.:Colter:.

I like t-shirts. I particularly enjoy wearing obscure t-shirts understood only by a few fellow enthusiasts (Achewood fans, Mike Keneally fans, musicians, etc.). I like wearing them because they’re often conversation starters for otherwise complete strangers. So when I wore my Latyrx shirt to the DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist show yesterday, I was in for a pleasant surprise.

Some background info: Latyrx was a duo comprised of rappers Lateef and Lyrics Born. They made one pretty great album and went their separate ways. I found my t-shirt at a thrift store on Atlantic here in Brooklyn for $2[1]. It didn’t start any conversations at the show, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that Lateef was one of the opening acts as part of a new duo, the Mighty Underdogs, with Gift of Gab from Blackalicious.

I was even more surprised when they did a Latyrx tune, and Lateef said “my man in the Latyrx shirt knows this one.”

1.) Score. Of. The. Year.

I’ve just discovered that Windows Photo Gallery makes basic photo editing a breeze. It does Auto Adjusts, Brightness/Contrast, Cropping, Color/Tint/Saturation and Red Eye Reduction. And it does it all without having to navigate the various menus that most other photo editors require (because of course, those programs do tons more things). I don’t recall if these were features in Gallery’s XP version (maybe one of y’all can tell me). Either way, Microsoft can say they made at least one program intuitive and easy to use. Sadly, they tried a little too hard with Microsoft Word, replacing the “File” menu with a clickable logo. NOT very intuitive. I had to google it to find “Save As.” Bad move there, Microsoft. Overall, though, Word for Vista is a definite improvement visually. If it weren’t for all the bugs, Vista might have been a serious competitor against Apple for non-tech types.

UPDATE: I’ve discovered that I have some older video files (ASF format) that Windows Media can’t play (it says it needs a codec), and yet Windows Photo Gallery will play the video just fine.

Sure, MySpace allows people to put up crummy animated gifs and otherwise design their profiles to look like a circa 1997 GeoCities webpage, but Facebook gives people a zillion little plug-ins that don’t really do anything. I don’t log in to Facebook often, but when I do I get besieged with things I don’t understand:

1 music invitation
1 pandora invitation
3 likeness quiz requests
2 compare requests
1 tv trivia invitation
1 tv show trivia invitation
1 werewolves invitation
1 booze mail request
1 pirate invitation
1 hi five friend request
1 super wall post request
3 my questions requests
1 get superlatives invitation
1 live it up invitation
1 top friends friend request

I guess I’m just not taking advantage of the website, but the few things I’ve clicked on turned out to be utterly pointless, so I’m never sure what I’m getting into when I click on something.

Also weird is that on Facebook you can buy “gifts” for people for a dollar, and apparently all that you get is an icon to display on your page. $1 for a gif image. What a great racket they’re running.

Today I was hanging out on Heather’s porch in the lovely weather eating jambalaya, and later, Girl Scout cookies[1]. In a flash of inspiration (no doubt fueled by Dos Equis and PBR) I was compelled to attempt a minor feat: from where I was sitting, could I throw a cookie into the open driver’s side window of my car?

To give you some idea of just how tricky this particular proposition was, the distance was about 30 yards, and the depth between my location and the car window was about 10 feet. The window, about 2×3 feet.

I made it in 1 out of 5 attempts. I can only assume my success was attributable to my Zen-like state of indifference[2] and my incredible tossing skills. I’m not saying it’s like landing an F15 on an aircraft carrier, but on the list of Highly Unlikely Tasks its place is probably in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, somewhere between herding cats and starting a fire with a stick on the first try.

My other recent triumph is far less impressive[3]. Last Wednesday I was watching old Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes with not one but two attractive women on my couch. The ramifications of this event were, of course, impressive only to my 8th grade self. Nevertheless, Tara and Katherine are card-carrying Trek nerds, and we hope to get together again soon. Tara’s birthday was Saturday. She had a Star Trek party with uniforms. Wow.

1.) The shortbread ones. Trefoils. From the Latin trifolium, “three-leaved plant”, French trèfle, German Dreiblatt and Dreiblattbogen, indicating a graphic form composed of the outline of three overlapping rings. Like the biohazard insignia. Or the runes for Led Zeppelin’s rhythm section.

2.) I didn’t really care. I mainly wanted to throw cookies at my car. Because that’s what jambalaya and PBR do to you.

3.) I know. “How can that be!?” I hear you say.

Be it known on this day, the 25th of August, 2007, that Heath Harrelson is Da Man. Not only has he masterminded my improved navigation bar (now on the right), he actually wrote the collapsible archive plugin at lower right. We’ve been using WordPress apparently longer than most people, and so our archives dating back to 2003 were getting absurdly lengthy. My repeated complaints spurred Heath’s innovation and now all our lives are improved as a result. It is for this reason that we must bestow the title of “Da Man” onto Heath Harrelson of Oklahoma City.

Animals like squirrels and small birds often move in short, rapid twitches. I’ve read that this is because their nervous systems are fairly simple, and don’t allow for much fluidity of motion. The other day I began to wonder if this might be a survival advantage for prey animals. Many predators react to movements rather than color or shape recognition, and so the less time a prey spends moving, the better for them.

Also, if you’ve ever wondered why squirrels are so indecisive when they’re in the middle of a road in front of a fast-approaching car, it’s because their first instinct at the sign of trouble is to freeze up and remain motionless. I’d also wager that a car’s fluidity of motion confuses them - they’re perhaps more accustomed to a predator bounding up and down as it runs toward them. Also, they’re most often oriented perpendicular to the car, so they only see the car with one eye, without depth perception. All they see is an object increasing in size somehow. I wonder if squirrels have depth perception at all, actually.

And in other zoological news, a great lesson I learned from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is that moths and other insects are attracted to lamps and flames because their internal navigation systems are going haywire. Many flying insects use distant light sources like the moon as fixed reference points in their flight. But artificial light sources like street lamps make that impossible. We can keep the moon on our left and travel in a reasonably straight line, but a moth can’t keep a street lamp on its left; it will end up circling it forever. Or at least until daylight when the lamp turns off. Or until it plunges into the bulb and dies.

Last night a massive cicada was buzzing my porch, and I made the mistake of turning off the porch light with the door open. He zoomed into my living room and headed for my lamp, briefly stunning himself while I turned the lamp off and turned the porch light back on. He recovered and zoomed back outside. The poor bastard.

Here’s a technique that Sara and I played with on Sunday. It’s really easy to do. All you need is a tripod and Photoshop. Just keep a stationary background, take a few pictures with something different going on, and pull them all into Photoshop as layers. From, there, just erase from the top layers the things in the lower layers that you want to reveal. I’ve got some more ideas that we’ll try to delve into this week.

And here are two more ideas we shot at my house in the music room and the dining room.

One of the marvelous things about NBC’s Heroes is that, like the X-Men, each character has his or her own peculiar power that is somewhat limited in application. So writing a plot must be a bit like playing a game of chess. And like chess, Heroes has two “queens,” Sylar and Peter, who can operate with all the powers of each player (something that thus far separates the characters of Heroes from the X-Men).

All of this made me wonder about chess: why are its pieces so limited in movement, and why is there only one game to be played on the chess board, with one set of “powers” for each piece? There are dozens of games that can be played with a deck of cards, so why not re-assign each chess piece a new power? For example, let’s say that a rook can teleport to any open space analagous to its current position (if it were in the far top right corner, it could teleport any of the other three corners, presuming they were open.). Perhaps knights could only move at full right angles, bishops could only land on every other diagonal tile, etc. Just a thought.

I suppose at some point, the more changes you’d make, the more chess would resemble Dungeons & Dragons, which, in a certain sense, is more complex, creative and strategic a game than chess because the powers of the pieces are constantly in flux.

This is the sort of thing I think about before I fall asleep at night.

I’m really enjoying reading about the histories of punctuation and typography, like the ampersand:

“Ampersand” is short for “and per se and.” I did not know this.

A fun thought is the fact that, without all these little trifling thingys like # and &, we wouldn’t have the Internet or computer programming languages. Because all programming is built on the characters that won’t get compiled as letters. The little scrappy losers of written language, the guys whose names no one remembers (”honey what’s the thingy on the phone dial - is that the asterix[1] or is the hash sign?”) are the guys who built the technology revolution. They’re the Bad News Bears of Language, the Little Engines That Could of Semiotics, the nerds and outcasts who changed the world…much like their programmers.

1.) The use of the word “asterix” or any other erroneous variants of “asterisk” is almost as maddening to me as the use of “expresso.” Or “right justified” when people mean “aligned to the right”.

I just realized that there is a convenient link to the index of my mp3 collection that MOG creates. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but in case you were absent that day, MOG is a music blogging/social networking service that tracks your collection and what you listen to for all to see. If what you’ve got matches their database, people can listen to samples of those tunes. I know lots of people are using Last.fm for a similar service, but Last.fm has the maddening lack of a local state-level search options so I’d never be able to find people in Little Rock on it. You’d think that would be a horific oversight but apparently they’re not too concerned with it. So much for their social networking. Yay MOG.