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This… guy… gave me a double-take as he was waiting at the Winstead’s on the Plaza.  Thankfully I had my camera and could stop laughing long enough to take several pictures:

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Dear Ignorant Ass,

So last night you scaled a six foot fence and broke into my car.  I suppose I could congratulate you on the extent of the bounty resulting from your daring raid, but the problem is… you probably don’t know how to use half the stuff you carted off.

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I’m a sucker.

I was driving to work Friday morning, when I stopped to take a left turn at Gillham and Rockhill. A black puppy was romping around a the top of the hill near the park, and as I came to stop, she ran up to, and then beneath, my car.

To make sure I didn’t run her over as I pulled away, I opened my car door to look underneath…

… and she jumped in.

She was very dirty, smelled terrible and was shaking from head to toe. So there I was: driving a manual car with a confused, scared puppy, trying to determine what to do. I couldn’t just toss her out of my car; it was freezing out. At the same time, I couldn’t just take her home… she was a stray. So, I did what first occurred to me:

I called 411 for the nearest vet’s office.

Turned out she had been out for a couple of days, by the vet’s estimation. They gave her a bath, trimmed her nails and wormed her. She’s delightful, and takes well to discipline.  The name that has stuck is “Shandy,” one of my favorite Guinness drinks.

This is where I found her, and here are some fun pictures:

Shandy

Yet, no matter how adorable she is, and how much I may want to keep her, I’m posting flyers later today around the area… if she does have a home that misses her, I’m going to be returning a happy, healthy puppy to them.

Ok, this really bothered me.

I was directed to a CSSZenGarden design created by Outline2Design that is rather beautiful… I was really impressed, so I looked at their homepage.

Their designs are extremely artistic, and valid XHTML, so I was even more impressed; I wanted to know more about their work and where they manage an office, (mostly to determine if they were a small shop, a front for a larger shop or just “a person.”)  I noticed a copyright link to Zertle, LLC.  Clicking that, I saw that Zertle owns two shop fronts, Outline2Design and PSD2HTML.

That’s when I was absolutely disgusted by the pricing strategy at PSD2HTML.

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Here’s a story I posted on Digg today… This was funny stuff.

As I was driving home around 12:30 AM, I passed our one Apple store to see who was waiting for “the big day.” When I saw the security guard protecting the precious stock from a videographer, a mother and half a dozen dedicated Mac geeks, I just *had* to stop and take a few shots. At least they let the poor guy listen to an iPod…

read more | digg story

Wow… this was a wild, exercise and art-filled weekend.

After 18 holes of golf on Saturday morning, I attended the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s An Asymmetrical Evening, which celebrated the opening of the new Bloch Building.  It was an evening I won’t forget anytime soon.

The new building certainly leaves an impression… I’ve had a stronger appreciation for it since I’d heard it described as “a feather beside a stone” several months ago.  The interior is impressive and complementary, and I would urge anyone who wasn’t there this past weekend to attend this coming weekend’s celebration!

The next morning (after I returned my tux), inspiration struck and I set out to do some photography… check out the results if you’d like!

Outside the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art	Liberty Memorial

If you are interested in visiting the new Bloch Building, here are a few events to keep your eye on… see you there!

• June 8
  • 10AM-5PM: Member Preview Day
  • 6-8PM: Panel Discussion
  • 8-12AM: Friends of Art Opening Party
• June 9
  • Bloch Building Opening Weekend
  • 2-3PM: Architect Lecture
  • 6-7PM: Architect Lecture

Refer to: http://ebin.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/how-to-turn-your-photo-into-movie-like-effect-using-photoshop/

Here are my attempts using this technique:

Here are the before and afters, raw image to edited:

Just for giggles, I also attempted the the “300 effect,” proposed within the comments of the Digg post:

I recently bought “Stranger Than Fiction” from Best Buy, figured I’d watch it tonight.  I put it in my DVD player, a Sony DVPCX995V, and it began to read the disc.

Then, the damn thing shut down.

I was really confused.  I messed around with it for a few minutes, then I jumped into a chat session with a Sony representative.  After suggesting the DVD was scratched or the wrong region, (uh huh, sure), he THEN recommended I reset the whole player.

Now, the thing is, this player requires you to manually type in the names of DVDs where it can’t read the standard demographic information.  I’ve got 300 discs in that player, I’d rather not lose that information.  So then he gave me a phone number to tech support and wished me luck.

But you’d better believe I started searching the Internet for any other reports of this nonsense.  It didn’t take long before I found this Amazon discussion and a blog post on erkkila.org.  A number of DVD players, a number of new DVDs… sounds fishy.

Here are the numbers I have so far:

Sony Pictures: (800) 860-2878
DVP-CX995V Support: (800) 222-7669

This does not bode well for Sony.  Is there some kind of write protection on these DVDs?

When Google introduced their online Calendar solution, I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email soon after containing an upcoming event, GMail offered to “Add it to my Calendar.”  Obviously there were parsing rules in place that recognized a date and/or time, even guessed correctly at the name of the event.

Unfortunately, as in all rules assumed in parsing, mistakes can be made:

My guess is that it was looking at “7.50 ea” and translated that into 7:50 Eastern, but I can’t be sure.  All I know is that it interpreted three items a friend of mine ordered into appointments.  No big deal, but it just reminded me that, even when some parsing rules seem simple and straightforward, someone is going to have a use case that breaks them.

MySpace has all sorts of problems: a terrible user interface, poorly implemented HTML, notorious scalability problems, and a user base ranging from stay-at-home moms to porn stars, from preteens to the technically elite.

Yet for me, being a MySpace-r myself, there is an even larger issue: their insistence on perpetuating ignorance to avoid addressing not only the formerly mentioned issues, but also their own laziness and incompetence.  I’ve had it.  This blog is going out to all those people who have, at one point or another, had “weird things” happen on their account… let’s see if this will help.

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