02.11.02
SatireWire Strikes Again
Oh those SatireWire folks. I really ought to read them more often. Instead I get good stories forwarded to me, like the one I’ve got in the Read More section…
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02.09.02
Fun Tolkein Link
This was a great list of Tolkein Theories that I ran across the other night. I’ll be putting my favorite in the “Read More” section.
http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/theories.htm
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02.08.02
Signage Confusion
Recently seen in a kitchen at a work place:
“Everyone: Please rinse teapots and then stand upside down in the sink.”
From a mailing list:
This may be an urban myth, but I was told that a fleet of buses had to delete “Allowed” from every sign saying “No Smoking Allowed” because a smoker has successfully argued that the sign merely allowed passengers not to smoke.
02.06.02
Room For It All
Today’s Office Humour
A professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, rocks about 2″ in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full?
They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. He then asked the students again if the jar was full.
They agreed it was.
The students laughed. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. “Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this is your life. The rocks are the important things – your family, your partner, your health, your children – things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff.”
“If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the waste disposal.”
“Take care of the rocks first – the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”
But then… (click Read More)
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02.05.02
Beards in History
I myself wear a Van Dyke: A mustache with a goatee. It’s more out of an inability to actually grow a full beard, but I don’t let anyone know that…
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com or click Read More.
Below the Beltway
By Gene Weingarten
One day recently, I arrived at work four days unshaven. I got stares. The Post is not a particularly stodgy workplace — David Broder, for example, frequently goes shirtless, with nipple rings — but in the matter of the abrupt appearance of serious stubble, the newsroom may as well be the law firm of Snort, Grumble and Harrumph Ltd. Many of my colleagues seem to assume the worst: nervous breakdown, substance abuse, wife and lover in trunk of car, etc.
I think I know why. Newspaper people follow the news; intuitively, they know what beard growth tends to mean. It isn’t good.
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02.04.02
Underlined Links Research
I’ve just done a survey of some high-traffic sites and their text that has links. (This survey does not include graphics that may or may not have underlines, although most followed the same patterns for the graphic was GifText.)
All Links Underlined:
nytimes.com
cnn.com
yahoo.com
ebay.com
amazon.com
oregonlive.com
citysearch.com
aol.com
All Links *NOT* underlined:
msn.com
netscape.com
bbc.com
theatlantic.com
Some Links underlined, Some Not:
USAToday.com has 6 links not underlined out of 81 that are.
This list includes the left, top and right hand navigation on the page. It seems to me that for front pages, you stick with one style or the other these days.
02.01.02
Funny People
A list of strange acts by criminals and other regular humans.
4. THE GETAWAY
A man walked into a Topeka, Kansas Kwik Stop, and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.
Click the Read More to see the other 7 blurbs…
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01.27.02
Proper Tax Forms
Make sure you have the proper tax form ready to go. http://www.thoughtpolice.com/bayboyz/1040.html.
Defending The Reputation of Jpeg Compression
There’s been a lot of discussion regarding the horrors of the JPEG Compression Monster. However I think it’s important to remember that JPEG is not an inherently lossy format. JPEG uses a formula for encoding the color data that uses ‘wavelets’, so to speak. [1] Imagine the top of each wave as being a point of color in the image.
In fact when you set the compression settings for saving a JPEG, you’re setting the minimum size of those waves. By setting a low quality compression (a 2 or 3 setting), the waves are made larger and fewer waves are used to express the image, and the smaller the file size that results.
In the same way, setting a high quality compression (the 10 or 100 setting) uses more and smaller waves, waves that can produce more detail in the images.
Look closely at a more recent version of Photoshop and you’ll see something interesting. “Now the dials here go to… 11?” [2] Once the waves are smaller than a pixel (usually the ’10’ or ‘100’ setting in most export dialog boxes), then you have a lossless compression scheme! Setting your compression to 11 or 12 will make sure all the detail in an image is captured in the waves.
JPEG: The Compression Chameleon.
[1] I cannot speak to the mathematics myself. However I do comprehend the basics of the idea. http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/wpd0199.htm#comment
[2] See “This is Spinal Tap”, the movie. The DVD version includes a voice over by the band which is not to be missed.
I'm with Ben
http://www.io.com/persist1/logs/1011904114.html
I’m with Ben on this one. The whole “Googlewhacking” thing is pretty silly. Particularly because the more popular it is, the more difficult it becomes. Eventually someone will put up a page that has a set of generated pages that includes a pair of each of the words in the English dictionary and end the game once and for all.
The game has always been much easier to play with the Mac-oriented version of http://www.google.com/mac.