Picture removed. The joke’s gotten old. – Dan, 5 June 2007
Picture reinstated. The joke’s so old that it’s now dead, and this page can serve as a permanent archive to what once was. – Dan, 7 October 2018
Picture removed again. I’d misunderstood a conversation in which I believed Bryn had approved of its reinstating. – 10 June 2019
Just came across the Infinite Cat Project. The premise is simple: take a picture of your cat looking at the
current picture on the web site, and send it in, and it will become the current picture. The first cat is Frankie: just
click Next Cat to get to the next one.
I think this is a great use of the high-speed communication that the internet gives us in order to produce something truly artistic. Cool.
Article on the BBC. A schoolboy holds up a shop and demands money, using a sawn-off shotgun.
My favourite bit: Mr Guliani said there was no money in the till and, on instruction to load the bag with cigarettes instead, told the boy he was under age. The retailer later offered him sweets and crisps instead.
There’s a new googlebomb out, abusing the way that the popular Google search engine works. To see it in action, go to Google and enter “Bush’s foreign friends” (including the speechmarks) as the search term, and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
This made me smile: The Jabberwocky in ActionScript (Macromedia Flash’s scripting language). It’s another one of those that you’ll really need to be a proper geek to appreciate, but it’s really quite good.
Perhaps you need to be a Lewis Carrroll fan, as well…
The good news is that the weather looks fantastic for my parachuting trip this weekend. I can’t think of a better thing to be travelling for on a Friday 13th.
The downside is I haven’t spent more than a few consecutive minutes off the phone this morning talking my work colleagues through the code I’ve left behind for them to carry on with. At current rates, I should expect to be answering my mobile during a free-fall.
“They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we.”
Full story from BBC News.
Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:
Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought’a be using Corel Photo-Paint.
(I wander over to her desk, and see that she’s working with a bitmapped image of our logo – she’s trying to remove some of the text from it… using the text tool… the text is jaggedy and quite obviously bitmapped)
Her: Why can’t I select this text?
Me: Umm… because it’s not text; it’s an image. The same reason that if I scanned in some of my handwriting and gave you that as a file, you couldn’t select it.
Her: But it is text: look…
(at this point, I collapse into a blubbering heap on the floor… this person has several years of an internet computer science degree tucked under her belt, but can’t understand the difference between vector-based and bitmap graphics [pretty fundamental year one web design stuff])
Overclockers Australia is running an article, collecting together advertisements for computer hardware and software over the last quarter of a century. I’ve pulled out a few of my favourites:
Those offers sound fresh! I think I’ll see if I can get a trade in against Duality…
Mmm… There’s some Doom 3 screenshots online…
This is hilariously good, and it’s kicking up a bit of a fuss. So, in case it gets taken down, I’ll be hosting a copy of it here, too… Click here to watch "My Land", starring Bush & Kerry. I can’t help but sing along…
Warning: the picture you are about to see is seriously cute. You have been warned. Brace yourself:
Decided to have Dadadodo, which I used yesterday, to generate some poetry based on my vanity pages from the old version of AvAngel.com, my perpetually-under-redevelopment web site. Take a look at this:
My body, of the religion,
That of seeing myself in a moment,
Stares ahead.
Always been an existential touch,
And I banish this.
My life, without a link, is in my writing,
To her I’m water,
At the rain comes ecstasy:
It’s gone.
Not bad for an algorithm with no pre-programmed understanding of language, I thought. Meaningless… but in a good way…
