January 2008
80 posts
The Unburdened Mind: Psychopaths Amongst Us
“It’s like… at my first job,” he continues, “I was stealing maybe a thousand bucks a month from that place. And this kid, he was new, he got wise. And he was going to turn me in, but before he got the chance I went to the manager and pinned the whole thing on him.” Now he is grinning widely. “Kid lost his job, the cops got involved, I don’t know what happened to him. And I guess something like...
Airbus A380 Cockpit Panorama →
“When the fact that one is a total nonentity who’s done nothing more...”
– Ellsworth Toohey, in Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ Toohey’s vision would seem to have whole-heartedly arrived, in the form of our current obsession with celebrity do-nothings like Paris Hilton and the rest of her odious ilk. The average person’s interest in the lives of...
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do”
– Henry Ford
Rain Is STILL Kryptonite To Los Angeles
As I previously noted, Los Angeles starts to come apart at the seams when sprinkled with the kind of rain that many places endure for weeks on end. Last night’s (supposedly) heavy rain resulted, once again, in a total lack of hot water this morning. What a surprise. After a useless call to our emergency maintenance service, conveniently located so close by that the operator had to ask me...
Understanding Art for Geeks →
this is, ladies and gentlemen, a must-see. — rocketscience
Rebuilding
I got my Macbook Pro back today, with its replacement hard drive, and am currently ass-deep in the weird process of rebuilding what I had. Software Update is sucking down gigs of data in order to get me up to date, then I’ll have to:
1. Reinstall Aperture.
2. Download and install the latest Aperture update.
3. Resurrect my Aperture library
4. Rescue my enormous iTunes library by...
WatchVideo: Moscow Warm Summer Night, by Timelapser
Minor Disaster
I just knocked a full cup of tea over my desk. My speakers, lamp, flatscreen TV, Xbox 360 devkit and external hard drive all got doused, as did all the cables and outlets beneath my desk. I’m sitting here with everything powered off, hoping I don’t cause a fire when I hook everything back up. At least my computer is unaffected…
Dead Drive
It started with a few sluggish applications, then Aperture’s crop tool stopped working. Next thing I know, I have a non-functional Macbook Pro. Looks like the hard drive gave up the ghost, after just nine months of use. I love Apple’s products, and my time with my MBP has been awesome, but to have a drive die so quickly on such an expensive machine really chews on the hem of my...
“Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have...”
– Maurice Chevalier
OK, so what exactly is the point of Twitter again?
“Careless design attracts careless behavior which, in the aggregate, leads to a...”
– Ricky Van Veen
“I wish I was no longer sick.”
Flags Of The World, Graded →
‘“Hey, lots of countries have a tricolour, why don’t we have a quadricolour?” Big mistake.’
Working in Aperture, cleaning up images.
Strictly No Photography →
I heartily endorse, in fact, encourage, this sort of behaviour.
Baby + Needles = Sadness
So, this morning my two-month old daughter Tallulah had her first set of inoculations. Frankly, it sucked. The nursing staff were awesome, and made sure that it was over with as quickly as possible (in fact, it was pretty incredible watching someone accurately administer four separate injections, in four locations, to a writhing baby. And in just twenty seconds), but there’s something about...
“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little...”
– John Ruskin
best of craigslist : Survival Of The Fittest M&M →
“I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.”
15 Year Old Boy Scout Saves President of the... →
And I don’t mean he used his knot-tying or fire-building skills either. A guy rushed the president with a knife at an event, and this kid wrestled the would-be assassin to the ground and took away the knife! In his boy-scout uniform! — xstevemurphy I must have quit scouts before they got to that badge. — peterwknox Haha!!
Three Times The Fun
I just finished giving the same presentation three times in quick succession. I’m pretty pleased with how it went, given that I’m not a natural at this kind of thing, but man - three times? Without a break? I’m all talked out.