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This is a cute parody on the MacBook Air “manila envelope” commercial. ThinkPads still suck, though. They didn’t always suck, but they do now. There is a reason IBM dumped the line. IMHO, of course.
Via The Apple Core.
My some loves the Alien vs. Predator series. He has a friend at school and they talk about the movies all of the time. At home, I have the Blu-Ray disk of AvP: Requiem and on the cover is a nice picture of the PredAlien hybrid. I had to explain to my son that all aliens are hybrids but in AvP: Requiem, the hybrid is a particular bad-ass who is half-alien/half predator.
We also just got finished watching Superman : Doomsday and so the inevitable question was asked…
He asked, “Papa, who would win in a fight… Superman or the PredAlien from AvP: Requiem?”
I just shook my head. I said, “Giovanni, remember what I told you about baseball? You remember, the whole thing about the majors and minors? Those are leagues. Players in the minors are simply not as good, by and large, as their major-league counterparts. Say you put a minor league team against a major-league team and had them play one another. The minor-league team would be considered ‘out of their league’ for that matchup. It’s the same way with Superman and the PredAlien. What happens when Superman gets shot with a bullet?”
“It bounces off,” he replied.
I continued, “and what happens to an Alien when it gets hit with a bullet?”
“It gets hurt or gets blown up…. oh! I get it!” he exclaimed. “The PredAlien is in the minors and Superman is in the majors!”
I shook my head. “Actually, Giovanni. If Superman were in the majors then, for this matchup, the PredAlien would be playing Tee-Ball with Marco (my 4-year old son).”
He did not like that answer. He liked the PredAlien and though it was a cool and downright bad-ass monster. Knowing Superman could rip off one of it’s arms and use the acid blood like cologne left him a bit disillusioned.
This is, by the way, why Batman is way more interesting than Superman.
Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early
Clever, very clever.
Thanks Kevin!I hope this never, ever, happens to me.
Oh, you shouldn’t have wasted that. Here comes the T1000.
I love the tagline on this one. Still hoping one day we’ll see the Green Lantern hold up that wonderful green ring on the silver screen and say:
In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power…Green Lantern’s light!
Until then… we have this.
Impressive video depicting a landslide. Much more intense than you first expect.
I don’t know how people have the time to do this. The great thing about this particular phrase is the varied and often dramatic expressions on people’s faces when they say, “what?”
Masterfully compiled!
Thanks John!
Neat ads for WMF knives. These carvings are pretty amazing.
via haha.nu
UPDATE: Grrr, probably faked in Photoshop dangit. My friend thought the cantelope, which has an empty/mush/seedy center, can't be carved. Oh and these are kitch knives, not carving knives. Oh the insanity. Thanks Zingman!
The greatest minds of the late ’70s determine our children’s futures.My favorite line is, “…no, you are the frog.” Click to watch, hilarious.
Another good one…
This made me laugh. It’s worth a watch.
On Saturday, I took Marco to a lacrosse game at St. John’s University. The UMass Minutemen came out of that matchup victorious and after the game we tailgated in the parking lot. Here are a few pictures from the game.
The game was a pretty exciting one and I’m glad my cousin was coaching the winning team. Marco also got his first exposure to a real lacrosse game. He has a lacrosse stick at home but didn’t really know what to make of it. Now he does.
This is a pretty shocking video of how trains are packed in some parts of the world. At first, I thought the passenger who leaned in and started jamming people in front of him inside was going to get in trouble with the conductors on the platform. Then the conductors started to assist in a big way.
Surreal.
I have been stepping up my commitment to Tae Kwon Do lately. For a very long time, almost a year, I’ve only gone to 1-2 classes a week. One of those was a kids class where I helped keep the kids in line. Two of the rug-rats are my own. The sporadic attendance did very little to keep me in shape and my technique was not fairing an better.
Over the past year, a lot of the younger students have matured quite a bit and are now, more or less, fully grown and fighting strong. They all compete regularly in about 6-8 tournaments a year. By comparison, I compete on average once every other year (though I placed Gold in each for sparring).
Recently, we had 16 students go to the regional championship from our two schools. All of them placed first or second and I think 13 of them are going to the nationals in July. By the way, if you win the nationals in an olympic year you qualify for the US Olympic Team. Pretty cool.
With all of the excitement in the school I decided to try and work out a different work schedule, one that sees me leaving the office earlier to make class and finishing up work later in the evening over my VPN connection to the office.
We spar a lot at my school, since that’s our specialty. We have about 5 sparring classes a week and the teenagers go to all of them. In fact, they go every day for about 3 hours a day, plus an inenst Saturday clinic in Bayside Queens. That’s a little nuts for me. These days, I’m making it to 3-4 of these sparring classes which is really good by my standards. I also benefit from sparring with so many people that are better than me. The workout is great and I finally feel like I’m starting to improve again.
The additional classes take a toll on my body, however. I am currently suffering from a blow to my thigh; kind of a multi-day charlie horse. I also got kicked in the hand (should have been making a fist) and, today, I didn’t stretch my calves properly so I have an acute tenderness there and it has left me with a pretty severe limp. Before class we do an elaborate stretch routine for about 5-10 minutes, but I came in late for the first of a two-class session and missed the stretching. I stretched on my own but I was not thorough enough.
The smell of tiger balm is in the air and I’m hoping I’ll feel better tomorrow but I know I’ll only feel worse.
A friend of mine just sent me a link to Magic Pen an amazingly addictive physics-based puzzle game implemented using flash.
Thanks Brett!
Also, check out my old favorite, the Falling Sand Game!
I somehow came upon a photo group on flickr called HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it’s a kind of photograph that accomodates for infinite precision in tone levels. Of course, infinite is not really achievable o n a computer so with my tools that works out to be 32-bits per pixel per color channel. Yes, that’s 96-bits per pixel instead of the standard 24 you get with a typical JPG.
Camera’s generally can’t capture so many tonal levels directly. Pro and Prosumer cameras can shoot RAW images, which yields images with a better color depth than the standard 8-bits-per-channel you’ll get with a simple point and shoot camera. RAW files usually contain 12 or 16-bits of color information per channel.
To capture the right number of levels, at least with my equipment, you need to create a composite image from photos taken at varying exposures.
To create that image, I stuck my camera on a tripod and took 3 photos. One at EV -2, one at metered EV, and one at EV +2. This yielded 3 images like so:
Being a novice, the first thing I took note of was my ability to see the chair in the adjacent room and the clock that’s sitting on a shelf at the bottom of the night-stand. I can see it clearly in the HDR photo and I still have good tones in the highlights of the chair. Essentially, I don’t have an uneven distribution of tone, either too bright or too dark. I get good tone levels across the whole image.
Photoshop does all of this magic for me! All I need to do is point it at the 3 RAW files and it automatically stitches them together and gives me the option of how I want to distribute the tones. It does this through a slider… a slider which I need to learn more about.
When I save my image to a standard JPG, I obviously lose 32-bit per channel color. At this time I am presented with another slider that allows me to adjust exposure and gamma. I made one more tweak and voila, I have my very first HDR photo. Here are some HDR photos you can find on flickr. Some of them are amazing!
Unless your camera can capture the images very quickly, which mine can’t, I’ll be forced to take picture of still life.
Quickie:
Yes, I suppose it had to happen…
Oh, and in case you’ve been living under a rock…
I’m f*cking Matt Damon
I’m f*cking Ben Affleck
I’m f*cking Seth Rogen
I’ve got insomnia again and you all know what that means! Stupid videos. Wait, what? I always post stupid videos? Hmmm. I’ll have to think a bit more about that.
She’s tough, she gets right up.
I love the tagline on this one, “Unsuccessful gymnastics are still more impressive than a successful anything else.”
A good compilation, help!
