Man....


HP -1 | MetaFilter Been working on a series of images of old pewter D&D figures..... This just kicked me in the ass to get something posted.

It's amazingly hard to to bring up how much of a influence this stuff had on my geeky, lost in my own head, teen self. And it's even more amazing how you don't think about it until something like this happens.

Does that define true cultural impact? When something is so pervasive one never stops to think about it till it's gone?

XP SP2 vs. Vista RTM vs. Vista SP1: Gaming benchmark

So I plan on upgrading to a new Intel mac soon and plan on installing Bootcamp on it for games ASAP. (BTW, Bootcamp now supports 64 bit!)

I used to have a gaming PC back in 2001-2003 and ran XP fine, but with Vista I wanted to see what I could dig up in the way of recent reviews and found a nice write up over at ZD net.

XP SP2 vs. Vista RTM vs. Vista SP1: Gaming benchmark | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

I wish it delved into the difference between 64 and 32 bit, but all in all Vista still looks like a dog.

Scribe Fire

After reading about how Safari is not as secure as it could be I switched back to Mozilla begrudgingly. But now I am having some fun playing around with the various add ons it has. The newest one I am trying is called ScribeFire: Fire up your bloggingScribe Fire and it's all about making blogging easier. Took me awhile to get it set up on my hosted server but now i am testing it some more with this very exciting post.

Calm yourselves down.

Update:

Hmm, no catagories...

God dammit

"CAYMAN ISLANDS - Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven. When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands."

Man, this country is built so that only crooks get ahead, I swear.....

Photoshop Disasters

Culling the <a href="http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/">worst retouching mistakes</a> on the internet. Oh my god. I love this site.

Lanczos resampling

"Lanczos resampling is a multivariate interpolation method used to compute new values for any digitally sampled data. It is often used to resize digital images, but could be used for any other digital signal. In the case of digital image resizing, the Lanczos function indicates which pixels in the original image, and in what proportion, make up each pixel of the final image. Lanczos filtering gives very high quality results compared to more commonly used but faster techniques such as linear or cubic interpolation because it more closely approximates the optimal resampling filter, the sinc function. While the sinc function is infinite, making it very computationally intensive, the Lanczos function defines an approximation over a given range (the "window"), allowing the implementor the ability to improve the approximation by increasing the size of the window."

Just in case you were wondering.

How to Inoculate Your Children Against Advertising

"We didn’t sit the boys down for long lectures; rather, every time we noticed that a commercial or a print ad caught their attention, we asked them if they thought the product really did what the commercial claimed. This introduced the idea that sometimes people say things that aren’t true and that it was okay for them to question what they saw and heard. It also taught the boys that what they think is important and valuable. At the same time, we explained to them how companies need money to pay their workers and themselves, and how those companies try to convince others to buy their products in order to make money. Slowly, we began to see a change in their behavior."

Great post.

The Gimp

Looks like The Gimp has been updated to run on 10.5. For those of you who do not know, The Gimp is a open source free version image editor like photoshop. Only free.

Has a healing brush now!

Corn Detasseling

So the conversation in the bar the other day drifted to the fine art of Corn Detasseling and how much that sucked to do as a kid. So I thought I do some googling this morning about it. "You get up before the sun comes up, meet at the high school and get on the yellow school bus that takes you to the field. You know that your first 10 steps into the corn are going to be anything but pleasant because it's full of dew. You're wet head-to-toe no matter what you're wearing. The corn is tall, you're walking through mud and engaged in repetitive physical exertion for the next 10 hours. In the morning, it's wet and chilly. By 10 a.m., steam is rising from the field. By noon it's darn hot, and by three, it's extremely hot and you're exhausted."

"Detasselers all wear pretty much the same uniform at work. Gloves with rubber grips protect the hands, hats guard against sunburn. And despite the heat, nearly everyone wears a bandana around the neck, a long-sleeved shirt and long pants, all to avoid the detasseler's worst nightmare: corn rash.

"Oh, I have it on my legs, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon," says Robb Stewardson, 20, a junior at Doane College, in Crete, Neb., who is detasseling for the first time this summer. He wore shorts the first few days and is now suffering the irritation caused by leaves of corn brushing against bare skin. "It looks and feels like the worst sunburn you ever had, but it's a rash that's everywhere."

But I guess agra business is making a end to all of these fun time.

"But the tradition of detasseling could be coming to an end. Seed companies are developing ways to make wider use of what's called "male-sterile corn" -- corn whose tassel doesn't produce pollen, thereby eliminating the need for detasselers. It's planted next to a corn variety that is able to pollinate, so cross-pollination can be achieved more efficiently."

I dunno, corn that does not pollenate sounds like a bad bad thing to me.

The next slums?

"For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay." ...

"At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year."

Yowza.

The Music Post

The Sixty One. Highway 61

A road is a road, but sometimes it's more. Sometimes a road sings.

Drive down Highway 61 and you'll find music everywhere you turn.

Muddy Waters rode the 61. So did Bob Dylan, Ike Turner, and B.B. King. Elvis grew up in the housing projects along it.

Highway 61 was the road by which people left to find better opportunities. And by leaving they took their music to the world.

Come join us on thesixtyone.

How does it work? Musicians upload their music for listening, but rather than allowing the Simon Cowells of the world decide which songs go on the homepage, the listeners do. How, you say? If you like a song you've found on thesixtyone, just click the "bump" button to increase its bump count. Doing so will cost you points, but if songs you bump get bumped by others, you can earn more points! Collecting points increases your level and reflects your skill in picking top songs in your favorite genre!

By listening to songs through the lens of the collective community on thesixtyone, you'll always find good new music. We're committed to giving every bit of music on the web the opportunity to find its audience.

-- Sounds like a pretty cool idea.

Also, I recently played drums on a recording of a Tom Petty cover "Listen to her heart" played by Allegra Gellar. Fun stuff!

I have some photos I need to upload soon as I get through the current rush of work. Shot a bar in San Fran called the Gold Dust, I have some out takes from the G Callers shoot and some nature porn shots from Big Sur. Lot's o stuff coming soon. Just a stress ball right now and don't have the time.