I was going to write a post about swine flu, but I waited too long (I should have written something on Monday morning), so at this point, there's nothing left for me to add.
Except that I came across this the other day:
Friday Funday brings you some fun and interesting links from my travels around the internet. Funday links will open in a new window.
Caught on Camera — The Best of Google Street View
Despite the stupid pop-up gallery, some of these are pretty funny. I'm glad none of them are me.
Laser Bread's Photostream
Laser Bread is probably best known for the "born with googly eyes" series. Quality stuff.
Film the Blanks
If you haven't discovered this site yet, you're missing out! If you like movies, you'll love Film the Blanks.
BallDroppings
Balls drop. You draw lines. Interesting noises are emitted. I don't know. You guys know I love this sort of thing.
Drums
Along similar lines to BallDroppings is this neat little thing. I just wish you could create beat loops.
Today's Foxtrot comic contains a coded message and the key is hidden by a series of math problems. As the title implies, this post is about the solution to those problems, so if you want to figure them out for yourself, stop reading now.
At first, the problems look pretty complicated, but once I started looking at them, I quickly realized that many of them are simple problems. I was even able to do a number of them in my head! Morah and I busted out our calculators and filled in the key as best we could, which is below:
A - 11
B - 8
C -
D - 17
E - 10
F - 2
G - 5
H - 19
I - 13
J - 7
K - 26
L -
M - 22
N - 20
O - 15
P - 16
Q -
R - 9
S - 23
T - 12
U -
V - 25
W - 4
X - 18
Y - 21
Z - 14
As you can see, we left a few unsolved. Either they weren't coming out to whole numbers, or we simply didn't know how to solve those ones. Once we had the above figured out, we matched up the numbers with their respective letters and decoded the secret message:
Paige Fox is bad at math
Friday Funday brings you some fun and interesting links from my travels around the internet. Funday links will open in a new window.
Omegle
Do you want to chat with a complete stranger? If so, Omegle is for you! Unfortunately, most people on here seem to ask a/s/l within the first 10 seconds of chatting. If they do, I always disconnect. I did manage to have a pleasant chat with someone a few days ago, who agreed that anonymity was the point. I'll probably never talk to them again, which is kind of sad, but ultimately seems like the point of Omegle.
Disturbing Strokes
This one kind of made the rounds before I could post it here (I swear, I find the best stuff on Saturdays).
On The Set
Amazing little dioramas of sets of T.V. shows we've almost all watched.
Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video
Not official, but damn funny.
We Didn't Start the Flame War
You've used the Internet, I don't think I need to tell you what this one's about. Beware of some strong language that may not be safe for work.
Last week at work, I was given the task of changing the color scheme of our CMS for a client. It isn't something we normally do, but the client requested it, and it wasn't too difficult to do, so we did it.
I say that it "wasn't too difficult," because there was a small amount of difficulty involved. Actually, it was more an inconvenience than a difficulty. While it was easy enough to change the color of the links and any colored text, all of those images you see in the screenshot to the right (which I edited to show the before-and-after colors) had to be changed individually. It wasn't hard, just time consuming.
That got me thinking about how to quickly change the colors of images, which lead me to ponder, "wouldn't it be great if I could change the color of images using CSS?" Not only would it be great, it's entirely possible and very easy to do.
As a proof of concept, I made this page. Take a look at the code and you should get a pretty good sense of what's going on (unless you're using IE6, in which case, update your browser). Starting from the top left and moving to the right, and then down, here's what each image shows:
I do want to point out that I'm not breaking any new ground here. I've been using this same basic technique on my website since February of 2007 to add rounded corners on my webcam images. I don't know why it didn't occur to me then, but I've shown my test page to a few people who all had big, excited reactions.
The implications of what you can do with this sort of technology are vast, and in May of 2007, David Hellsing wrote a fantastic post over on Dave's Kitchen about how you can take advantage of the effect. I won't go into details here about what David came up with, but check it out because it is brilliant.
Bringing this all back to the CMS at work, our icons are single-color images (that is, a single color besides white and black). If the colored areas were transparent and the backgrounds of all the images set to a solid color using CSS, we could easily have changed the color of every one of those images by changing a single value in the CSS. In fact, with a little planning, we could change every single color that needs to be changed (links, colored text, message bar, and icons) by changing one value in our CSS code.
No wonder people are getting so excited about this.
Friday Funday brings you some fun and interesting links from my travels around the internet. Funday links will open in a new window.
Links in red are not safe for work.
Cat vs. Fly
Guess who wins.
Bagpipe Hero
A spoof commercial that had me laughing out loud, since I'm learning to play the pipes.
Jack Benny, Mel Blanc, Johnny Carson
Mel Blanc, man, I don't even know what can be said about him. Easily one of the greatest (if not the greatest) voice actors of all time.
Guess Her Muff
This site shows you a picture of a woman and invites you to guess what she looks like "down there." The site isn't NSFW on its face, but... Well, just play it safe, O.K.?
LOLClits
It's kind of like lolcats, but... You know what? Don't even visit this page. Seriously. There are some things on the Internet that you can't un-see, and this site is filled with them.
This morning, The Today Show had a report about greeting cards meant to be given to cancer patients. This is causing a stir, which was the point of the report.
Cards made especially for cancer patients are not a new concept; several websites exist that allow you to buy pre-made cards for those who have and had cancer. The controversy seems to be surrounding the mass-production of these cards by major companies like Hallmark (in the report, Hallmark is specifically singled out).
In the Today Show report, Steve Adubato argues that mass-produced greeting cards are too impersonal to give to cancer patients and survivors. He says that it doesn't matter how ineloquent or awkward, as long as your sentiment comes from the heart - and from you - it will be well received.
I agree with Adubato, although I feel the same way about all greeting cards, not just the cancer-related ones. I know a lot of people like receiving greeting cards, and I don't have a problem with that, but I'd just as soon receive no card at all. The same is true with giving; I'd rather give a card I made than buy one I settled on.
That's really the key, I think: I have to settle for a card. Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed a real decline in the quality of greeting cards over the past few years. Add to that the facts that what's written in them aren't your own words and that the exact same sentiment will be given to thousands of other people, and the whole business just leaves me feeling a bit cold. That goes extra for the cancer cards.
What do you think? Are greeting cards an acceptable way to express your feelings? Are cancer cards going too far?
The keyboard I use at work has some keys on it that are a bit tough to press. Being someone who types all day long as part of my job, this is somewhat annoying. Only slightly more annoying is what happens when I attempt to type in gmail.com, but accidentally enter gmail.cm. You can visit gmail.cm and see for yourself, but I suggest you take my word for it when I say the site resizes your browser.
I'm pretty particular about my browser window, its size, and its placement, so when a site resizes it, I get irritated. To make matters worse, I visit gmail.com several times a day and about a third of the time I make the typo, which means my browser gets resized daily.
I've been putting up with this for a while, but after it happened again this morning, I decided I had put up with long enough. I blocked access to gmail.cm altogether, and in case you ever need to know how to block access to websites in OS X, I'll tell you how I did it (like everyone else, I assume no responsibility if you break your computer).
To accomplish this, you're going to need root access to the machine (which you have if you know the administrator password). Open the application called Terminal (it's in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder). You're going to edit your 'hosts' file, and it's always a good idea to back stuff up before you goof around with it. To do that, type in:
sudo /bin/cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.backup
Press 'enter' and type in your password. Now you're ready to edit the file. Type in:
sudo /usr/bin/pico /etc/hosts
When you press 'enter,' your 'hosts' file will open in a text editing program called pico. Use the arrow keys to move the caret to the end of the last line and hit 'enter' a couple of times to get to a new, blank line. Then type in:
127.0.0.1 www.gmail.cm
127.0.0.1 gmail.cm
Obviously, if you want to block a site other than gmail.cm, you would type that in instead. Once you're finished adding sites you want to block, press 'control' and 'x' at the same time. Pico will ask if you want to save your changes, so press 'y' and then 'enter.'
To test your work, clear your browser's cache and try to visit gmail.cm (or whatever you typed in). Your browser should say that it can't find the site. So what magic did you do to accomplish this? You told your computer to look for gmail.cm and www.gmail.cm at the IP address 127.0.0.1, which is the localhost IP address. In plain English, that means it's looking for gmail.cm on your own computer (127.0.0.1 always means "this computer"). Since gmail.cm obviously isn't hosted on your machine, it doesn't work (if your computer is set up to serve web pages, you'll likely see that instead of an error message).
Pro Tip: Instead of using 127.0.0.1 and having the site fail altogether, use the IP address of an actual website and have OS X automatically forward you to a useful site. Unfortunately, every IP address I can find for gmail.com takes me to google.com instead.
Friday Funday brings you some fun and interesting links from my travels around the internet. Funday links will open in a new window.
First
History is full of firsts.
Local News Birthday Wishes Fail
Local news is usually too clueless. This time, however, I think they were just clueless enough. From the video's description: "A couple of clueless anchors fall for an epic joke when somebody writes in with hilarious wishes for just about every crank call name in the book."
Mother of All Funk Chords
YouTube user Kutiman cut together videos made my other YouTube users to make this first installment of Kutiman Thru You. The result is a funk-tastic song and a video that's as fun to watch as it is to listen to. Kutiman has made several other videos, each with a different genre of music. All of them are excellent.
Your Logo Makes Me Barf
'Nuff said.
Gobstopper Trailer
This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Starring Christopher Lloyd as scary Willy Wonka, you can't possible live another minute without watching this trailer. Seriously.
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Be my boss!
If you visit my Amazon.com PayPage, you can pay me as little as $1. I could be your underpaid employee!
