Some Good Stuff

Have come across some good stuff on the internets lately and wanted to share.

Need some more wild in your life? Check out Nick Brandt to see some spectacular images of Africa. He has a fantastic eye and has captured a whole host of animals, panoramas and the feeling of the wildness of Africa. Truly inspiring photos.

The other is referenced in the post below. Texts from Last Night provided me with more laughs in a few hours yesterday than I can remember in a whole week. I could post a dozen that made e laugh out loud but I'll just post a choice couple.
"(416): I just jerked it to the same porn two nights in a row... and she says I have problems with commitment..."
"(512): i just sat at a stop sign for 10 minutes waiting for it to turn green. i need to STOP SMOKING THIS SHIT."

Via Amy's Reader Feed, Looking Into the Past is a Flickr pool of old pictures held up where they were taken. Trust me, it is very cool.

And, lastly, SuperCook lets you enter in food you have and then kicks out a bunch of recipes you can make. It is pretty awesome.

That's all I've got for now. I've got some calls to make, trails to ride and hearts to break (just kidding on the last one).

Amazing Surf Photography

My mom sent me a bunch of photos by a guy named Clark Little, his photos are nothing short of astonishing, beautiful and awesome.

This is one my favorites from what she sent me.

This is the kind of photography I'd love to be able to do. Unfortunately it requires some rather expensive gear that just isn't in the cards presently. Too many other things taking precedence, like my mortgage and, you know, groceries.

Still, this is fantastic. Check out his site for a whole ton more of them, all for sale.

The Hawtness is Notness

My favorite celebrity satire artist, 14, scores a wicked hit again with her: A Madonna Crotch Endorsement 20 Years from Now.

14 does a great job of capturing the little details and the whole package is satire of the highest and funniest order.

Her entire series of work based on Paris Hilton is genuinely hilarious and worth a look. The same for her Rachel Ray series.

Really there's very little that she does in the way of celebrity satire that doesn't score a near direct hit on my laugh at them bone.

I've been working on a collaboration with her for a little while now but its taken a backseat recently due to more pressing issues (like, oh I don't know, breathing). But I am planning on getting back to it when I can think clearly again and feel the burning need to rip some celebs a fresh one (actually, I'm going with some political figures for my write up).

Beware the Hasselbeck Screech Owl

I've made no bones about the fact that I thoroughly loathe Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the token conservative parrot owl on The View who became Sarah Palin's top adviser despite having the intelligence quotient of a retarded wombat. So it was with delightful glee that I saw my favorite artist, 14, of the Gallery of the Absurd, had aimed her artistic cannons at her. And she scores a direct and hilarious hit.

Yes, it is petty of me to level so much hatred at someone I've never met and will never meet. But Hasselbeck represents so much of what is wrong with politics in America. Her unexamined repetition of GOP talking points without having the knowledge to understand them, her teary defense of Bush and his pet Iraq War, her outrage that anyone could possibly question this current administration and just that freakishly huge and shiny forehead.

When In Doubt, Show Some Flesh

The more astute readers of this blog may have noticed a rather unusual lack of posts these days. I've been trying to put most of my politics on IP Politik and that's been one of my main things right now.

But even so, my blogging batteries have run down a bit and I'm occasionally asking myself just what the whole friggin' point of this thing is.

And then I get given a link to hot women with painted on Halloween costumes, like this one and it all makes sense again.

And yeah, the link is NSFW but oh so good on the eyes.

Enjoy, I'm going back downstairs to watch the end of the World Series and have some pizza. Regularly scheduled ranting and madness will resume soon, I'm sure.

Co-Workers Stealing Your Lunch? Use These Bags

Office Culture: Anti-Theft Lunch Bag Deters Sandwich Thieves
Sometimes a product comes along that is just completely full of awesome. This is one of those products. The only way this gets better is if you actually spray some edible goo that looks like mold directly on the sandwich.

Either way, people who shark other people's lunches in an office need to be taken out back and have their nuts stapled to a pit bull.

Twitter-itis

My oh my, how the times and my attitude has changed. I remember many months ago when Rick was trying out Twitter and I commented that I could not understand the attraction to a severely limited pseudo-blogging engine.

But I was wrong, lawd! was I wrong. Twitter has actually changed how I internet. It is a fantastic way of keeping in touch and up to date on what my "connected" pals are up to. I know more about what my buddy Jay is up to these days because we Twitter it everyday (and yeah, I'm jealous he gets to go on those long rides all the time!).

But Twitter is also a really useful way to learn about popular culture. In particular, the latest extension of the data feeding into Twitter is called FlixPulse. Its a movie review site based on the number of positive, negative and indifferent posts about movies. Movies are then given a percentage score and a letter grade. Kung Fu Panda is an almost sure hit with an amazing 98% positive review rating. Zohan isn't such a good movie with a D rating and a mere 66% positive rating, the same as the latest Indiana Jones.

I've been lobbying my district to start making use of the system to push out server status updates, downtimes and other important messaging. Other organizations are already doing this like the LA Fire Department. For an easy to use means of getting word out, I don't think there's anything as good. It's also possible to get individual feeds delivered to your cell or email in-box (as in the case of emergency messaging).

There are an amazing and ever growing assortment of add-on services derived from Twitter's "pulse", the non-stop comments on everything. A good resource to check out in this regard is Frantic Industries: All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place (clever name, eh?).

My only complaint about Twitter is that it isn't especially stable and seems to go down randomly throughout the day. I can't get my RSS feeds to work properly anymore but part of this problem is due to the exploding popularity of the site and service. I hope they are adding servers and beefing up the system as it does not appear to be getting less popular at all, it's only going to get worse!

Along the same lines, I'm starting to make use of FriendFeed to keep on top of my other friends who are as addicted to the web as I am and are involved in numerous sites across the webosphere.

Funnily enough, Rick stopped using Twitter shortly after that post and I took it up a month or two later.