Spiderman in the Rain

So, I've been telling people about this piece for years, I saw it a long time ago and it's stuck with me all this time as my favorite Spiderman picture, but never found it again. Apparently I hit the right Google terms this time, and I've finally found it. Too bad it's so expensive. Anyways, done by John Romita. There was a scene in Spiderman 3 that reminded me of it, which is why I brought it up again.

Kentucky Derby: Street Sense

So, it looks like Street Sense is already a favorite, but I'm going to have to agree. He's a great looking horse. Plus, he's part Irish, and who can argue with that?

[Edit: I win!]

Snowy Lotus Elise 8

Snowy Lotus Elise 8, originally uploaded by Fleur-Design.

With an Apple sticker! Dude, you are my hero. *drool*

python.struct

I've been doing a lot of work on translating data spit out by various sensors recently, so I now know intimately what bit-twiddling means. At one time in my life, when I was more impatient, I swore I would never enjoy this sort of thing. Python's struct module sure does make it easy, if not enjoyable(ish). If only bit-twiddling in C was this quick..

Cygwin is my secret hero

In trying to develop in C on my Windows machine at work *nails scratching on blackboard here*, I installed Cygwin. At first, I only used it when I had to, but today, I noticed myself using it constantly. Thank the gods for decent command line on windows. And GCC. I was getting tired of lugging my personal laptop in just to do some coding. I guess when you learn everything in a *nix environment, it's just a pain to get anything done in windows.

ls > dir any day of the week.

Spring In Florida

Purple Trees
Originally uploaded by Kusmeroglu.

I've been taking pictures all over the place, this is an awesome place to live for photo-ops. We don't have season changes, the *only* difference between winter and spring so far has been the slight rise in temperature, and these gigantic purple trees. They're quite surprising at first, when you're driving along, and there's a shock of purple over the road.

Fireworks Photos

We watched some fireworks off of the St Petersburg pier from a boat this weekend, and I went a little crazy taking pictures of fireworks. Some of them actually came out really nicely, as long as you cropped them right. Very abstract-arty. You can check out the lot of them here on flickr.

Florida

So, I live in the world of beaches and sun now, tomorrow will mark my one month anniversary of moving down. Everything here is strange and different, but in a good way. The weather is fantastic, the winter here is like spring or summer up in Pennsylvania. I'm told that the summer will be unbearably hot and humid, but I've never been one to complain too loudly about such things. The plants and animals are all odd, there are squirrels, but just as many lizards, the palm trees out number normal trees, and there's spanish moss hanging off of everything, giving the scenery a hint of the exotic and ancient. The sunsets are fantastic, and even the crappy beaches have a hint of clear blue water. Living between the gulf and the bay, I see water all the time.

The people at work are all great, I haven't had a bad experience yet. Things are hectic and the politics are at an extreme because there is a lot of upheaval going on, but everybody is still nice. People down here are nice in general, except when they are behind the wheel. Everyone has this friendly, laid back sort of attitude in the city. (I hear it isn't so in other places nearby) I just ate at The Chattaway, which is this adorable 'best burger in st. pete' type place. I've never ate somewhere with such an interesting and comfortable setting. On the way there, I passed my neighbor, Moe, and her husband, who asked if I was going to "the chatty", since it's only 3 blocks from me in an otherwise residential area. The guy I ate with is my new beach volleyball partner, V, a truely nice guy. We ate and sat by a firepit type thing and talked about life and relationships, then chit chatted with a couple who were also sitting by the fire.

Charlie, one of the guys from work, invited me out to play beach volleyball, and got me totally hooked. I played for the first time on tuesday, and I've probably logged 20 hours since then (thursday, saturday, and sunday). V wants to train me for a co-ed team and participate in tournaments. Apparently I'm a natural beach volleyball player, I'm picking it up much quicker than I did indoor volleyball. I blame martial arts and wallyball for my quick reflexes, and the scenery and company for my enthusiasm. Everyone I play with is really cool, and spending hours out on the beach can't be beat. Between games, you get to lay back and watch the boats go by on the water, or the sunset. I should have a dark tan in no time, which is odd for me, since I don't have the patience to lay out.

The nightlife down here is odd, it's all beer, wine, and music. There's a lot of jazz and blues down here, and most of the places have live music, then there's First Friday, where they shut down a couple blocks on Central Ave and have a band playing out in the street. Everybody drinks beer all the time. I'm assuming that it tapers off in the summer, when beer becomes heavy, but I wouldn't be suprized if people just switched to wine. It's very vacationy. Even people that have lived here their whole lives remark on how it's like a vacation everyday. (I think this is where the laid back attitude comes from)

Anyways, I just wanted to chat about my thoughts on moving to Florida. I like it here very much, I'm keeping myself busy seeing new places and trying out new things.

Google Calculator and Suggestions

(Woo, Trebuchet is my favorite font. == happy with new dashboard)
So, I just noticed today that if you have Google suggestions turned on, like in my search bar in Firefox, you can do the calculator stuff, and it will pop up as the first suggestion. I use Google for a calculator, spell checker, and thesaurus all the time, this just makes my life two buttons easier/faster.
If you're not familiar with the calculator stuff, check this out. You can type stuff like "1440 minutes in hours", and the conversion (=24 hours) will show up as the first suggestion.

One Picture A Day

So, apparently there was a one picture a day video making fad that I completely missed. (I think I miss them all, and that's okay by me.)
At any rate, this is definitely worth a minute or two of your time:

http://www.oldeenglish.org/podcast/one-picture-every-day

It's especially worth a couple minutes of my not cramming studying for exams time. 22 hours from now, I'll be done with all of my undergraduate studies forever! Woot.

Wacky Google and Saving $

1st of all, Happy Belated Birthday to me :)

I haven't posted much lately, I have a backlog of wacky web findings - I think I found something about DNA barcodes? - and also google not only now owns blogger somehow but increasingly the rest of the universe - but I'll have to dig them up at a time when I'm not just procrastinating. For now I will only indulge my bargain-hunter-ness :)

A certain thoughtful and generous Mossy Blog owner got me a thinkgeek gift certificate for the Bday! a Whoo-hoo event enough already, but then in the process of trying not to pay for shipping and googling for coupons, I ran across this.

http://www.bigcrumbs.com/crumbs/frontpage.jsp?r=tamarwhite

At first I thought, this has to be a pyramid scheme? But I googled into it further, and it appears legit - and makes a lot of sense in the context of affiliate marketing.
Internet marketing is a wacky, complex, and often expensive business, it even makes a business out of advertising *itself*. Basically banner ads and ad-blogs and all sorts of permutations thereof exist.
I gather the idea here is, instead of paying a banner advertiser etc per click-through or per purchase, bigcrumbs pays *the customer*, and also lets the customer profit from further advertising.
And they gave me 6.3% cashback from my thinkgeek purchase. With a giftcard to pay for it, it's not just cash back, it's free money :)

Apocalypto

I was quite entertained by this movie, I would recommend it, but then again, I've always like Mel Gibson movies. (No, I didn't watch Passion of the Christ).

At anyrate, the movie opens with this quote:

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
- Will Durant

which I think, along with the general plot of the movie, is quite fitting for this day and age. Go Hollywood and your social commentary.

Tom Bihn shopping

One of the things I take most seriously in my life are my bags. I'm not your standard purse toting sort of girl, and after putzing around with some canvas bags from the local army navy store, I bought a bag from Tom Bihn. The Medium Cafe Bag is awesome, it just fits a folder with my papers and one or two small books for class, as well as gum, cell phone, pens, flashcards, and wallet.

Now that I'm looking at finally getting my Mac Book Pro, I'm turning again to Tom Bihn for my laptop case, and found this interesting tidbit that has me completely sold: Apparently some of the bags have a
Treason Tag, which hides the statement "We're sorry our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him." hidden in French amongst the washing instructions.

Happy Halloween from Indiana Jones

My halloween costume this year was Indiana Jones, which was remarkably easy to do since I already had boots, slacks, a button down shirt, a whip, and the hat. I went out and bought a couple belts and a Indy looking bag, and all was well.

Overheard in State College

Girl 1: "What are we going to do if the party is cancelled?"
Girl 2: "What party?"
Girl 1: "The one with all the floats."
Girl 2: "The parade?"
Girl 1: "Yeah.. the parade."

Ahh, homecoming, how I will not miss you at all.

Railroads will save the world

I was very excited this morning to read this article in USA Today. I spent all day excited about it, and even showed it to some people, who were decidedly Not As Excited (tm) about it. This is probably the best news that I've heard all month.

The article is talking about Norfolk Southern Railway, which is updating some railroad tunnels and bridges as part of a new rail corridor from Norfolk, VA to Chicago. Points to take home with you from the article: The federal government is paying for over half of the project out of funds earmarked for highways. (Various state governments are also contributing money to the project.) The new corridor can handle trains that are double stacked with standard size containers (the same ones used for shipping all over the world), saving shippers around 500$ a container. With double stacked trains, Norfolk can actually make money. One train "replaces about 300 trucks".

Now, why are trains so important? Trucks are a terrible and inefficient way to transport goods. (By inefficient, I mean both physically and economically) Trucks get involved in many accidents on the highways. Trucks cause congestion on highways. Trucks damage highways to the tune of millions of dollars a year: one truck driving down the highway does the damage of 10,000 cars (Schwartzman). [Think about this: 1 Train = 300 Trucks = 3,000,000 Cars = lots and lots of your tax and toll money saved] Tires on pavement are way less efficient than wheels on tracks, not to mention that you're basically moving each item separately and with a diesel engine. Trucks pollute orders of magnitude more than trains, especially when you look at pollution per pound of goods transported, and in light of global warming, this is especially important. Trains are cheaper than trucks, these days, cheap transportation is everything.

Really, I'm mystified by the fact that we don't use trains much more than we do, in fact, we use trains even less than we used to. It just doesn't make sense in any way. Trucks should be limited to local delivery, the rail infrastructure should be updated and expanded, and something really has to be done about Amtrak. At any rate, you can see why this made me so happy. I hope this is the beginning of a new trend. Thank you, Nick Rahall, keep up the good work.

Princess Layla the Bubble Killer

Just a quick post, to introduce Layla, hunter of bubbles. She has to catch every one, and we need more bubble solution to help burn off her excess energy.

This is one good photo I took out of 40. She decided to play Blur the Picture.

I think it might be a favorite game of hers. Others include:

• Steal Stella's Shoe and Prance Around With It
• Chase the Ice Cube
• Run Flying Puppy circles Across the Room for No Apparent Reason
• Leaping Lick the Face
  and
• Wrestle the Kitchen Rug.

Now all we need is the flying cars

The future is now! As we were just saying on the phone :D

First of all, Philips introduces "Lumalive" Fabric, which is just, as a concept...

0_0

There's also a youTube vid.

Now if only they could crank up the resolution... but still.


So as I was saying - the future is, kinda, now. Ipods have finally gone way down in price, *and* are with video. In 2003 my parents paid $500 for a 3rd gen 30GB! Playstation 3 and the next Nintendo system (HTH does one say "Wii" and not sound like an ass..?) are actually finally COMING OUT. Wikipedia is for better or worse becoming the effective repository of all human knowledge, which gives me oddly giddy geek I-told-you-so feelings for some reason, and mapquest and maps google have totally changed the way everyone I know navigates. And you can zoom in on your HOUSE. Our neighbors have some crazy pools apparently. Suddenly *everyone* has a site on the internet, thanks to MySpace & co., no matter how Ba-Dong the design can be.

Google has become a freaking VERB.

And of course there's the Best ScreenSaver EVER - Electric Sheep.

Now you don't even have to download nuthin to see check it out, although personally I think in terms of sheer *pretty* the current flock WAY outstrips these videos. I just found that some of the sheep guys are now on MySpace - They have some youtube stuff, and some google vids. (Tons of free video and image hosting - yet another flyingCarsIsm.) Also hifisheep.com did what *I* was wishing for all along.

Creator of Electric Sheep on MySpace


He also has a google vid somewhere where he did a lecture at google, it was lengthy at an hour long, but so very informative. It answered a ton of questions I had about the sheep.

Awesome Sheep designer's myspace

Opposite of a desert tree at sunset

Opposite of a desert tree at sunset
Originally uploaded by Kusmeroglu.

I've been looking through pictures tonight, a little cruise down memory lane, and found this one, which I always meant to put up somewhere. I think it's a unique sort of play on the familiar desert tree picture. The background is the shops along college ave, picture taken in a winter storm twilight at penn state, 2005.

Research Project

I'm doing an undergrad research project on combining social bookmarking information with internet search. I'm trying to determine if adding tags to search results speeds up the process of finding the page you are looking for. Please help out by filling out this 5 minute questionnaire, I need all the responses I can get.

Thanks!