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Archive for 2005

Will Kong be King?

Friday, November 4th, 2005

The latest Kong trailer looks quite promising. Jackson’s respect for the original film is quite evident, and he’s had the good sense to make it a period picture. The hardest part for me is trying not to think about kielbasa sausage while listening to Jack Black, but I’m working on it. I think I can manage it by December.

10 Years of The Palace

Friday, November 4th, 2005

“Dear Mr. Bumgardner,” writes Scarlett, “Congratulations on writing software that goes the distance! We on Palace are celebrating 10 years of operation and it’s a pretty happy time among all the Palaces. I don’t think many software developers get to have their software in operation this long with a product going through multiple operating system […]

Vintage Cheesecake

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

Five new coverpops today, all wonderful vintage covers from the amazing collection at MagazineArt.org. I think you’ll love browsing thru these. Vintage Pulp Fiction Vintage Mass Market Magazines Vintage Womens Magazines Vintage Science & Technology Vintage Grab Bag

Bum Chex

Friday, October 28th, 2005

Here’s a Wacky Packages coverpop that I made, for those of you in search of your elusive Bum Chex. The images were provided by | Comments Off on Bum Chex

More CoverPops

Friday, October 21st, 2005

The VISCO SF Cover Explorer was quite a hit this week, making a number of large blogs, including BoingBoing, UserFriendly and MetaFilter. Now, I’ve gone and made a few more of these things, which I’m calling CoverPops. Here are the 1,001 best selling graphic novels from Amazon. Here’s Doug Gilford’s entire collection of MAD magazine […]

The Game

Monday, October 17th, 2005

I must admit that as a married man, I really shouldn’t be reading a book about pickup artists. But there is a certain vicarious thrill to be had from Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists; really far more than just a guide to picking up women. It’s a master class […]

SF Cover Explorer

Monday, October 17th, 2005

I had a new idea for exploring large photo archives a few weeks ago: put all of them on an enormous virtual coffee table,
arranged by color and time. I had some free time on Saturday so I finally got around to implementing it, using the wonderful images from the Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art (VISCO), courtesy of Terry Gibbons.

Today in L.A.

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

I am on Los Angeles TV today, filling the role of “obsessed sudoku fan” for a KNBC-4 news segment on the puzzle craze. If you’re visiting this site because of the show, welcome! The free puzzles are over here. Enjoy!

Grokking Ning

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

Mark Andreessen’s new project, Ning, went live today, just in time for the Web 2.0 conference, where it is likely to be a hot topic. If you haven’t yet seen any opinions about Ning, it’s because Ning is a little hard to grok at first glance. I made an attempt to grok it today, and here’s what I came up with:

Hallucinatory Stereoscopy

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

In an amusing review, StereoTimes, compared the the Sonic Impact T-Amp (shown here), a new $30 dollar digital amplifier, just slightly unfavorably to audiophile equipment costing $5000. The T-Amp’s perceived clarity allows sound-staging and stereophony to reach hallucinatory stereoscopy: near-field listening with the Celestion F15’s revealed a stereo illusion that would satisfy even the most […]