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February 28, 2005
You should grow like an onion with your head in the ground.
BoingBoing points out a great site today, InsultMonger.com. There, you can find my favorite Yiddish curse (see title of this post), as well as dozens more. My dear old Dad would have loved to see this list. Of course, none of it would have been new to him, as he was fluent in these and probably many other Yiddish curses.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2005
Snowy Gates
I'm in New York City through Saturday morning, and took the opportunity after meetings today at Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to (a) experience the heavy snowfall that began this afternoon and (b) check out Cristo's 'Gates' project. My brain has a hard time with these - one side sees the Zen 'saffron' color and feels like it makes sense - while the other side of the noggin' sees a construction site. Anyway, the installation looks downright magical in the snow. Don't know if these images do it justice or not, but take a look. And for a different set of 'Gates', visit the Sommerville Gates project.
Posted by jetrotz at 06:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 17, 2005
Friends in High Places
Digital marketing powerhouse Digitas/Modem Media announced today that my friend Cella Irvine would become their Chief Administrative Officer, reporting to their CEO. Cella is a long-time digital media vet, having led Microsoft's Sidewalk operation in NYC for many years, up to it's purchase by Ticketmaster/CitySearch. She went on to work for insurance giant Marsh, Inc. Anyway, she's a brilliant and wonderful person, and should do well in her new role. BusinessWire news release on her new gig is here, and a Clickz.com news story is here.
Posted by jetrotz at 01:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Rollin' Babies
It's just amazing. That's all I can tell you. At this point, with 41 days to go, the baby's head can be felt clearly, pushing against Amy's belly on the upper right side. That puts the feet down near her bladder. And since the little one seems to like practicing soccer goals, Amy isn't enjoying all that activity. The baby is also getting sound sensitive. When I make noises near Amy's belly, the baby moves around. And when Amy was playing her horn yesterday, the baby actually settled down and stopped moving. I told Amy that either the little one is entranced by the music, or petrified by the blast of sound. You be the judge.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Flamin' Xbox
Microsoft said Thursday it will recall 14.1 million power cords for its Xbox video game console after a defect gave some users minor burns and scorched carpets.
Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer for Microsoft, told Reuters the recall covered all Xboxes made for continental Europe before Jan. 13, 2004, and the rest of the world before Oct. 23, 2003.
Since I've been playing Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas on my PS2 almost exclusively lately, not a big deal. Here's a link to the MSFT site with info on ordering the replacement cord. You'll need your serial number and manufacture date off your Xbox to place the order.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 16, 2005
Delicious Monster in the News Again
Seattle NBC Affiliate KING-5 visited Delicious Monster HQ (the Zoka coffee shop) recently. Mike Matas posted the 90-second Quicktime -- it's a nice promo for the boys from DM. Now if I can only find some time to scan all my stuff. Trouble is, my Wi-Fi gets weak in the back room of my house where all my books are. So I'm gonna have to methodically cart them to the office at the front. A small price to pay to fill my library though. My earlier posts on Delicious Monster here and here.
Posted by jetrotz at 08:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More than a Tease...
The first trailer for the upcoming Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film was posted on the front page of Amazon.com today. Do not stop, do not pass go, etc., just get yourself over to there and watch it NOW. Warning: The video takes a about 60 seconds to load -- traffic issues? or just a slow Flash player?
Of extra note - I reported earlier that the release date for the movie was May 6, 2005 - but Amazon's info has moved this up one week to April 29.
I'm prepared to be hugely underwhelmed by this movie, some twenty years in the making. But I'm cautiously optimistic seeing this trailer, the first showing action from the film (the earlier trailer was just a CG tease). The trailer suggests a bit more of an 'Independence Day 2005' feel, and is perhaps less humorous in tone than I expected. But that's probably just marketing spin for this, an early Summer release. Amazon also has a selection of new screenshots from the film, and the new movie poster, pictured above.
Posted by jetrotz at 08:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 15, 2005
Swimsuit 2005
Despite the calendar indicating it's still the depths of winter, Sports Illustrated has it's annual respite for all of us. The annual Swimsuit Issue launched today on SI.com. 2005 is the first year since 1997 that I haven't worked on the production of the online version of the American icon, but it's great to see the issue without getting sick of all the photos weeks in advance of the public release. The magazine blessed the release of close to double the number of photos in past years, although some are for magazine subscribers only. But there are tons of free video clips (it was pay-only in past years), and a smattering of VR photography by my friend Bruce Kaufman. And my friend Chris Gibbons created some very slick Flash features for the Rate-a-Photo section. Another new feature this year is a digital edition of the magazine available for download for $4.99. The application from company OliveSoftware uses their 'ActivePaper' technology, basically serving the assets to registered users via Flash. An interesting model, so to speak. Anyway, start clicking!
Posted by jetrotz at 06:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Woe and 28
My hometown of Savannah, GA is in the news today, but not for a terribly positive reason. Savannah State University, one of the country's historically African-American colleges, achieved the dubious honor of going 0-28 this season with a loss to Florida A&M 49-44 on Monday night. In 50 years, only one other Division 1-A team has lost every game. Head coach Edward Daniels' explained to the Savannah Morning News that his former coach Al McGuire taught him to 'keep a sense of humor...You can't let things get you down so far that you're a Grim Reaper-type guy.' Well, maybe going 0-28 gives you reason to be just a little bit down...Read coverage at SI.com here, and at the Savannah Morning News site here.
Photograph by Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News
Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 14, 2005
Infographics Gone Wild
I stumbled on this while wandering through Restoration Hardware yesterday. The Firefly Visual Dictionary ($33.97 at Amazon) is chock full of infographics breaking down, for example, all the parts in a power transformer pole outside your home. Or the innards of a windmill. You name it, it's in here. Close to 1,000 pages with over 6,000 illustrations, this is the kind of book I loved to read all the time as a kid. I'm going to have to pick this up sometime soon.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Getting Ready
The last several weekends have been a blur of activity. Several hours of breastfeeding classes, followed by trips hither and yon to seemingly every baby store in the Greater Atlanta Metro area. There is just so much to buy in preparation for a baby, and the military-industrial complex (by that, I mean Babies-R-Us) makes you think you need to buy two of everything in their stores. But if Baby Trotz arrived tomorrow, we'd be just about ready - just need to buy the 600 diapers the books suggest we have on hand at the outset. I'm most excited about the gadgets (read the extended entry) and the print we selected for the nursery. We're going with an Animal/Zoo theme, and this retro/mod print from Carousel Designs is cute without being annoying. What do you think?
I would highly recommend you buy one book to help make pre-Baby shopping more economical, sensible, and less stressful. Baby Bargains is a godsend. These folks break it all down, and make sense of it all. We've also relied heavily on my friends Hart & Cella's 'What to Buy for Baby' list. It's been a great reference, too. We bought a lot of our gear at a great local store - The Baby's Room. The owner's son is a Red Sox/Patriots fanatic, so we could at least talk sports while doing the baby shopping. The store was littered with 'Red Sox Nation Crib Specials' and 'Patriots Dynasty Glider Sets.' Hilarious.
Anyway, we've filled in a great many of the essentials.
Crib - Pali Denise in Cognac, made from European Beechwood. Single drop-side, with a drawer beneath. Simple, clean lines, and it didn't break the bank.
Glider - A super deal on a combo glider/ottoman from Best Chairs for a few hundred less than Dutalier offers for theirs.
Baby Monitor - What a freaking disappointment. This was the one 'baby gadget' I was sure I'd have a blast researching. Guess what - most of them suck, apparently, using 49MHz frequencies. Even the 'high-end' ones running in the 900MHz band are not encrypted or trunked. Even a basic walkie-talkie you can buy at Galyans has these features. There are some new models offering 2.4Ghz communications - great, so I can listen to my baby in between squeals and pops from my Wi-Fi network at home. We tried a Fisher Price Sound N Lights Monitor with Dual Receivers, but the staic was horrendous, no matter which of the generous TWO channels we tried using. That one went back to the store, and we took home the Sony Baby Call Nursery Monitor. Not imaginatively named, but this little baby works at 900Mhz, and has 27 channels. The static is non-existent, but it still peeves me that there is no better tech than this. Sure, I might setup an iSight on a long firewire cable from the home office next door to the nursery, and I could route that to a VNC client on my Treo or something, but that seems like a lot of trouble. Sorry, I had to rant about that one.
Stroller - Based on several friends suggestions, we went with the 2004 Zooper zStreet stroller. We've heard some anecdotal stories about the 2005 zStreets having some problems, but nothing but raves for the 2003. We found this one from liquidbaby on eBay, and at $99, we can try it and see how well it works.
Car Seat - We settled on the affordable and highly rated Graco Snugride from Target in the 'Kentshire' pattern. It's funny - every store that carries these Snugrides have them in different colors. Boutiques get two or three, Babies-r-Us another set, and Target yet another. This simple design should be fine until the little critter outgrows it. It snaps into the Zooper without too much fuss.
Bassinet/Playpen - We'd held off on getting one of these, as we thought we might borrow a friend's bassinet. She's lent hers to another friend, and considering we're all for saving steps walking to another room while the baby is a still a newborn, we went for what all the books and Consumer Reports call the favorite - the Graco Pack and Play in Clarion print from Babies-r-Us. Of course - same pattern issues here. Babies-r-Us has their patterns, Target others, etc. But we liked this one. You may think it looks like vomit. But hey, that's only one of many organic compounds we expect to see on this thing.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The RSS Challenge
Lots of interesting things happening in the RSS space. MediaPost Daily (free registration required) has an interesting run-down on the anxiety level among mostly ad-sponsored publishers concerned that the pressure to deploy RSS feeds could eat into their bottom line. MediaMusings talks about one solution - customized, branded RSS readers like C|net's Newsburst. I've fooled around with the C|Net application, and the interface/organization of items doesn't thrill me. It's still beta, and I'll continue to fool around with it. But for my true RSS fix, I'll continue to stick with zFeeder for now.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
TMBG New Kids on the Block
My favorite geek band, They Might be Giants, is releasing their second kids collection tomorrow. Hat tip to Daddytypes blog for the heads-up. With Baby Trotz on the way, I'm dreading the insipid, tenative and timid junk which passes for most 'Children's Music' -- but TMBG's Here Come the ABC's (CD and DVD) should be a welcome respite from most of that. My friends John and Jana played a lot of TMBG for their twins when they were younger - and yeah, they did have some trouble explaining why the boys liked to sing S-E-X-X-Y in preschool. These songs should be a bit more age appropriate. Amazon has an interview with the band, and the TMBG site has some DVD video samples.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Halo2 and RSS
As Joystiq puts this, 'Stats Ahoy!' A previously under reported feature of Halo2 is the ability to access gamertag and clan statistics as XML on Bungie.net. I haven't fooled around with this, but it sounds quite intriguing. If I had more time to play the damn game, I might dig into this and add my (lame) stats to Trotz.com, but that will have to wait. Still interesting concept I'd like to see in more games. Bungie.net's explanation of how this works and a page here with a collection of Halo2 stats tools.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 09, 2005
New Postal Service EP
The weekly email from the iTunes music store featured a gem this morning - The Postal Service EP We Will Become Silhouettes. It features several versions of songs from their disc Give Up from 2003, and a new song called Be Still My Heart. Worth a listen for $3.96 from the iTMS.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 07, 2005
Dynasty
So we didn't have Massachusetts' native son win the highest office in the land. As a consolation prize, the Red Sox and now the Patriots claimed the highest honors in their respective sports. I don't expect the Celtics to join the club this year, and of course, the Bruins are playing golf instead of hockey this year. But kudos to the Patriots for their third Super Bowl championship in four years.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Blogging Soldier Gets Busted
While it's OK for a journalist to snap photos and speak his mind about what's happening on the ground in Iraq (see Kevin Site's Blog), this National Guardsman's honest talk about his experiences there have reportedly drawn the ire of THE MAN. BoingBoing reports on the demotion of guardsman Jason Hartley due to refusal to obey a command (stop blogging) and violation of OPSEC (operational security). Read his email about the whole process, and check out his blog - it's a very good read.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Delicious Library gets more Kudos
As I mentioned earlier, Delicious Library ($39.95 for OSX from the minds at Delicious Monster) is a great application for you obsessive compulsive types out there with big media collections and an iSight camera. This app uses a very Mac-like interface to organize the books, games, CDs and DVDs you own onto virtual 'bookshelves'. And by the way - it turns your iSight into a bar-code scanner, and looks up your stuff to fill your library. Anyway, a very good blog called 43 Folders has reviewed the app and started an interesting conversation about it. Several interesting tidbits therein, including someone mentioning that an iTunes to Delicious Library plugin is under development. A life saver! I bought it a few weeks ago, and I'm slowly scanning my collection. Nice way to remind yourself that it's been a while since you've watched The Fifth Element, and to know that your deadbeat friend borrowed it in 2002 and still hasn't returned it.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Rob Schneider has more Money than Sense
The way I look at it, you can either be an actor and aspire to do great work and probably starve while doing it, or try to make a buck and grow a thick skin - the critics are going to (rightfully so) tell you how bad your crap is. Mr. Schneider responds to an LA Times column about how Deuce Bigalow 2 is an example of Hollywood not concentrating on quality film making in a full page ad in Variety. Expensive way to show you are more of a tool than we even imagined. Read on at Defamer.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Isometric Screenshots
Interesting project here. This project by artist Jon Haddock recreates important historical moments (and a few bits of movie magic) as isometric 2-D images like you'd see in older computer games. He does extensive research to 're-create' the scenes. Interesting. Gallery here. Tutorial on creating one of the images here.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
How-To: Converting Color to Rich B&W
This is a how-to guide for those of us who spend time converting color images in Photoshop to black and white. Simply selecting grayscale leaves a fairly flat insipid black and white image. This process, as detailed on Design by Fire, is much like a system we used to use back in the mid-90s as espoused by experts in digital imaging at The Associated Press. Anyway, it's a good way to do this. Check it out.
Posted by jetrotz at 06:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 04, 2005
Don't be a Playa Hater
Halo 2 - The greatest thing since sliced bread, right? We've heard it all. 9.4 rating from Gamespot editorial, 9.0 from their users. A whopping 9.8 from IGN edit, and 9.5 from their readers and their survey of other media types. Well, Halo 2 doesn't completely float my boat. I do like it for short bouts. It's run, gun and run some more in multiplayer, and while entertaining, doesn't have quite the subtle gameplay I think it's capable of. Well, in an enourmous review, this fellow offers up the most honest review of Halo 2 you'll ever see. Take a gander - it weighs in at over 7,000 words, but it's worthwhile.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iPod Stereogram
Now this is a really old technique brought way into the 21st century. In the 1800s, photographers travelled the world creating 'stereograms,' pairs of photos mounted on card-stock which appeared three-dimensional when observed through a special viewer. These cards and viewers are quite collectible, and some photographers (like my brother) are enjoying the ease that digital photography provides the steroscopic process. But this guy takes it a step further. No printing required here - just mount your iPod Photos as shown in his diagram, and voila!
Posted by jetrotz at 07:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack