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Video - Bruce Lee Playing PingPong With Nunchucks
Bruce Lee playing ping pong with nunchucks. No it’s not real, amazing use of CG though.
Photo - Fredom Trail Statue
This statue was nestled amongst one of the churches on Boston’s “Freedom Trail” walking tour. If in Boston, the Freedom Trail is worth the afternoon needed to walk it, but wear comfortable shoes.
Photo - Tadich Grill
Tadich Grill in San Francisco. The food is good and worth the trip if downtown. It’s a bit pricey, but the chance to soak in SF culture in such an old school establishment made it worth it.
I’m Back
I’m not sure in what form, how often, or what content will be, but I’ve left this space unused for way too long due to both a lack of ideas and time.
I’m back, watch for it…
Samurize
In the past few weeks, I had been looking for a system to keep track of my to-dos at work. I wanted a system that would leave something open on the Vista sidebar or better yet, the desktop. I tinkered with using a text file, Remember The Milk, and other methods. Then I came across Samurize.
Samurize is a desktop monitoring tool that is 100% free. The best part about it is that a regular text file can be accessed with the system and displayed on the desktop with it’s display attributes modified. So I have a text file in my documents folder called to do that is updated on the desktop every time I make a change and save the file. Sweet. It’s also handy for building information widgets that display system information (like drive space and utilization), screensavers, and XML output streams.
I have a decidedly low tech file running on my desktop that is text only, but it serves it’s purpose as it provides date/day/time info, disk and CPU info, and a listing of my to do list.
3D Photo Viewer
I’m not a huge fan of many things that Microsoft pursues, but I was amazed after seeing the video demo of the 3d photo viewer produced by a collaborative research team from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. I Started Something has a great summary of the project full of linky goodness and the YouTube demo video.
As someone in the comments mentions, this tech hooked up with flickr or other public photo sites would be jawdropping.
Amazon’s Wish List has always been a place where people could track their lusted items. Given Amazon’s ever growing collection of offered items, the lists could encompass many different types of desired goodies. That functionality is now even better with Amazon’s release of a browser button that allows the addition of items from any site to an Amazon Wish List. This makes the Amazon-based wish lists the closest thing to an interweb-based universal wish list.
Amazon details how to add the button to your browser of choice and it couldn’t be easier. A stroke of genius from Amazon.
Why offer such functionality? Amazon can look at what people want, where they want to get it from, and how much of it they want. Given the convenience offered by the universal wish lists, many people (including me) will feed Amazon’s market research willingly.
The Dark Knight
I broke my own rule yesterday when my wife and I went to go see ‘The Dark Knight’. I’m not a fan of seeing movies at a theater, but we had free movie and refreshment coupons. We originally were planning on seeing it with some friends in IMAX format, but they sold out the IMAX show while we were in line so we ended up with a mere mortal presentation of the film.
I have to say that ‘The Dark Knight’ is probably the best Batman treatment I have ever seen. Many of the fight scenes do a great job of capturing the intensity of Batman as portrayed in the comics and especially recent graphic novels. I was also very happy to see Bruce Wayne injured, not because I like seeing people get hurt but it shows that Batman isn’t invincible. And this film also does a great job at looking at how far Bruce Wayne will go to protect the inhabitants of Gothic City. Lastly, kudos on the decision that Christopher Nolan takes with the Rachel Dawes character.
And Heath Ledger’s Joker. Wow. The Joker in this movie isn’t just some goofball with a green/white face that makes bad jokes and puns; the Heath Ledger Joker is a psychopathic badass that is every bit and probably more clever than anybody the good guys throw at him. Although the Caped Crusader has some nifty tricks up his sleeve, the Joker always seems one step ahead of him and the law. If nothing else, Heath’s final performance should be viewed as required viewing for aspiring actors looking for an example of batsh*t crazy (sorry for the pun, I couldn’t resist).
The movie isn’t perfect in my mind. Harvey Dent/Two-Face is wasted on the Nolan Batman franchise with an in and out performance that reminded me of Scarecrow’s screen time in ‘Batman Begins’ (although there is speculation that Dent’s fate may not be so obvious), and the entire Lau angle is an unneeded plot complication and a waste of time. I also think the Reese blackmail subplot wasn’t well thought out and just added time to an already long movie. The end result is that the film is more complicated and longer than it really needs to be.
Even with those reservations, I completely understand why people are interested in multiple viewings of this movie. Nolan has set the bar high with ‘The Dark Knight’ and I think the franchise will do well if he doesn’t keep discarding the villains. I realize that Nolan was likely counting on using the Joker again, but that isn’t going to be easy to do at the same quality level given Heath Ledger’s death.
Cali State Computers Can’t Handle Pay Cut
According to The Sacramento Bee, the antiquated payroll system in use by the State of California to pay it’s employees would require at least six months of reconfiguration to issue federal minimum wage checks to state employees. The culprit is apparently the fact that the entire payroll system is COBOL-based, a near-death computer language popular in the 1970s. As the post reports:
“COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days,” said Fred Forrer, the Sacramento-based CEO of MGT of America, a public-sector consulting firm. “It’s certainly not a language that is taught. Oftentimes, you have to rely on retired annuitants to come back and help maintain the system until you’re able to find a replacement.”
That puts Governor Schwarzenegger in a tough position as he just fired the best candidates for systems reprogramming (the part time workers and consultants) in order to conserve cash.
As shown here, Radiohead has released a video for it’s song ‘House of Cards’ that used laser and data capture software to capture 3D data instead of traditional cameras and light. The interesting thing about this concept is that as a result of the process, there is a dataset available that can be utilized by visualizers to produce different representations of the same data.
Some of the different visualization efforts produced so far are available for view at the House of Cards YouTube group.
