressive! 

Hands down it'll be nice to see how Chrome will improve during the beta cycle.

On a personal note, I've been ridiculously busy working on Kris Koester's shoot this past week. Things have been going smoothely & I've definitely learned a ton being best boy grip. The downside is that I'm incredibly exhausted. Not tired, because I haven't been sleeping well, but just worn out from flipping my bodyclock on its head for 36 hours. On a the upside, the shoot is nearly halfway done. Here's a picture from the set this morning.

Hopefully I'll be able to post the trailer when its up (possibly the whole thing). Its a pretty good script, and the crew, cast and camera (courtesy of Uptown6) are all fantastic. 

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lolcat for the iz

Izzy was inexpicably sticking her tongue out for, like, a half an hour yesterday, so she got hur picture taken a bunch and lolcat-ized

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Good readings

I added my Currently-Reading shelf from goodreads.com to the side panel. Goodreads is a great resource for finding interesting reading material and very useful if you have trouble keeping track of your bookshelf (especially if you're like me and its overflowing).
They have other cool widgets too:

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