Archive for November, 2006

comfortably

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

come on, now.

i hear you’re feeling down.

well i can ease your pain,

get you on your feet again.

relax.

i need some information first.

just the basic facts,

can you show me where it hurts?

there is no pain, you are receding.

a distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.

you are only coming through in waves.

your lips move but i can’t hear what you’re sayin’.

bits & bytes pt. 2

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

odin_hrafnar.jpg
I love naming things for the sake of naming them. Especially things that don’t have a reason for being named in the first place.

Below is the list of names for my assorted hard drives mentioned earlier.

  • PowerBook: munin
  • WD MyBook: hugin
  • WD Passport: poetry
  • Other external drive: fury
  • iPod: an iPod by any other name

The astute reader will notice:

  • That the names for my internal HD and the MyBook should really be inverted
  • A heavy-handed Shakespeare reference
  • That I have far too much time on my hands

BUY VXBX.PK (VOXBOX WORLD TELECOM INC)

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

vxbx.gifThe pump n’ dump spammers are finally hiring MS Paintbrush schooled art directors to improve their images.


Words missing from the dictionary:

Thursday, November 30th, 2006
  • The act of chatting with somebody online, but in the same room, and suddenly burst into talking in meatspace (not my idea!)
  • The sensation of being fully aware that you are doing something wrong yet not doing the right thing. (I know, nobody else has ever had a reason to feel this)

bits & bytes

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

My iBook G4 had a 60GB internal hard disk which I once thought would last forever. The PowerBook G4 I’m using today has 100GB, which is comfortable for music, photos and the documents I’m working on currently.

Today I picked up a 320GB external HD by Western Digital. Slick.

I finally have breathing room to place all my movies and old documents somewhere else. Much better this way.

I’m also using my pocket-sized 80GB WD Passport exclusively for backups of documents, pictures and email. Will do my very best to back these up weekly.

The hard disk tally:

  • PowerBook: 100GB
  • WD MyBook: 320GB
  • WD Passport: 80GB
  • Other external drive: 80GB
  • iPod: 30GB
  • Total: 610GB

Five years from now we will look at this post and laugh.

consuming thoughts

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

I am mentally debating whether I should post books/movies/comics/products I’ve liked in the past into consuming. The upside is that the site becomes an increasingly complete overview of everything that goes into shaping who I am, while the downside is that it’s a lot of work over a lot of time with no real benefit. :)

On a different note: I never keep boxes or instruction manuals for things I buy.

hammers, nails.

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

when you’re a web-developer, every situation you confront becomes an idea for a site.
when you’re writing scripts, situations becomes ideas for films.
or television series.
situations become problems looking a business solution.
or ideas for a piece of art.

it all depends on how we choose to view our surroundings.

dep

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

…it feels like being locked inside a glass box.

a plot

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

Laugh all you want, but back in July 2002 I actually plotted how many photos I took per month with my P5.
graphing.png

Good news is that I did not keep up the prolificity.

WD

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

293.png

OLPC

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

I’m a huge supporter of the OLPC (”$150 Laptop”) project, but not smart enought to write anything clever about it. So here are my thoughts, stolen from today’s NYTimes:

Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and educator who is an adviser to the project, has argued that if young people are given computers and allowed to explore, they will “learn how to learn.” That, Mr. Papert argues, is a more valuable skill than traditional teaching strategies that focus on memorization and testing.

The idea is also that children can take on much of the responsibility for maintaining the systems, rather than relying on or creating bureaucracies to do so.

Everyone who claims that “third-world countries are better off spending the money on food and infrastructure” are completely missing the point.

sylar

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

A sign you’ve been watching Heroes far too much. :)
us_104_200606_13_bethefirst_336x280.gif

PSWii

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

I have not yet chimed in on the PS3 vs. Wii “battle”, though everyone knows I’ll be picking up a Wii some time soon, and have no plans in hell on getting close to a PS3. The Onion nails the argument better than I ever could anyway:

pswii.png

play well

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

102,981,500 is a number calculated in the 1974 for a particular reason. I just noticed the correct one is actually 102,981,504, as the figure was originally rounded down. I still have the former memorized, in swedish.

Props to whoever finds out what the hell I’m talking about.

browsers

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006
  • Safari for general usage.
  • Camino for my calendar, gmail, backpack and other assorted services.
  • Firefox for accessing my bank.
  • Flock for uploading Flickr pics and occasional browsing.
  • NetNewsWire’s built in WebKit browser for reading articles found in feeds.

Cameraman

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Having a DSLR means carrying lenses*, which means carrying a nifty camerabag, which means thinking twice: if you’re actually going to use the camera while outside.

The economics to this decision tend to go against taking the camera along. The heft and weight and bulk add up very quickly. So from now on, I figure, coming back home with one good shot accounts for a success. :)

* eventually.

Amsterdam’s Laser 3.14

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

dsc_0466.jpg
A fellow named Laser 3.14 has been tagging some witty, semi-philosophical phrases on construction boards around town at least since I got here. He seems to be particularaly fond of the Jordaan and Westerpark area, and you can’t go far without running into one or more of his tags.

I love streetart in general. Laser’s tags are always amusing to spot, and impossible to condone as graffiti since it’s always on done on temporary boards. I do my best to photograph them, and were I a bit more diligent in tagging (heh) the photos on flickr, you’d find a few dozen more pics here.

The laser314 tag has tons more.

dsc_0468.jpg

futuramaism

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Leela: “There is already a soda like that. It’s called Soylent Cola.”
Fry: “So, how does it taste?”
Leela: “It varies from person to person.”

iChatting

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

“Any chat with video quickly becomes an excercise of show and tell”

~ ricky

I could not agree more. :)

dsc_0469.jpg

this deserves a lot of caps:

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

I HATE SITES THAT DON’T LINK TO ARTICLES THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT OR FEATURE PICTURES THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT

(I would link to the offending “blog” post that pissed me off, but unsurprisingly that particular blog doesn’t use permalinks.)

logos

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

aligning 20 logos to a grid is not as easy as it sounds. logos are ungriddable.

any colour you like

Monday, November 27th, 2006

cropped.jpg

zero-star all-stars

Monday, November 27th, 2006

stars.pngDear Apple,
Please standardize the assigning of stars to objects across your apps. iPhoto has us pressing command-[number], Aperture a combination of 0 and \ and =, while iTunes doesn’t even supply keyboard shortcuts.

Bad Apple.

Flickr thoughts

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Short of taking amazing photos, the trick to getting attention to your shots on Flickr seems to be twofold:

  • Having tons of friends who care about what you shoot
  • Posting your pics into dozens of groups begging for attention

The former works because it’s organic and feels natural. The latter feels wrong to me. Plus it’s a huge hassle to use groups. Clunky and poorly thought out.

DSC0352

Monday, November 27th, 2006

DSC_0352.JPG

westerdok

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

DSC_0397.JPG

inspira.art.br

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

I’ll be retiring the domain inspira.art.br in a short while… The project itself has been on hiatus since 2003, and I haven’t been using the email address for much too long. Furthermore, I have no plans or intentions on doing anything useful with the site in the future. Too many other, exciting things to do. :)

So if you still have my @inspira.art.br in your address book, please update to my @gmail.com.

show your feathers.

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

(this was really, really not my kind of place.)

Mobilephoning

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

What if the Caller ID funtion on your phone also showed where the caller is located? I imagine the Jaiku’s and Plazer’s of this world are probably working on something like this, but I want it now.

The call already answers the Who (Caller ID), When (now or past timestamp), Why (contextual) and the What (the call itself). All we’re missing is the Where.

It’s dead easy for the operators to figure out from the location of their cells. If there’s enough resolution, they should give us the streetname or neighbourhood; if not, city or at worst country. It’s only a few bits to send along with the GSM packets.

A pity they’d charge us an extra €9.99 per month for the privilege of sending this data.

T&T

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

So Tess is having her book published in the very near future. I’ve been helping out a tad with refreshing her personal homepage, taking some time to future-proof the code to implement the bigger changes we’ve got in mind. Nothing major.

Tess also said Omega-3 helps to combat The Darkness© and Rain. Must give it a try.