Friday, October 29, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Doggy rar. RAR, I say.
Courtesy of the faaaaaabulous Ayato (http://www.furaffinity.net/user/ayato) of HC1 fame, my first piece of personal character art in what feels like forever. I'd sort of gotten over the notion of a personal character -- I enjoy character development too much to settle down on any single one, but eventually my vanity won out. I held a poll on Twitter (I'm @alexfvance, by the way; feel free to follow!) for domestic canine species, since I basically wanted a Bad Dog version of myself. The awesomest proposal was a Mechelse Herder, aka Belgian Shepherd, aka Mechelaar, aka Malinois. For one thing, they look badass and for another, with that many alternate names they MUST be up to all manner of nefarious badness. So! There we go. I finally broke down. Thanks to Ayato for doing such a lovely job!
Monday, October 25, 2010
Anti-Billboard on U.S.-Canada Border
via wired.com
While the photo doesn't exactly ring very true with its desaturated and overly dramatic clouds, it's still a cool piece of public art that calls attention to the signeage-strewn landscape.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Yo dawg I heard you like stickers on your HP Slate
via engadget.com
So we built in a retractable pull-out tab so you can put stickers on the back and stickers on the tab and stickers on the motherfrakking stickers.
Here, @mattyohe brings this smashing design to its logical conclusion: http://yfrog.com/nbvxzmp
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Chilean Mine Rescue Playset -- too soon?
I think it's fine. None of 'em died, so it's not exactly in bad taste... is it? :)
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Secret of Wet Dogs' Shake-Drying Discovered: "Where R is the 'radius of dog' and W, for a rat, is 18 Hz."
http://www.viddler.com/simple/fa8e2a66/
via gizmodo.com
As per the Giz' suggestions, skip the formulas and get right to rats, mice, bears and doggies shakin' they thang!
Facetime Droste Effect: This is what you see when you Facetime with your iPhone and your Mac at once.
Yeah. Let's light up another one of these bad boys.
Historypin: a fantastic grassroots project to map historic photographs on Google Street View for a glimpse into the past.
via historypin.com
Absolutely magnificent.
A few years ago there was an exhibition in Amsterdam where big ground-level billboards were set up in public squares, showing blown-up photographs of the same area from a century ago. There was also a mark on the ground where the photographer had stood, so standing there the billboard's image would be aligned perfectly with the reality behind it.
HistoryPin aims to do the same on a global scale. It's such a simple thing, really, giving an old photograph a set of coordinates and fudging with Street View to get the buildings to line up, but it gives those old photos a wondrous and immediately accessible context.
This is a fantastic use of information science and consumer computer services. Technology has always excelled at making unreality real; now more and more we're seeing technology used to make reality more real, too.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
No Standing Only Dancing: my kind of street.
From photographer Rennie Ellis' Australian Graffitti collection.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Oh Aretha, baby, I love you too.
Never before or since has anyone made a pink lampshade dress over stockings look classy. Aretha, I am so gay for you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ6HOUGE-Ok&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Wolves on the highway. Obviously. (via a @cheetah_spotty)
http://www.youtube.com/v/Lk3ibIGKTYA&hl=en&fs=1 They're worse than biker gangs. Men: gird your loins! Women: hide your
children and your beadwork!
children and your beadwork!
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
E-mail vs snail mail in numbers; spam vs junk
The more useful comparison is legit e-mail vs legit snail-mail, which works out as about 29 to 1.
Although an interesting corollary is the distinction between spam and junk, correclty observed by the grapher: corproate messages, newsletters and advertisements sent via e-mail according to proper practices count as legit e-mail, while in the postal service they count as junk.
At least in the Netherlands we have a mechanism to decline junkmail in the post (a yes/no or no/no sticker on the mailbox) and I assume other countries have similar arrangements. Junkmail is something you can opt out of.
Digital junkmail is something you (inadvertantly) opted into, usually via a craftily hidden-in-plain-sight check box on a corporate website, signing you up for product updates and newsletters as a consequence of purchasing a product. These, too, are something you can opt out of.
So how much legit e-mail is actually digital junkmail?
The best innovation my company has ever come up with: providing a cauldron of warm, freshly mad oatmeal porridge every morning of the winter.
So much better than a cup of coffee in the morning. Mmm.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Huge Bike Jump into a Pond 35 feet in the air - super cool.
http://www.youtube.com/v/B3GribQCg6c&hl=en&fs=1
via youtube.com
This looks like crazy fun, and beautifully filmed. Don't try this at home, kids!
Hot Dog. Animal cruelty through costuming.
Honestly if there is anything funnier than a pissed off Corgi wearing a hotdog suit, I do not know what it is.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Windows Phone 7: Who are you, and what have you done with Microsoft?
Yesterday's presentation of Windows Phone 7 has left me thoroughly impressed, both with what was demonstrated and with the corporate monstrosity behind it. I don't care that the platform lags two years behind iPhone and Android. I don't care that it lacks copy-and-paste, or multitasking, or that applications reportedly take up to three minutes to load. I don't care there's no Mac client, that I'm under a 2-year contract and that nothing I've seen is more desirable than the iPhone 4 I have and love.
I also don't care that I am interested in WP7 in more or less the same way I was interested in the moribund Google Wave last year, if not quite so wide-eyed and breathless. I apologize for nothing, and I don't believe any of my enthusiasm was misguided, despite how things turned out since then.
I am a whore for anything new that shows real vision.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Hard as it is for a staunch Machead to say, I must admit: what I see of Windows Phone 7 is impressive.
via en.wikipedia.org
No copy and paste, no backgrounding running of apps, but those might be forgivable for a 1.0 device. The user experience is very interesting, aiming to remove the distinction between the OS and the app to turn the phone into a more transformative device even than the iPhone and Android.
Time will tell if the phones themselves actually deliver a worthwhile experience, but this Is the first time in a very long time that a Microsoft product debut actually got me interested.
Also, amazingly, they're running ads that don't completely suck, even though the message is convoluted an aimed at older folks who haven't yet bought into the smartphone craze:
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
An afternoon in Naarden-Vesting: Spanish treachery, French occupation, and a Roman goddess.
[gallery]
Dating back to the 9th century under the name Naruthi, Naarden was granted city-rights in 1300, but the South Sea (an inlet of the North Sea, which would later be dammed in to form the IJsselmeer, in which the world's largest man-made island would be created, on which I now live) was a tumultuous and continuous threat, so the city was rebuilt in a safer location some fifty years later. As I mentioned earlier, Naarden-Vesting as we know it now is a fortress town with double battlements in a star shape. Originally a Spanish innovation, the star fort allows the occupants to fire weapons not only at advancing enemies, but also at villains trying to scale their walls.
Should it be unclear, vesting is a Dutch word for fort, derived via a no doubt circuitous route from the Roman goddess Vesta. She represented the hearth, the homestead, belonging, which is why we still see her name in words like invest and vestibule, and in the Dutch verb vestigen, meaning to settle, to occupy, to inhabit.
The town put its defenses to good use against the Spanish invasion and subsequent occupancy of the Netherlands during the 80 Years War, when Don Fadrique, son of the Iron Duke, laid siege on the town. Despite adequate defenses against the Spanish troops present, the annexation of the Netherlands as a Spanish territory was well under way and, fearing for future reprisals for continued resistance, the people of Naarden disarmed themselves and opened the city gates. The Spaniards rounded up some seven hundred men, women and children, and executed them in front of the municipal house.
After the occupation ended the defenses weren't adequately rebuilt when in 1672, exactly one hundred years after the Spaniards marched in, the troops of King Louis XIV sashayed briskly into the town. The battlements were substantially upgraded, but our own King William of Orange III nonetheless won the city back for Holland a year later, and once more under a Dutch flag, work continued to modernize the defenses.
In the 19th century the French rolled in again, this time under Napoleon's flag, but the French general in charge of the garrison stationed in Naarden apparently liked it there so much that he refused to surrender the town even after Napoleon's forces in the Netherlands had capitulated. It took a few months, but once again the town was reclaimed.
The history since then doesn't really show much of a return-on-investment for the fortunes that were spent building the town's defenses, and by 1926 it ceased to serve as a fort entirely. Still, the battlements are still there, all covered with grass and surrounded by a moat and quite easily accessible to the able-bodied, adventurously-inclined and sturdily-shod.
Here's a passel of photos — pardon the curious 'ghost silhouettes' on some of them; I'd accidentally turned on my iPhone's HDR function and apparently didn't hold the phone still enough during the exposures...
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