Lots of monkeys, and a guy with a snake up his nose
The editors who put together
SFGate's Day in Pictures feature have, um, an interesting sense of humor. The daily collection of news photos from around the world is the best I've seen on the 'Net, but it's the often captions that take the cake.
At the end of the year, they choose their favorite photos, and
2004 had some great ones. Although I'm left wondering about the preponderance of monkeys.
Bult kicks ass
Through the power of Internet? I have discovered that there's a Swedish metal band called
Bult. The songs suffer somewhat from bad translation, but how can you resist checking them out when their website is at -- I kid you not --
http://bult.kicks-ass.net?
Kevin Cornell, illustrator
This is a very well-designed website. But I think
Jason will especially like his drawings.
The E stands for Extra. Get it?
Perhaps it's the final example of my addiction. For the past few weeks I've been seeing outdoor ads around town for something called
BE, whose tagline is "Beer with Caffeine, Ginseng, and Guarana Extract and Natural Flavor." Apparently this concoction is prounounced "B to the E." Ah, clever marketers.
I popped into a local liquor store (of which there is no dearth in my neighborhood) to see if they had it, and sure enough, the little shiny black and red singles (it's a 10-ounce can, slightly smaller than a normal beer) were there in the cooler.
That's when I noticed that this brilliant new scheme was brought to us by
Anheuser-Busch, the makers of
Budweiser. "Oh my," I thought, "do I really want to buy a
Bud?"
"But wait," I said to myself, the marketing message obviously beginning to work it's magic, "it's not
just a Bud! It's
B to the E..."
I bought two cans and brought them home to try one. It's not too bad. It's faintly Budweiserish (did I just invent that word?), but with a lot of guarana taste in each gulp. No significant aftertaste. Thankfully.
Apparently each can contains 22.5 carbs and 203 calories (yikes), and it's 6.6% alcohol by volume. Each contains 54 milligrams of caffeine (only about half a normal cup of coffee), which ain't that much. At least, not compared to my normal daily intake.
Ynnej, why aren't you listed
...in this guy's
MVHS Alumni database? Maybe you should kick his ass. Or hack his db. Or, y'know, just smoke a lot and watch TV.
SHHH — Society for HandHeld Hushing
Thanks to the
Society for HandHeld Hushing (a.k.a. the designers at
Draplin Industries and
Coudal Partners) you can now print your own cards (one of several designs pictured above) to hand to those annoying mobile phone users who seem to think that everyone in earshot is equally as interested in their petty conversations as they are.
Download the PDF here...Labels: designers, humor
Small world
I needed a few things for dinner yesterday afternoon, so I walked two blocks to the
Bi-Rite Market. It's a tiny little whole foods market on 18th Street.
As I was queueing to check out, I heard someone say, "Mark?" I turn around and there's Schools Group alum
Kristen Hayes. Turns out, she's been working there for three months, the same time I've been living here. She's taking a semester off from college and living with her sister, about four blocks from me.
Makes me wonder if there are any other former Schoolies living in the Mission. I ran into one about nine or ten months ago in Mountain View, and she said she was living up here in SF somewhere.
Speaking of others who live nearby, Acterra's Watershed Council Coordinator
Katie Pilat lives a block from me. She bikes to CalTrain every day and takes the train to Palo Alto. Having done that for a couple weeks when I first got the new job up here but hadn't moved yet, I can attest to that making for a reeeally long day.
Above:
Olya and
Kristen (pictured) and
Carmen and
Giovanna (not pictured) and I went for ice cream in Arcata, after visiting
Headwaters Grove in July, 2001.
Remember the Graphing Calculator?
The story of how the
Graphing Calculator managed to ship on 20 million computers is a fascinating and hilarious one.
Ron Avitzur was an engineer at
Apple in the early '90s when his project was cancelled and he was laid off. But he didn't let this stop him. He kept showing up for work anyway. His badge still worked, so why not?
"I had many sympathyzers," Ron writes. "Apple's engineers thought what I was doing was cool... They thought my software would show off the speed of their new machine
{the PowerPC was about to be launched -Ed.}. None of them was able to hire me, however, so I worked unofficially, in classic 'skunkworks' fashion."
� Read the rest of the story...
Download.com's Staff Favorites 2004
So I've been working on this feature for the past week:
Download.com's Staff Favorites of 2004. Staffers could submit their favorite download in the Games, Software, and Music categories on our site.
I'm pretty happy with the way it came out, although it was a tight deadline so I didn't have time to do any interactivity; I would have preferred all the image links to be mouseovers. But there wasn't time.
I did all the HTML in CSS with minimal use of tables (although it gets plonked into a template by our production staff, and the templates are a jumble of terribly bloated table code -- I fully expect to address this early next year). Of course, I also did the design, which is my actual job. Doing the HTML is a bonus. It's a bonus for me because it allows me to learn more CSS as I go. And it's a bonus to our production staff because it makes their job really, really easy.
BTW, I'm not the guy with the bag over his head. But yes, my photo
is included on the feature.
Citical flaw in PHP
Mr. Attitude and
Ynnej may want to download the
update to PHP that addresses a
critical flaw discovered last week.
1000 Journals Project
"...If you ask a kindergarten class how many of them are artists, they'll all raise their hands. Ask the same question of 6th graders, and maybe one third will respond. Ask high school grads, and few will admit to it. What happens to us growing up? We begin to fear criticism, and tend to keep our creativity to ourselves. Many people keep journals, of writing or sketching, but not many share them with people. (when was the last time a friend invited you to read their diary?) You will not be judged here. And you will have company. This is for you. For everyone..."
The
1000 Journals Project is a fascinating collaborative art project. I know a few people whom I think should add their names to the queue to received journals. Hilary, Holly, Velma, Olya, Jason, are you listening?
Does anyone remember SoundJam?
Those guys over at
Panic (a really great software company in Portland) help fill in some of the story of the birth of
iTunes, through the story of their own product,
Audion. Sound convoluted? Well, it's not really.
Just read the story.
It's a little on the lengthy side, and certainly features too much
Jobs-worship for
Jason's taste, but it's really, really well written, quite funny, and features lots of little anecdotes and historical graphics.
Motor Trend ad
Here's a sampling of the many exciting things I get to work on here at
Download.com. This is a half-page ad for our Music section. It's going to run in
Motor Trend magazine.
Pixar likes Macs, what a surprise
Ynnej will be interested in
this article about one of
Pixar's tools, Review Sketch.
"The Review Sketch tool...resides on all the Macs at Pixar," says the article. "...The director could draw on an image, and then play it back with the image moving underneath his drawing. A slider let him choose the width of the anti-aliased line."
Anyone surprised that Pixar uses Macs? Can you say "
Steve Jobs"?
Rumor: Flash-based iPod
Rumor has it that Apple will introduce a Flash-based iPod at
MacWorld SF in January.
Note to self
Note to self: When a homeless guy asks you if you have a light, first make sure he's wearing pants.
Spring water from the headwaters of Headwaters
In 1999, shortly after the public acquisition of
Headwaters Grove and
Elk Head Springs, I traveled to Humboldt for a rally for
Julia Butterfly. The other reason I went was for a quick day trip to the main grove, where I wanted to pump a few gallons of water from
Little South Fork of the Elk River.
Susan Stansbury,
Anamar�a Ni�o-Murcia, and I hauled that water out of the forest and down the mountain (water's heavy!) and back down to the Bay Area, where I bottled it in some
attractive bottles and offered them for sale as a fundraiser for the
Headwaters Forest Project (now sadly defunct).
We didn't end up selling many. So I still have the water today. That is, I have some of it. Most of it has evaporated over the years, especially the years I lived in the Mountain View hothouse I called
The Studio.
The
Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters had a fundraising auction last Sunday, and I donated four bottles of the water with a slightly updated and larger version of the label (pictured above). BACH's a great organization, so if you're interested in Headwaters Forest, definitely get plugged in with them.
Big Rick
I happened upon
Big Rick Stuart's website today. He was my favorite DJ on
LIVE 105 a few years ago, and I was bummed when he was let go. He's still on KFOG today. But I never listen to that station. Maybe I should...
Anyway, Rick's site is cool, but by far the coolest part is his
six-page personal timeline of the stations he's been at over his entire career. It's a venerable mini-history of Bay Area (and a few beyond) radio, and it brings back a lot of memories. Rick's had stints at
KUSF,
the Quake,
KITS (aka LIVE 105), and even
KNAC in SoCal, which later became the legendary "Pure Rock" station that broke all those LA hair bands I covered back in the
Western Front News days.
German stop frame animation
Peter Licht does interesting stop frame animation videos. [requires
RealPlayer]
Apple should use this
Will
this be the next
iPod TV ad you see?
Hmmm...new party?
Howard Dean will "lay out a vision for the future of the Democratic Party" in a live webcast this Wednesday at noon (Eastern time) from Washington, D.C.
More interestingly: "He will outline not just a direction for our party, but a concrete destination: a party built from the ground up," wrote
Democracy for America Executive Director Tom McMahon in an email to DFA supporters this morning.
"That means a party powered by millions of small donors, not millionaires. It means a party that speaks plainly and commits to concrete outcomes that affect real people. And it means a party that competes in every single race, for every single vote, in all fifty states," wrote McMahon.
I think I'll tune in at
www.DemocracyForAmerica.com on Wednesday to see what's up. I'd still have preferred that the
Green Party would have been an actual presence in this year's election, but I'm all for having more kids in the pool -- especially if it means a challenge to America's retarded two-party stronghold -- and a new party with Dean at the forefront could be an interesting species indeed.
Now if I can just convince congress to switch to a parliamentary system...
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po
