I was preparing to go out on a dreary Sunday afternoon, when something profound happened.

There is simply not enough dramamine in existence to counter the motion-sickness you'll get by contemplate the amount of spin required to make this comprehensible..

Exhibit A: A game, coming soon, brought to yo by G4TV's X-Play News:

Exhibit B: A news article which I found through FARK about a most curiously edited wrestling promotional poster</a>.

Because, y'know, nipples are baaaaaad. Including mens'.

It's after making a direct comparison like this that I shake my head, for I know not only how bent some peoples' priorities are, but how few actually care. And I can too easily imagine people are already having "elective aureole reduction surgery" in some cases.

Tags: rant

Current Location: home

Current Mood: depressed

Current Music: My inner rage

Having not had the capability for a while for whatever reason, I had to try it out when I finally could.

The capability is iSight, a user-facing camera which is these days built into every laptop Apple makes. (And that's every one, including that poufy, flouncy little Macbook Air.) It can be used for other things, like the folks at Delicious Monster realized when they built their application Delicious Library.

The idea behind Delicious Library was to build a fairly intuitive iTunes-like interface for the cataloging of physical objects, like CDs, DVDs, books, and games. They even make it easy to get the information into your computer by letting you scan a barcode if you have a convenient camera handy (cough). Then they go online and fetch all the particulars of the thing you scanned.

I wanted to try it. And the demo version allows you to scan up to 25 items. So hey, I could try it.

The first books I held up to the camera (using the camera view window as a guide), it picked right up. As an extra delightful feature, it read the name with the built-in text-to-speech engine.

The fifth, it searched for a few moments and then balked. It couldn't find a book corresponding to the UPC of the book I held up to it. A wonderful thing got cut ever-so-slightly low in my sight.

And frankly, I can't blame it for failing. The first four books I showed it were cookbooks, by noted authors and commercially available. The fifth was an incredibly obscure roleplaying game book that I had picked up two nights before, and just happened to have by my feet.

That incredible convenience of using a barcode scanner to read your library into your computer? Not so much so when you have two hundred or more books that it might not be able to read, neatly stacked on shelves in another room.

Tags: geek

Current Location: home

Current Mood: curious

Current Music: The teakettle

One lady performer, one keyboardist who never says much...

Why have we never seen "The Captain and Tenille" and "The Eurythmics" in the same place at the same time?

Tags: music

Current Location: home

Current Mood: curious

Current Music: The teakettle

Old laptop: 100Gb capacity disk. At last report, a little over 8Gb still free (minimum recommended).

New laptop: 250Gb capacity disk. Some software removed because it no longer works with the new system, but mercifully they're in the minority. (Ideafisher is dead! Long live Thought Office!) And yet, it's still filling up fast.

You won't believe where I'm writing this...

I'm hammering this out on my Wii (thank you Opera) because my primary computer is busy with its anti-virus scan. Yes, it's shameful that I run it so infrequently, but given that a full scan takes over 20 hours, it's not sonething I can do every day anyway

The bitch is that I use HTML tags, and the input method is ill-adapted to the task, though I'm learning.

Monseur Grunchy es mort! Vivre l'Confetti Factorie!

I went out this 16-degree morning and bought myself a new shredder. The old one fit over a trash can and tookup to five sheets. The new one takes up to six, cuts up credit cards and ruins CDs and DVDs, and has its own bin.

And it microcuts! It'll reduce a single sheet of paper to 2400 little schnibbles, each smaller than a Tic-Tac™.

And the power switch and warning label have a cool blue LED glow, but now I'm just being a geek.

Then again, posting about it on LJ means the geekdom is pretty much fait accompli, non?

Out of bed, with no place to go

I have a vacation day today due to work being closed, and apart from the paper-destroying appliance, which I bought before 9 AM, I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with the rest of my day.

As proof, I offer up the fact tgat I typed this up on a Wii.

Tags: home

Current Location: Home

Current Mood: blah

Has everyone got their calculators, scales, and sacrificial daggers ready?

Good, then let's begin.

January 1st. A time of transition, much like an odomoter rolling over to a multiple of ten thousand.

In eight months, I hope to be out of here, preferably into something resembling a house. Toward that end, I've already started buying book boxes, and looking critically at shelving, though not necessarily in that order.

Remember all that kvetching I've done about not being able to create a sufficiently updated and advanced version of the Subplot Switchboard?

Well, I got this book, RailsSpace, which contains everything needed to build a social networking site in the programming system Ruby on Rails.

And right now, I have two bookmarks sticking out of it.

It's simple, really: After I go through a chapter and work on building the application as they describe it, I go through again and rework the example on my own code, which still only has subtle differences. By the time we diverge fully, I ought to have enough of a handle on what I'm doing to continue. And each application has its own bookmark.

Even if I do manage to get through all the book, I won't be quite done building the app—there's layout (graphics, document structure, CSS), AJAX for that extra quasi-tactile feedback, and then it's a matter of finding a host who does both RoR and databasing.

And then there's testing. Rails has its own testing facility, but that only shows when something is functioning as it was designed, not when it's functioning correctly. I may need volunteers. Someday.

Everyone knows that I can get a little funny about food sometimes. Sometimes it's special, sometimes it's mashed-up junk. There was this place I liked to go to when I lived in Prospect Bay.

Tags: food, rant

Current Location: home

Current Mood: disappointed

Current Music: Secret Agent on SomaFM-Bitcrusher-Flamingos

It's too modern for heroin, so let's blame it on Ecstasy.

Tags: web

Current Location: home

Current Mood: morose

Okay, call it a strange little caprice. I just finished playing through a game, with online assistance

Attitudes on food vary. Some primp and fuss over the stove to the point that you wonder what they're going to do with whatever they're preparing: will they eat it, or marry it? Others look at it as mere sustenance, and will gladly slouch into the kitchen, grab a can, open it, and eat whatever is inside, even if it's cake frosting. Oh heck, especially if it's cake frosting.

I...............vacillate.

Tags: food

Current Location: home

Current Mood: hungry

Check the calendar lately? You should. There's only 100 shopping days until Christmas!

As is the Saturday custom, I visited my parents. Mother did my laundry even though I can do it myself, and she's even confessed to me that ironing hurt her hand even before the surgery. So let's just say they make out well by keeping me conflicted.

Anyway, we went out for lunch (also a quaint weekend custom). The restaurant of choice was a national chain that shall after today always be "Ucky Fried Ick" to me, in much the same way another chain shall always remain "Bug Evans." And something I saw there was ...shocking.

Since I read Airbag at work, and work has some serious proxy blocks in place for anything that it considers potentially harmful or misusable, I couldn't browse this link:

Content-aware image resizing This is scarry, and not in a good way.

Naturally, I wondered, and I finally remembered it when I got home. I found two different links to essentially the same presentation. One was the one provided on Airbag (which was blocked at work for fear that I might learn (gasp!) hacking! and the other was a comparatively safe O'Reilly (the technical book publisher, not the douchebag). But even if I'd found that one, I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway because the presentation was hosted on YouTube, which is blocked at work for fear that I might become (gasp!) social! But that's a rant for another time.

This rant is about a technical idea someone had to minimize a picture while keeping most significant elements in it. Rather than taking out entire rows or columns of pixels to make the image smaller, the algorithm takes out specific paths of pixels, allowing the important parts to keep their aspect ratio while squeezing them into a smaller space. They do this by removing the unimportant parts. This is supposedly better than cropping, which may remove major details from around the picture, or resizing, which removes parts of major details from the middles of pictures.

Interesting? Having seen the video, I'd say so. Is it nifty? I'd agree there too. Cool to watch? Yep. But good? To borrow a turn of phrase from James Lileks, "Sweet smokin' Judas, what were they thinking??!?!

Remember that saying "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Well, their market value just plummeted. It's as if someone thought Photoshop wasn't prevalent or easy enough to use already. "No, it's too much work to go in and turn a picture into a total liar by consciously removing or changing elements. We'd like to be able to resize the image and just have them go away automatically."

I'm not quite sure how it began. I think I was comparing newspaper articles with a co-worker. He pointed out his and I pointed out the only comparatively recent one that I knew of.

Frankly, I'd forgotten how long ago it was. (I'd also forgotten how the rest of "my" paragraph ran; I usually stopped at the words "pasty and intense." Let's just say it shifted his opinion of me slightly, and not necessarily for the worse.) Check out the date on that sucker -- July 14th, 1996! Not only did I forget the date of that article, but I'm over a year late for its 10th birthday! I should have baked it a urinal cake or something.

I got four paragraphs into writing something before I realized that it would serve nobody but myself to post. Nobody would derive any benefit from it, and I'd feel like a whiny sap for posting it. So I deleted it.

I do that a lot. That's why you don't hear much from me.

Tags: psychobabble, rant

Current Location: home

Current Mood: morose

So my laptop is backing itself up (it would have finished in my sleep if the disk hadn't filled up), and so I started cleaning up. This involved walking back and forth with stuff that needs to be elsewhere, and carrying it to where it belongs. Simple?

Not so simple.

The floor in front of my apartment's den (too small for a bedroom, too large for a teachest) has always been a little creaky. Now it'ds getting noticeably wobbly, to the point where I wonder how long it'll be before I become a guest of my downstairs neighbors. It doesn't help that I weigh a significant fraction of a Buick, but when one relies on one's flooring, one expects support, damnit.

So? Move.

Trust me, that's a goal. But I haven't found a suitable replacement yet, and I want something I'll be reasonably happy with for some time.

There's also the problem that my last opportunity to opt out of next year's lease passed on July 20th. So yeah, I could move elsewhere, but I'd still be paying rent here.

So? Lose weight.

Do not get me started on that option.

So? Call customer service.

That's where this is going--I need to call the people who run this place and tell them parts are running down.

But I know what comes after that: the first two times someone comes out to examine it, they won't even find the spot I'm talking about, then they'll argue with me over who has to pay for this, and they'll have to tear up the carpeting to fix it, and there's a chance they won't do it right, &c.

And yes, I'm being negative. I like to thin, this makes me right more often than the optimist.