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.

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.

( Note that word "was"—read on. )

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.

( Hey, count your blessings. At least he's not complaining about himself behind this cut! )

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 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.

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.

The Franklin Covey binder is fairly common where I work. This in itself isn't strange, even though everyone also has Microsoft Outlook. It's a low-tech solution, sure, but it doesn't misplace your appointments, contact lists, or e-mail whenever the LDAP server goes down, which judging by my experience is about one time in five.

It should be noted, though, that the Franklin Covey system adds an insidious twist to the ideal of personal organization. Outlook will let you schedule meetings and whatever you want, no matter how pointless they may be. The Franklin Covey system has the audacity to try to get you to organize yourself.

( There's a cut... this is bad... )

Those who know me, know that I can dish up toxic levels of Snark when I feel hurt or assume for some reason any less will not drive a point home. Petty, insulting, vitriolic, that's all me and more. Times like that, either my negative image starts spilling out of me or I pull it out and start swinging it like a club.

So what am I supposed to make of this: remember a few postings ago I talked about a LARP called "Port Royal" and how his friends were pushing him to push me to re-run that thing?

( Read more... )

From the empassioned plea above, made through dropped jaw, frothed spittle, and bleeding eyes, you can probably guess that this is about web design, especially the egregious variety.

( Read more, with caution -- thar be GEEKS here )

Just scroll down this Newsvine seed and look for the familiar name. The worrisome thing is that I got an incredible warm fuzzy I got from the response...

Remember that ping-pong table? The Christmas gift of unimaginable impracticality, which between them they'd lost the assembly instructions for?

Well, I'm house-sitting, and they just turned up. It was amazing enough to compel me to blog it. And it highlights just how incompatible my parents really are.

( Read on to find out how this incredible mystery was solved! )