Sometimes there's art in them there thangs

I seem to be stumbling upon things to do with album covers (CD liners to you young hip folk).

Here's a site that showcases great design in that arena - Sleevage.

Tele-bully

Last night I got a call from folks trying to sell me a trial subscription of the local paper - The Calgary Herald. The girl on the line was a fast talker. It was hard to get a word in edgewise and even though cutting this conversation short was as easy as hanging up, I wanted to see where this would go. I explained that I don't read the newspaper anymore. That's a pretty definitive argument against wanting a subscription. Nope - she kept reading from the script, explaining what great features were in the paper these days. I replied that I was not interested and was hanging up now, but my curiosity got the best of me and I stayed on the line to see what she would say next. Now she's saying she's going to send out the paper and am I still living on such and such Avenue... yadda yadda. That's when I hung up.

Message to phone sales people: This kind of tactic is what motivates me to NEVER buy your product. So in essence, you haven't gained a sale, you've gained a crusader against your product. Is that good business?

Self measuring bowls

The magic number when it comes to snacks is 100 grams. Apparently eating a 100 gram snack isn't a bad thing. Just one......

These ingenious bowls make it easy to measure out 100 grams of snack material. They tip over when you've reached 100 grams. Also available in 250 gram size. For those extra special snack times.

Set phasers on fun....

Make a Star Trek phaser toy look even more realistic by replacing the built-in light bulb with a blue laser from a Playstation 3. Looks awesome.

Hmmmm.......

Karl thinks ahead to Halloween next year...

Time savers are always good

It's a viral for Sprint, but it's still got some decent time saver tips. Waitless dot org.

Holy sketch toy Batman!

If you're into technical drawing, you might like one of Google's latest toys - Google SketchUp. It's one of the most intuitive 3D modeling programs out there - and it's free! Want to design your dream home? You could do it with this tool.

Here's a set of tutorial videos on what it can do.

I could waste hours on this. Damn you Google!!

How did she learn them all?

Hey geohounds, you've got nuthin' on this up and comer. Lilly is 23 months old and can point out many countries on the map.

Freaking amazing.

Zoom zoom!

They souped up the TGV bullet train in France and decided to try to see how fast it could go.

How does 574.8 km/h ( 357.2 mph) sound to you? That would get you from New York to Los Angeles in under 8 hours. Check the video. Especially the part where the train passes under an overpass - what a view.

Making art out of album covers

I've always been a fan of clever album art, so when I saw these album cover remixes, I was impressed.

It's just a fancy word for pink

In yet another example of bizarre copyrighting, T-Mobile has copyrighted the colour magenta. GMAFB. Go ahead, figure out what those letters stand for....

Moops

If you're a Seinfeld fan, you'll probably like this Jerry Seinfeld Dictionary of Terms and Phrases.

Not as dark as it was back in the day...

Ever since I mentioned that I was growing some fuzz below my lip and then a moustache, folks have been asking for photographic evidence.

Voila.

The moustache is driving me nuts. I'm not used to having hair intrude into my mouth area.

OK, it just dawned on me how bad that sounds...........

The King of Pop is a honky!

It's official.... MJ is now completely white.

Too bad it won't do anything for his ability to live in any neighbourhood he wants....

Am I the only one who finds the magazine cover to be all too ironic?

Yo bro, don't be a ho

I don't get celebrities. The very nature of their lifestyle invites observation, adoration and emulation. But they often just don't seem to get that - or they do, but don't agree and resist. Heh. Resistance is futile. But Prince has really decided to bite the hand that feeds him by pulling this stunt with his fans.

"His lawyers have forced his three biggest internet fansites to remove all photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to the artist's likeness. A legal letter asks the fansites to provide "substantive details of the means by which you propose to compensate our clients [Paisley Park Entertainment Group, NPG Records and AEG] for damages".

Prince. Dude. Order up a grande soy latte, sit the hell down for a minute and think about what you're doing.

P.S.: That image is a photo I vectorized at that Stanford link I mentioned yesterday...

Cat talk

Two cats talking.

It is truly funny how cats vocalize.

Doing nothing has never been so amazing

Funny motivational poster.

I cannot take credit.

Reminiscing about our cats

I have fond memories of our cats. I like cats a lot. We had to get rid of ours because of allergy problems.

What I like most about cats is the most simple games they play.

• Attack the movement under the blanket. You know - with the two-front-paw-dive?
• Punch the ball from underneath. I used to place a wadded up paper ball on my lap and the cat would punch it with its paw from underneath to send it flying.
• Knock the object down. If an object is placed on a high place (like the top of a stepladder), they can't help but knock it off the high perch. In the stepladder case, it just falls to the next step, which is motivation enough to knock it down some more.
• Fetch. I never knew cats like playing fetch. But ours actually ran out of breath playing this game.
• Chase the light beam. Be it a reflection of the sun off of a shiny object like a watch, or a projection of a laser pointer on the wall, cats love chasing shiny points of light.
• Hunt the creature in the crevice. Another game our cat loved to play is where you hide a hand in the fold of a pillow or between a pillow and something else and hint at movement. Oh my do they love to stick their arms in there right up to their armpits to try and fish whatever it is out. Substitute crevice for the opening under a closed door.
  

Who thinks up this stuff?

[snort]
Momspit.
[snort]
It's a no rinse cleaner as safe as........... mom spit.
[snort]

Most cool

Now this is cool. Stanford University put a vectorizing online utility to allow you to upload bit mapped images and convert them to a vector image. Just upload your image and VectorMagic will vectorize it for you.

Vectorization converts a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, but vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves. The effect looks akin to a painting.

I vectorized a picture of the Oregon coastline.

They make these.... right?

What I want for Christmas, by Karl Plesz.

A combination cellphone / PDA / GPS navigation device / mp3 player / camera / wi-fi access device. It has to fit in a shirt pocket, have voice memo, long battery life and not weigh a ton. It has to look cool too. And have a touch screen.

Oh! And when it talks to you, it must have the voice of HAL from 2001 a Space Odyssey.......

That's not asking too much, is it?

The caffeine curve

Coffee

Another blog bumper sticker..............

Christmas comes early...

Don't try and tell me that I never give you people anything......

5000+ resources to do just about anything online.

How it's done

Tonight, Darlene and I decided to go out for a good steak dinner. We went to one of our favourite places, which I've already blogged about - Saltlik. When our steaks came out, we knew right away that they had gotten our order wrong, both of our steaks were overcooked. I didn't mind, but Darlene did and hesitated saying anything to the server. But like a pro, even after we told the server the steaks were OK - she didn't listen and insisted that we were given bad food. Not only did they bring us new steaks cooked properly, but they ate the bill. That was not a cheap meal my friends.

Why did I post this? Because I wanted to show the restaurant world how it's done. Loyalty - earned through customer service. I left a humongous tip.

Globetrotting for tunes

One of the things about our 'small world' that hasn't panned out as it should is music. You may have choice, but those choices are limited to what you hear on radio, see on MTV etc and hear on movie soundtracks. For all you know, they could be grooving (yes - I said grooving) to some hot new bands in Germany, Iceland and Peru that you've never heard of..... and probably never will.

Enter Gracenote Music Maps. Click on a country and find out what bands and albums are most popular based on searches conducted at that site. Now excuse me while I go sample some Katie Melur.

I told you so....

I've said it before and now there are statistics to prove it.

The two key findings:

• When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was "a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases." The study estimates that one additional P2P download per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.
• When viewed in the aggregate (ie. the entire Canadian population), there is no direct relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchases in Canada. According to the study authors, "the analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole."

Well how do you like that?

I has a venue

Improv class. Me. Learning. Performing when it's over. Have details....

Sunday, November 18th at 7pm at Loose Moose Theatre. It will be about an hour long. Cost is $5. Tickets at the box office.

Our class will basically be recreating the same improv games we learned during the course. It should be fun. I meant for you too. After all..... 5 bucks is 5 bucks.......

She's got some moves

Holy.

This girl can dance.

Retailers begin to react to strong Canuck buck

Well, some retailers seem to be getting the hint. With the Canadian price listed on the back of books some 25% or higher than the listed US price, WalMart have announced that they will begin charging the US price in Canada as well.

Meanwhile, Indigo (a Canadian bookstore chain) announced yesterday that it would offer a discount of 10% off any book. Wooooooo! 10%! Is my sarcasm showing yet?

Nachooooooooo...... !

Wow, look how long it's been since I've blogged! That's almost a record for me. I'll get to some posts soon enough - it's been a crazy busy week. Lots of courses to teach, Loose Moose tomorrow...

We hosted a costume party at our house Saturday. It was fun but we had far fewer people than we had hoped for. The competition was tough.

Did I mention I won the costume contest at work? Yeah....... The question remains whether I'm permanently stuck with the nickname 'Nacho' now.