Categories
Weird

Slow-mo video of bullets going through various objects

I think the water bottle is the coolest.



Categories
Weird

Tired of getting nickled and dimed by your bank? Try charging them.

Steve got tired of having his bank charge him fees so he instituted his own set of fees… when the bank called him to verify a wire transfer he informed them of the $5 fee for calling him to verify the transfer.  Read the transcript on his blog for the exchange he had with the bank rep.

Categories
Weird

Someone who has spent waaaay too much time watching MTV

Six minutes of inspired dancing by “Inspirational Comedian” Judson Laipply.


Categories
Weird

David Hasselhoff sings Hooked on a Feeling, Reeves is mesmerized

While waiting for Windows XP to install on my freshly installed Virtual PC I found my way over to YouTube and fell under the spell of this David Hasselhoff video. The concept for the video obviously came from a poor translation of something Tommy Chong wrote in his own vomit after an all-night bender.  The special effects appear to have been done by the creepy geek who hangs out in the computer lab (and not the smart geek you want to have fix stuff, the other guy with the really poor hygiene).


And yet… I couldn’t take my eyes off it…




Categories
Photography Weird

Buffet for cats

Ever see people standing around a lobster tank trying to decide which one they should request?


Categories
Weird

Living will form

Always one to be prepared, my parents have had a living will in effect for many years.  My dad just forwarded me his latest copy:





I, __________________________, being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by artificial means.
 
Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of nitwit politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it or lawyers/doctors interested in simply running up the bills.
 
If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to ask for at least one of the following:
 
 ______a Glass of Wine,
 
 ______a Margarita,
 
 ______a Cold Beer,
 
 ______anything Chocolate,
 
 ______a pork chop
 
 ______shrimp, lobster, crab legs or fish,
 
 ______the remote control
 
 ______a  bowl of ice cream
 
 ______a culinary magazine of any kind
 
 ______a hot dog, hamburger or bologna sandwich
 
 ______Sex
 
it should be presumed that I won’t ever get better.
 
    When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my appointed person and attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes and call it a day.  At this point it is time to call the New Orleans Jazz Funeral Band to come do their thing at my funeral, and ask all of my friends to raise their glasses to toast the good times we have had.


Signature:      ___________________________


Date:     ___________________________




Collected from the Internet (via my dad, of course).  Author unknown.

Categories
Movies Weird

A bit of Friday fun

Do you like movies?  Do you like spoofs?  Are you just tired of the hype around Brokeback Mountain? 


If you answered yes to any of the questions above, here’s a little Friday diversion for you: check out the movie trailers for “Brokeback To The Future” and “Top Gun 2, Brokeback Squadron”


I found the pointers to these clips in a great NPR article on spoof movie trailers (and for you etymologysts, it has an interesting little sidebar on the origin of the word “satire”).  The NPR story links to a number of spoofs, including my favorite, a trailer for a nice, uplifting comedic drama, “Shining”.


(note: don’t bother watching the trailers for “Big” or “Taxi Driver”, they fall short)

Categories
Weird

Beautiful Creatures

Some more wonderful web kismet today… wismet, if you will.


I was looking for a link I had tossed in my “interesting” folder in favorites and noticed another link in there I didn’t recognize (it was an old link to an indi comic site).  Through that link I found Andrew Bell’s “the creatures in my head” page.  This site, full of wonderful, expressive creatures, sucked me in.  I highly recommend checking out his site.


You can navigate Andrew’s pictures chronologically, but I recommend hitting the “random” button on the page (go to his site, click on the creature on the homepage to get the navigation, then click “random”). Andrew creates the pictures then ads a delightfully appropriate caption, take the time to read those too (the picture below-right is titled “but… you said no one would get hurt.“)


 

Categories
Design Sites

A great site for the color blind web developer

I’ve built my share of web pages.  I can do the layout.  I can do the CSS, HTML, etc.  I always have problems picking a color scheme.  I’ve now found a site to help me out with that part of the process.


If you aren’t a natural at picking colors and/or were not professionally trained as an artist, you may find getting a set of colors which complement each other is difficult.  I usually use a set of colors from a design book or copy a pretty web.  If, however, I need a specific color… I’m SOL.


Enter ColorBlender.com.  This site is a variation on a tool which has been floating around the net in open source for a while (see “A little history lesson” below).  What I like about this particular implementation is it has a slick interface combined with the ability to export the color blends as a Photoshop Color Tables (great for all the pixel-pushers out there).


Here’s how it works:



  1. Either start with a color in mind our use their blending sliders to construct a color (I decided to go with a nice, bright blue for this run)

  2. If you like your blend, you’re done!

  3. If you’d like to tweak the blend, click the “Direct Edit” radio button then adjust individual colors on your palette using the same sliders from step 1.

That’s really about it, go forth and create.  If you do end up using this on a web site, please let me know, I’d like to provide a link to your creation from this post so others can see how this tool can be applied to web design.





A little history lesson


The original tool was called ColorMatch 5K and was entered by Kim Jensen into a 2001 web competition which required the tools submitted be less than 5, 120 bytes.  Due to the size requirements, ColorMatch 5K was limited and didn’t have a ton of cross-browser compatibility, so many sites took up the code and improved upon it.  ColorBlender.com is my favorite, a quick search could help you to find yours.

Categories
Photography Reference Sites

A tip for smugmug users – timeline

When I made the choice between smugmug and Phanfare one thing I found I missed was the ability to filter my pictures by year taken.  To my delight, smugmug added this feature shortly after I joined.  The feature is currently hidden and considered beta, but it works quite well – the only bug I’ve found is it got confused about a picture I stamped as being taken in 1959 (seems they weren’t expecting dates that old… shocker).


If you want a nifty timeline on your smugmug page, here’s how to do it:



  1. Go to http://yoursmugmugname.smugmug.com/?showGoodies=1 (be sure to adjust the URL for your member name)
    This will take you to your homepage with the phototimeline module visible

  2. Click the “show” link

  3. Very important: click the “date taken” link
    If you don’t do this all your pictures in the timeline will be shown by date uploaded (which won’t be very interesting unless you’ve been a smugmug member for multiple years)

That’s it, now you have a nifty timeline on your homepage.