Just giving Desktop Tower Defense another shot, this time trying in hard mode to capture a personal best. I came up a little short only achieving my 3rd best because I forgot to send in the next waves of creeps a couple times and let the flying bosses slip through my noose.

Doggone it.

Just ordered up some large prints of some pseudo oil painting versions of a few photos we snapped at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, BC, Canada from our trip back in September. They're pretty pretty so I thought I'd share. What do you think?

(Click through to see large versions of the images. They will open in a new window.)

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... more inside ...I've knocked Prince Zifnab back down below my high scores where he belongs. ... more inside ...

Just found this via Neatorama and had to share it. I love really old photos illustrating life that was, especially when it's of an interesting culture. This series of old postcards is definitely worth checking out if you're at all into history or geishas.

I haven't heard or read anything about it, but I just performed a google search and I was shocked to see three new little icons next to each search result.

One of them says "promote" which I guess adds to its credibility, another says "remove" which I guess flags a page as being no good, and the third says "comment" and when clicked pops open a text entry box for you to add a comment.

Anyone know anything about this business?

Whoa...

It took me a while but I watched all episodes of the excellent anime Death Note.

I just watched the live action part 1 DVD the other night and it was very well done. The next two days, Oct 15 and 16, 2008, there will be a special engagement of Death Note 2 (live action) in theaters at 7:30pm. I'll be watching it Thursday and I'm quite excited. Part 1 was quite a bit different than the anime and added a lot of intensity to an already very intense story.



Death Note is based on a book series and is the story of a boy named Light who finds a Death Note dropped into the world by a God of Death named Ryuk (because he was bored). Anyone whose name is written in the Death Note dies. Light goes on a rampage determined to cleanse the world of all evildoers. He's extremely intelligent, but there is also a genius investigator only known as L working to stop the unknown killer (known as Kira) who is murdering criminals on a worldwide scale. Light and L play a real world game of chess attempting with all their intellect and psychopathic people manipulation skills to deal the final check mate blow to the other.

If you have the time or are into anime I recommend the full series. Otherwise you should definitely check out the live action DVDs.

Finally got it after a couple months of waiting. So without further ado...



Voila!

Was in Vegas with a friend this weekend. Didn't do too much gambling, mostly saw a couple shows and watched a lot of anime on laptop. (Only true geeks would go to Vegas and spend half the trip in the room watching anime.)

My last hour in town I did my only real gambling. I laid down $100 at a roulette table. I followed a couple of ad-hoc strategies like splitting between two numbers across the board and selecting birthdays and anniversaries (which I hit on a few times).

After the dealer told everyone zeroes kept coming up at her previous break, I denied my instinct to bet on them, and of course they came up. After that I kept laying a stack across zero and double zero every spin. Finally 0 hit and my pile of chips was up to $165.

It was at this point I decided to place the most exciting bet of my life thus far. The entire time I was at the table red came up 3 times and black about a dozen, and every time I bet on red I lost. So to the dealer's dismay I enjoyed slowly pushing my entire enormous pile over to black. I wanted to vote red the whole time, but it just kept failing me.

It was a calculated risk and I had no delusions about any magical ability to entice black to come up. (Though I was stupid in thinking that there is some kind of a trend to consider. I reminded myself later: It's completely random, stupid!)

So as you can probably tell by now, that little ugly ball landed on red. I wasn't shocked, nor upset. I simply had a big smile on my face as I stood up and walked away knowing it was a great gambling experience to look back on. (At least I lost to red instead of a zero!)

Roulette's really fun. I can't wait to go back and play some more, but next time with Charms so I can really have some fun. (I missed her terribly. )

This is from the Vallejo Times Herald:

Dolores Aguilar, born in 1929 in New Mexico, left us on August 7, 2008. ....

Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing.

Her family will remember Dolores and amongst ourselves we will remember her in our own way, which were mostly sad and troubling times throughout the years. We may have some fond memories of her and perhaps we will think of those times too. But I truly believe at the end of the day ALL of us will really only miss what we never had, a good and kind mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I hope she is finally at peace with herself. As for the rest of us left behind, I hope this is the beginning of a time of healing and learning to be a family again.

There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart. We cannot come together in the end to see to it that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren can say their goodbyes. So I say here for all of us, GOOD BYE, MOM.

Wow.

Now everyone, shhhhh, because Charms doesn't know where I'm taking her, but we'll be in Vancouver, British Columbia for our anniversary in September.

So I'm wondering if any of you Cannucks would be interested in meeting up with us for a little VideoSift meet-and-greet. We'll probably be free after 7:30pm-8:00pm on a Tuesday night and the location doesn't matter.

If anyone's interested, reply here or send me a profile message if you want some discretion. So who's with me?!

Anyone? Anyone?

The acronym I coined 2 years ago has finally made its way to the official pages of the urban dictionary. Yay!
Now everyone knows the secret.

The funny thing is I have actually caught myself literally using the phrase in real life and stopped myself to correct it with "laughing my ass off" because it seems it feels a little funny at first. Then you slowly ease into it.

To top it off I have a custom license plate being made for my car that reads:


I'll have to post a picture of that some time.

Update:
I finally got my new license plates:
http://blog.videosift.com/lucky760/I-Love-LMFAHS-My-New-License-Plate

A strong, lengthy earthquake just hit near Chino Hills in southern California at 11:42am local time. It measured 5.6 5.8 5.4 and lasted for what felt at least 30 seconds.

I could actually see the building around me swaying to and fro. Whoa.

(Thank goodness this isn't China.)

Never heard about it before but google just launched Knol, a site that could overtake Wikipedia. The big difference: Knol allows only known authors to create entries in areas of their expertise. Other members can make comments and suggestions, but control of the contents are held firmly by the author.

This is in stark contrast with Wikipedia who, as you probably know, allows anyone even anonymous people (and even bots for that matter) to create and edit entries to contain whatever "facts" they want. Sounds like a very interesting idea and as a matter of fact very similar to something Fedquip has described before.

I think it'll be a great first resource to hit instead of Wikipedia, assuming someone has written about your topic of desire of course.

Invisible Carpet Idea Close to Actual Invisibility
Eric Bland, Discovery News

July 17, 2008 -- Invisibility cloaks are cool, but an invisibility carpet is more practical.

That's according to scientists from Imperial College London, who recently published a paper detailing the creation of a material that would be the first to hide objects in visible light, something no cloaking device has ever achieved.

"We've given a prescription for how to cloak something in visible light," said John Pendry, who, along with Jensen Li, wrote the paper that appeared recently on ArXiv.org. "It will be difficult to make but it is also practical."

Cloaking an object requires structures, often referred to as metamaterials, that channel light in a specific way.

The only way to channel light in that fashion is by using structures smaller than the wavelength of light being used to detect an object. In 2006, Duke University scientists cloaked an object from light centimeters long by creating a metamaterial with structures millimeters in size.

To cloak an object in visible light, which has a much smaller wavelength, around half a micron, scientists would have to create structures nanometers in size, which, according to Pendry, "requires some clever nanotechnology."

That nanotechnology would come from combining special layers of common silica and silicon, each of which reflects light differently.

"It's a lot like a mirage," said Pendry. "The sun heats the air above the desert and creates a temperature gradient, so when light from the sky comes down the graded refraction bends the light and it enters your eye and you see a mirage the looks like water."

....

Read the rest of the story at Discovery News.

So I just discovered this weird little service called Twitter. Do any of you use this thing?

For the uninformed, it's basically a quite simple thing where you can send updates (via website or cellphone text message) of up to 140 characters describing what you're doing right now. Then anyone who is "following" you (which sounds kind of creepy and stalkerish) can be informed of your update.

I just signed up last night and it seems pretty useless to me. Anyone else able to make any use of the uselessness?

760 out.

Wow. This is unbelievable. I just found this story about a small community of all Black people who have been denied running water since 1956!

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio were awarded nearly $11 million Thursday by a federal jury that found local authorities denied them public water service for decades out of racial discrimination.

Each of the 67 plaintiffs was awarded $15,000 to $300,000, depending on how long they had lived in the Coal Run neighborhood, about 5 miles east of Zanesville in Muskingum County in east-central Ohio.

The money covers both monetary losses and the residents' pain and suffering between 1956, when water lines were first laid in the area, and 2003, when Coal Run got public water. ...

Read the whole story at CNN

Just wondering what HD format you support in your home. In your home is there a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player? Or perhaps do you have both? Also, do you use it? Do you enjoy it? How many movies do you have for your format?

I ask because I finally just received my set of 5 HD-DVD movies to which I was entitled for buying a laptop with an HD-DVD drive (which is now non-functional since I upgraded from Vista to XP), and I'm trying to figure out what to do with the packages of coasters.

Maybe a VideoSift contest (that, obviously, only HD-DVD owners or gifters will want to participate in)?

After continuing problems with our old Jeep Liberty, we rid ourselves of it and found a great deal on a new 2008 Mercedes Benz C300 Sport Sedan, so I bit the bullet and got it for Charms. It has black interior and metallic blue exterior. We're extremely excited and just wanted to share our glee! Below are a couple of the photos I snapped. (View all 10 at flickr.)

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Here's a sloppy, quick video of Charms driving past me outside our humble abode.
(Pardon the shaky cam and blockiness.)


WHOOPEE!!!

It's a topic of much debate among scholars, so I thought of broaching the subject for discussion among the VideoSift intellectuals.

The question is: What would you do to survive the zombie attack that is obviously imminent? Also, do you plan on preparing for the attack or do you intend to wait for it to begin and simply react?

When considering the issue, you must keep in mind that the zombie attack will not likely last a single night; it could go on for days, weeks, months, or even longer. It'll also be likely that the zombies will not be immune to sunlight (that's just silly vampire nonsense), so waiting for dawn won't help.

So, I ask again, how would you survive?

Here's my plan:

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These are my initial thoughts. What are yours?

This doctor was cracking chicken eggs while making breakfast and found a surprise in one: a dead gecko.

Read the full story.