Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (See-Through Loo)

(See-Through Loo)
Hahaha.. :)

Cabinet National Library

What Craziness is this? Its some sort of harebrained idea by some guys with magazines, but its really cool. Next time I'm roadtripping, I'll make sure to go there.

Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs

This is a fascinating article. Basically the idea is that an octopus has 8 long arms, and the way that they control them easily and still do complex things without getting tangled may lead to designs allowing robots to have long flexible arms. (Like Doc Oc of Spiderman)

An interesting thing is that once an octopus grabs some food, it makes the arm into a "semi-ridgid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length."

Thats pretty cool.

Technology just isn't as cool as it used to be..

I was playing with Jim's old school rotary phone the other day, and I was wondering what it is about rotary phones thats just so cool?
I think its because they engage the senses much more than phones (and other tech) do today. They have a cool dial thing, and its heavy, and you spin it, and it makes a sweet noise as it spins back. These days, everything is a keys and a screen, maybe a mouse, nothing feels cool, or sounds cool anymore. Nothing is fun to use.
Maybe thats why I like Apple products so much. Their hardware is different, appeals to some of my other senses. They have cool mice that are a single button in themselves, you can wring the neck of the iMac G4s like a strange looking goose, the first iPod's wheel would spin and click. They're not just another hunk of black plastic.
One of the coolest cell phones I've ever seen rotated open, instead of flipping open, and had a cool joystick like button on the keypad. Little stylistic designs made it cool without even knowing what the capabilities of the phone or the games included were.
Its possible that this is just a by product of growing up. Maybe I just miss toys, which are designed to be more engaging of the senses. *le sigh* Anyways, just a thought I had

The Governator Needs Open Source to Run California

Open Source is sweet. So is this articles title.. the Governator!

Shoes... Drama... icons...

...exhaustipation. Shoes and mom and oy.
...but in the midst of all the... whatever, I remembered that I want to put up the link to that nifty lil pic-file-generating app:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/icons_screensavers/pic2icon.html

I use it daily, saves soo much annoyance, my pics are so much more easily searchable, I just scan through them visually. It has blurryness/aliasing settings of some sort that I haven't touched in a while, but they rule. The only problem I've ever had is when I drag a truly INSANE amount of big files onto it, it can get hinky. But yes... muchly useful app.

...i think I'm going to sleep now, and have nightmares about shoe sales.
Yeah, you heard me. I'm gonna have nightmares about *shoe sales*... me...
sign of the apocalypse and/or Mom Involvement.
Meep.

New Year's 2005 - NYC

Here's a better gallery of the pictures. Better?
Please email me complaints and picture removal requests. :)
I also put up two movies of the party here and here. Unfortunately, spoiled by my camera's auto rotate function, I shot both movies sideways, and I can't figure out how to rotate them again. If anyone knows of a share/freeware way to do this, please let me know.

New Years Photos

WEB0004
Originally uploaded by Kusmeroglu.

I'm working on a good way to share all the great pictures I got.. at first I thought I'd just throw together some html, but then I realized that I might be doing this more often, now that I have a camera. I'm between using iPhoto/mac.com's automatic gallery making thing or this flickr thing if it works out.
What would be ideal is some sort of gallery that me and Rachel can add comments/descriptions below the pictures, and is automated.
Any Ideas?

Hair cloning for baldness? *blink*

...am muchly tired, checkin email before frantic Xmas packing tradition commences. WebMD as usual has flooded my inbox with crazy mostly-hypochondriac-sounding email newsletters. I keep it coming, though, cuz occasionally I get stuff like this:

http://my.webmd.com/content/article/96/103836.htm

*blink*
Hair Cloning. For, like, replacing lost hair..?

I think I'll just let it go, & get to the frantic packing...

Programming Issues

I'd just like to say that the inability to stop typing piece as 'peice' is really annoying. I even did it there. Grr....

[Also, working on a laptop for any length of time with a bad desk/chair is hurtful on the neck and back]
Back to hacking..

Game Pieces

Here's a teaser. I spent 5 hours last night hacking a program to create all my tetris pieces for me, with any size, colors, and shapes I want. It even rotates it and draws the shading on the bevels correctly. PyGame is great. (It would have taken me much less, but I spent like 2 hours fiddling with a couple different math modules trying to get it to rotate a 2d array.. should have paid more attention in CSE 485 before I dropped it ^^)
Anyways, this piece is one of the new tetraminoes, thats going to be worth 3x the points, because it forces you to have a hole.
[For anyone interested, the script to make the peices is underdocumented and here]

SolarWolf

This game is going to scratch an itch.
In explanation: I just finished exams and this semester (woohoo, and thank god), so I'm trying to decide what to do with my 3 weeks off with the requirements that it involves coding in python. I've been meaning to write a game for a while, with the major setback that Blender doesn't seem to work on my laptop (but it does on all other computers, annoyingly). Blender was going to be too much of a learning curve anyways.
So, in a fit of Not Studying (tm), I played SolarWolf on Jim's Suze computer. Long story short, I was impressed by its cleaness, quickness, prettyness, pleasing to the earness, and other important things (like good gameplay). I immediately wanted to find out what it was made with, and to my pleasant surprize, found out it was written with pygame. [Well then, dad, you win.] My initial impressions of pygame, based on a quick download of one of their demo games was that it was clunky. This was a long time ago, and I think I was grouping it in with my initial impression of pythonCard, which was definitely not what I was looking for as a GUI solution (but now looks a lot better than I remember as well, and I recomended it to someone for some project they were doing).
To all those who worked on these projects: Great job, and thanks!
After reading an article on getting into game programming, now my plan for x-mas break is writing a Tetris clone. (muahahaha) My unique (maybe, probably not) spin on it is going to be a library of other pieces you can choose. (meaning other than the standard tetraminoes) I'm definitely going to build in a highscores thing so me and Rachel can battle to the death.. (still haven't come up with a name though)

Sharkey 2: the Revenge

Why is it that as soon as I mention him here, the next day he goes and pulls a Haxor DaVinci?
0_0
I'm quite sure that one has nothing to do with the other, but, dangit. Now I'm linking to a etis rorrim.
.yllaretiL
What's funny is that knowing him, the site may be back to normal tomorrow, or gone. (yet again.)

Sharkey, himself as ever

I revisit Sharkey's site about once a month, since he's not exactly posting real fast. But always, I come away entertained. However, this is the first time I have ever spewed hot chocolate all over my monitor. (In any context.)

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3137105

..He starts off with a mouse pun halfway down the page, quickly veers into Gremlins humor, then Buddhism, and speeds up from there. It actually made me want to wander around in EQ2 being a wiseass. Looks like fun. I'm sure I could think of something. I don't know how detailed the EQ2 char creation thingie lets you be.
I wonder if it's possible to cobble together a Ferengi...

And as usual, the rest of his site & random links are also fun.

Mechs!!

They made mechs![TOYOTA.CO.JP] Woah! And they look cool, and anime like!
Woah.. !

Exhaustion & X-Men make me giggle

Not really the X-Men themselves, I guess, but more the minor characters.
I stumbled across this site:

http://jerome.galica.free.fr/marvel/X-Men/x-men.htm

I was addicted! It's like an encyclopedia of chibi Marvel characters! Or rather, I guess that's what it *is*... ^_^
Some of the lesser-known characters have such ridiculous names/premises... there's the weird copycat ones, like theguy that's a Kingpin clone - but wearing a fez, or the guy named Orbit who has lil jawbreaker lookin things orbiting his head, or the lady who has no shoulders, named Venus Deemillo! o_o
And you get to browse them and watch the little surprise GIF animations and look at bizarre versions of Wolverine & giggle.

Or at least, *I* giggle.

Prolly the Tilex fumes...

Woof! ... Seriously??

Technology progresses in some utterly crazy directions.

Like Dog Translators developed by the Japanese...
brought to you by Sharper Image!!

some of the description...

Dog owners are convinced their dogs talk to them, right? It's true! And now Bow-Lingual, The Dog Translator can help you understand exactly what your "best friend" is trying to communicate. Bow-Lingual was developed by Dr. Norio Kogure, a PhD in veterinary medicine at Tokyo's Kogue Animal Hospital.
Working with leading scientists at the Japan Acoustic Laboratory, Dr. Kogure recorded hundreds of breeds and analyzed thousands of voice (bark) prints. Their intensive observations and analysis led them to categorize canine communication into six emotions — Happy, Sad, Frustrated, Needy, Angry and Assertive — and to create the first Animal Emotion Analysis System (AEAS), which is the sophisticated technology behind Bow-Lingual.

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0˛o

0.o

Seriously??
We HAVE to get someone this for Xmas! We have to!!

Neato desktop

I've just realized that my desktop is rather spiffy. Since OS X came out, I've been fiddling with icon mods, and other stuff, and currently this is the end result:

Spiff, no? ^_^
The background is generated by Fracture, a screensaver that generates fractals and lets you shuffle the color scheme while it's generating. And you can save the images you like! (I was impressed enought to pay for it.) I made the Fracture folder my desktop images folder, & it shuffles fractals randomly every 15 minutes. ^_^
Plus, I have this OTHER amazing screensaver, called Fluid. It's so cool. And adjustable!

And thank god, Mike's Dell is no longer Frelled. I un-frelled it. Much misery and dell-phone-support-incompetance was discovered, but I did it. yay, me.

Lycos Anti-spam plan overwhelms sites (BBC)

Interesting thing I found from Slashdot. Basically, Lycos made a screen saver that (instead of helping find aliens, or further genetic research, or something cool) sends packets to the websites of spammers to try to raise their bandwidth costs. Well, it was rather popular, and the spam websites are getting shut down by what amounts to a DDoS attack. (Lycos says that they were trying to just slow down, not shut down the sites) I have mixed feeling on this. Its cool that someone's trying to target the spammers, but who gets to say what the targets are? (these guys say they were innocently attacked by the screen saver after an actual spam company linked to pictures on their website)

Overstock.com: Worldstock

Overstock.com, save up to 80% every day! Woohoo!
No, but seriously, I read this article about Amazon.com being sad in Q3 and Q4, and it mentioned that online shoppers might be going to places like Overstock.com (which is pretty much on online outlet.
The interesting and bloggable part of this is that they have a thing called Worldstock, which is a section selling "handcrafted goods from around the world"(TM). You can shop by country, including Ghana, Brazil, China, Tibet, and Nepal, to name a few, or you can shop by category (jewelry, rugs, home decor, etc.). They have some really neat looking things, like Cool Chinese Caligraphy, Chinese Jade Fish, and Rattan Head Pillow from Thailand. (It looks uncomfortable, but I think its similar to what the japanese used while sleeping on their mats on the floor. I'm fascinated by this, and always wanted to try it..)