Friday 5/30/03 §
Pixar plus Brad Bird (who directed The Iron Giant, easily one of the best animated films of the past decade) equals The Incredibles, a comedy about a family of superheroes which is currently in production for the 2004 holiday season. I'm a big fan of both Pixar's and Bird's work, and I can't wait for this! According to Steve Jobs, you can see the teaser for The Incredibles with Pixar's current release, Finding Nemo, which opens today. (kottke)
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Monday 5/26/03 §
"Oh my god! Johnny's new friend is a sasquatch -- with three legs!" The perils of crossing labradors with poodles to make labradoodles. (Thanks, Lauren)
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Thursday 5/22/03 §
Good turnout at the blog meetup last night.
Adam - Clark - daymented - Jeff - Jeremy - Laura - Manuel - Matt - Michael - Tara - Tim - TYD. Some of whom I didn't actually get to see because on the walk from Aurifice to Bauhaus, I managed to twist my ankle on an uneven bit of pavement and fall on my ass. Nothing was permanently damaged except, of course, for my pride, but I wasn't sure how long the natural endorphins would keep the pain at bay, so I headed home shortly afterward.
Ow.
This weekend I'm going up to Vancouver. I'll be staying within walking distance of downtown's major attractions. And of course it'll be raining and I'll have a bum ankle. The good news is that one can buy Tylenol 1 with codeine over the counter in Canada. If I'm still feeling pain on Saturday, there's nothing like a little narcotic to make sure I don't care.
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Evolution in action in Chicago. Literally. (dangerousmeta)
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Inventor makes fountain in which water flows uphill. Or at least appears to. (Boing Boing)
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Tuesday 5/13/03 §
The new color of money. Well, at least, of the $20 bill. (Metafilter)
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Occasionally I check the signal strength on my DirecTV receiver to make sure the dish hasn't been knocked off-axis. I hadn't done it for a while, and when I checked last week I was shocked to discover that I had no signal at all on no fewer than four of the transponders! This struck me as bad, as the on-screen instructions tell me I should be getting a good solid signal on all transponders.
But as it turns out, it's nothing to worry about. Earlier this year, DirecTV apparently launched a new satellite with a "spot beam" capability. That means it transmits different programming to different areas of the country on a single frequency. This way, they don't have to cram all the local channels into a single broadcast that goes to the whole country. Transponders 4, 12, 20, and 26 simply aren't pointed in the Seattle direction.
After a little digging, I managed to find this map, which illustrates what transponders are used for spot-beaming in which parts of the country. Cool.
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Monday 5/12/03 §
You've got questions? We've got... er, well, we've got subway cars for sale. (Boing Boing)
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Last Saturday, the first of "Oral Lee Brown's kids" -- a class of inner-city Oakland first-graders to whom, in 1987, she promised a college education to any of them who graduated high school -- received her degree. A touching story. (Bifurcated Rivets)
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Friday 5/9/03 §
PYX is an interesting way of representing an XML document so it can more easily be processed by regular expressions and other traditional text-munging tools. (muxway)
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The Apple Store in Bellevue Square opens tomorrow. I'm planning to go; if you are too, look for me and say hello. Just in case I'm not the only tall fat guy there, my gallery has a couple pictures of me you can use to narrow it down, if you don't know what I look like.
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Thursday 5/8/03 §
Escher Web Sketch. (Bifurcated Rivets)
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A watch with up to 128MB of flash storage and a USB cable cleverly tucked into the wristband? Naturally, it's European. The LAKS Memory watch -- "We start shipping now!" (GirlHacker)
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Wednesday 5/7/03 §
Scott Fisher is a rare fellow: a Korean-speaking American who got to visit North Korea in the fairly recent past (April 2002). Luckily, he's written us up a fascinating travelogue, including pictures. (Metafilter)
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Curious facts about a city near which I once lived -- Detroit. (Davezilla)
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The muppets come home. (dangerousmeta)
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