Scientists: Molly Wood a ‘cunt’

Mac-fan Tironius sets reporter straight, gives this tutorial on pre-viewing pictures

ROCKVILLE, MD. — After exhaustive analyses and data collection, scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) revealed at a press conference here today that successful CNET blogger, podcaster and editor Molly Wood is a complete and total cunt.

“We checked and double checked,” said Dr. Mark Steinburg in a prepared statement, “but it’s conclusive. She is, indeed, a douchie, wretched, soulless cunt.”

As an official card-carrying Mac-loving Apple fanatic, I have a responsibility to knee-jerkedly respond with truthiness when I hear so-called objective journalists speaking inaccurate nonsense about my preferred computing platform, yo.

On Sunday, July 29, in episode 107 of This Week in Tech(1), a technology podcast in a round-table format, CNET “Section Editor” Molly Wood, a self-proclaimed “unashamed Mac-basher,” scorned her Macintosh computer for two rediculous reasons: because of iPhoto’s inability to “cherry pick” photos off a camera’s memory card (instead of its normal all-or-nothing photo importing), and Finder’s lack of a Windows-style “Film strip” mode for easily viewing photos. Unknown to technology writer Wood, Mac OS X does both of these things.

I’m the last unashamed Mac-basher.

I’ll show you how.

False: iPhoto can’t selectively import photos off of a camera

This wonderful tip comes from Derrick Story (website) on episode fourteen of iLifeZone (iTunes).

Using iPhoto 6, and you do need version six, with your camera connected hit Return twice to be taken into iPhoto’s special photo selecting mode where you can select one, two or all of the photos located on the camera.

So, holy shit you can indeed “cherry pick” photos in iPhoto. Hot damn. But, if you wish to skip iPhoto, there is yet another way to select photos from your camera, and that way is by using an application called Image Capture.

Clicking Download Some… takes you here:

Simply select your photos and click Download.

False: You must open pictures in Preview in order to see them

Jesus Christ knows that a technology writer at a major technology magazine should know—or simply right click to discover—that Mac OS X has many ways to preview pictures from within the Finder.

Previewing pictures #1, icon previews: Mac OS X’s Finder has the ability to display pictures on your hard drive as icons of those files by simply altering a few settings. In any Finder window, click View in the menu above, and select Show View Options. Pressing Command-J does the same thing: up pops the view options inspector.

Simply check Show icon preview and there you go. Picture previews without having to open them. Furthermore, if you have a certain folder that contains pictures, check This window only at the top of that inspector, slide the Icon size slider all the way to the right, and watch as those icon previews become nice and big easy to view.

Previewing pictures #2, slideshow: As it turns out, Apple built into its operating system a method of beautifully previewing pictures in a full screen extravaganza. In any Finder window, select one or more pictures, and right-click or Control-click what you’ve selected and simply select Slideshow.

Clicking the middle button while in the slideshow gives you an index of all photos:

This beats Windows “Film strip” any fucking day. You can directly import a photo from here into iPhoto by clicking the button second from the right. In iPhoto, of course, you can edit, crop, color-correct and rotate.

Note, similar slideshows exist in both iPhoto and Preview.

Previewing pictures #3, column view: Mac OS X’s Finder has a “view” that has been in the operating system since it was first created and released, called “column view.” Select the view button (as shown below) in the Finder and—holy shit—yet another method to preview photos and yet another way to chip away at the credibility of a certain CNET cunt-reporter.

Labels: Best of, Mac OS X, Molly Wood, Photography, Tutorial

Facing declining numbers in births in his nation, Russian president encourages youths to attend fuckcamp. Seriously.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. … But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Read more of “Sex for the motherland: Russian youths encouraged to procreate at camp”

Labels: Cartoon

Flickr

Read more of “The Joker + A Knife = F*CKING AWESOME! ”

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

“I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age.”

• Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?
• Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?
• Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease? [See cartoon.]
• Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
• Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

Read more of “ In defense of dangerous ideas”

Labels: Cartoon

Hail Xenu!

I place “Scientology” in quotation marks because I do not recognize it as a standardized word

Gay director Bryan Singer’s love for the Holocaust (I mean Jesus Christ, it was in X-fucking-Men) continues with his new flick Valkyrie. From “Scientologist” to Nazi, Cruise slips into the crazy with ease.

The film made headlines recently when Germany originally banned production from occurring there because of the country's feelings against Scientology (which as you already know is Tom Cruise's first love).

Read more of “Tom Cruise Makes For a Rather Scary Nazi”

Did you just read that? Fucking Germany despises the philosophies of “Scientology.” Nice.

I frequently, yet masochistically read the blog of Apple-fanaticism known as Daring Fireball Daring Fireball: Twice I have caught his typos yet thanked once. where in the author poops on the missed release date of the application Pixelmator, an upcoming consumer-level Photoshop competitor. To Mr. Gruber, any announced and unreleased product is thought of and labeled as vaporware (because he likes to redefine neologistic words). His post:

1. He links to his post quoted below.Pixelmator: Still Vaporware

Note to everyone who complained about my skepticism that they’d ship in July: Told you so[1].

Pixelmator is an application to which I’m looking forward, a for the rest of us graphics app that is the cooler, hipper little brother to Photoshop. Its dashboard-style inspectors are dark and translucent, which nicely recede from attention when working on a composition.

I wondered why someone would write “I told you so” to his readers about the development of this promising app, and generally be a total caustic fuck to an independent Mac development team. His first post about the product (and where I learned of it):

Pixelmator

Vaporware image-editing app with HUD-crazy UI, based on the image manipulating mojo of Mac OS X’s Core Image APIs. Supposedly available in “late July” for $59.

Update: I don’t want to read too much into it, but it’s amusing that Pixelmator’s downloadable “press images” were created using Photoshop CS3.

Catty! Ree-ooww! Fissss! Fissss!

Mr. Gruber states that he doesn’t want to read too much into it, but then continues by reading the fuck into it, insinuating the apparent dubiousness of how a team working on an unfinished product is not using that unfinished product for the screenshots of how said unfinished product will look in the future. It would also seem to be that I, an average dim-witted reader, am to believe that the Pixelmator’s press images are, indeed, not press images at all, but rather something rather suspicious, or so the quotation marks tell me. Why, I never!

So, I wondered all of this until I found his picture on the Internets. John Gruber, file photo:

Labels: Best of

Peer-to-peer users share candid shots

Enjoy candid photography and documents from the hard drives of others through Gnutella

It’s interesting what people put on the peer-to-peer networks and not realize. See, when installing certain Gnutella-network peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire or Bearshare, the user is given options to make certain folders shared. 1. But I have no way of knowing; I can only assume that they fully know and comprehend their actions in publishing their pictures and documents to the network. I imagine that certain common folders such as “My Documents” are shared by hapless idiots, not knowing that they are publishing their lives to the world [1]. Thusly, files like Word documents, pictures, useless .dll files, and countless more are available for others to download.

Their unwitting exhibitionism provides for wonderfully creepy adventures. For the more voyeuristic of our readers, much fun can be had by peaking into the lives of others by seeing their private photographs and documents. All it takes for such ethically-dubious behavior is to know what to type into your search field.

For instance, type in the word resume (i.e. résumé), and find what people don’t know they have included in their shared folders: their entire life’s history. I was able to get some résumé-writing tips simply by reading a real-world example. It’s amazing how many people use Word templates.

But résumés are somewhat boring; what else can one find?

The real fun: Pictures

Type in the letters “DSC,” a common naming-scheme for several cameras, and eureka!, a wonderful cornucopia of breached privacy.

Random pictures include:

• An elderly couple at Kansas City Chiefs football game
• A Hindu family at get-together (possibly wedding)
• Bridal shower
• Cyclists in Germany readying for start of race
• A black flashing is idiocy through hand gestures
• Hideous English woman on all fours wearing a Playboy bunny suit
• This guy:

The real fun can come after, because applications like Acquisition and Limewire allow a person to browse through all files made available on that person’s hard drive. So if the first picture of ugly dog isn’t enough, you can see the other pictures on the roll.

Labels: Best of, Photography, Tutorial

The hapless plod[1] 1. Brit-speak for dim-witted police officer apparently installed the Winny[2] 2. Winny: Top P2P in Japan file-sharing software onto his PC, blissfully unaware that confidential data was being made available to other users via the P2P network.

Read more of “Japanese P2P leak cop fired”

iWeb bests Photoshop in making simple graphics for the web

For those who find Photoshop intimidating or bloated, let Tironius be your guide to creating lickable buttons with li’l ol’ iWeb for web or print

Bloggers and amateur web site creators who don’t find Apple’s aqua look passé will cheer in ecstasy when realized how easy it is to create those style of buttons using Apple’s oft-overlooked little trooper, iWeb. Now, I’ve already shown you how you can create print-quality flyers and posters in my iWeb for print hack. (There’s not much this little program can’t do.) In that, I explain how iWeb creates stunning flyers just like InDesign or Apple’s iWork.

Today, however, I will concentrate how easy you can create simple buttons simply by creating them in iWeb using shapes, and either using them for your iWeb site, or copying them to any other program. So let’s get started.

How to create an aqua-style button

First, let’s see an example of what we’re up against:

Not too shabby. Photoshop would give me a little more finesse, but creating this for your own website will make yours better than ninety per cent of the rest.

Open iWeb and create a new page

Open the page you want to place your new delicious button; or, open a new page if you plan to export this button for some other use (say) in another web page. Select New Page in the File menu. Up pops the template dialogue sheet, and to the left side select White for your template family, and Blank for the actual template. This will give us a clean workspace.

Select a shape

To create our pill-shaped button, we will select one of the shapes in the Shapes button located in the lower left of the main workspace. It is the rounded corner rectangle, fifth from the top of the pop-up menu.

You should see a shape similar to this one (though, size and color might be different if you’re on a different template):

This is our building block.

Adjust the size, color and shape

It’s a nice looking box, but it doesn’t much look like our end product. Let’s fix that by altering its shape. If it isn’t already, select the rectangular box you just created. When an object is selected, that object’s bounding box will appear. A total of eight little squares appear in the corners and on the sides. Dragging these will reshape the object. Drag the top center one downward so that your rectangle becomes a pill shape.

If the shape is still too rectangular (that is to say, if the corners are too sharp), then iWeb allows you to adjust the radius of those corners. That is the little circle in the top left of our shape (under the cursor in the above picture). Use this to adjust the shape into more of a pill:

Part of what gives the button its glassy look is the gradient you see underneath the glare. In this instance, the pill gradates from a dark blue to a brilliant blue. Let’s do this now.

It’s time to use the inspector. In the lower right corner of the program, there is a blue letter “i.” Click it and up pops the inspector, a pane that allows you to control all aspects of the site, including colors, size, and links. In this lesson, we’ll mostly use the color options located in object inspector. Click the tab shown in the above picture, fifth tab from the left.

The object pane should look like this:

Let’s fill our shape a different color. But, instead of just filling it with one color, we will fill it with two, whereby one subtly changes to the other. That’s a gradient fill.

Click the pop-up menu in the inspector where it says Color Fill, and select Gradient Fill.

Now, instead of one color swatch, you see two. Click the top swatch, and up pops the color inspector. Mac OS X’s color inspector is the best. I find it to be superior to Adobe’s in ease of use. It’s time select our base color; for this, I chose a classic aqua blue. Any color works, but blue is classy.

For now, we want both colors to be the same. You’re able to drag swatches around, so to make the other color the same, simply drag the first color on top of the second:

Now, select the top one again, and using the slider in the color inspector, make the blue just a hair darker. Don’t go crazy; subtlety is the way to go:

Note, if you accidentally make the bottom color the darker color, no worries: just click that little double arrow right by the swatches. That switches them. Also, if you choose to have a stroke (an outer line) like mine, make the color the same as your darker blue. You can select the stroke using the pop-up menu. Select Line, and just drag the darker blue swatch right onto the swatch of the stroke below. Final note: already this is a great button and looks more like “Web 2.0” style now than the final.

Create the button’s text

So what is the purpose of this button? Are you sending your reader to a picture page? Or your blog? It’s time to tell them where to go with text. In the lower left corner of the work space, click the Text button. This will plop a brand spankin’ new text box right in the center of your work space. Type your words. To make sure the words align exactly to the button, we want to center the text both horizontally and vertically.

We’ll now switch over to the text inspector. It’s the big “T” tab right in the middle as shown. In the Color & Alignment section, select the center alignment button, and center vertically button. If it isn’t already, select white as the text’s color. To give the text a teensy bit of contrast from the background, we will apply a very subtle drop shadow. Go back to the object inspector (fifth tab from the left), and tick the Shadow checkbox.

The following separates the pros from the amateurs. A real design snob will scoff at the use of a drop shadow. They seem to be accepted and prevalent in package design, however. I can always spot the Photoshop lover by his use of the default drop shadow settings (which by the way is 75% opacity). These are much too dark and gaudy! In our design we will tone it down to an acceptable level. Use my settings as shown in the picture. No need to type “pt” in the settings fields.

You may need to adjust the size and font face of your text. This is done in a separate inspector called the font inspector. (This is one part of OS X that needs an overhaul.) Myriad Pro is the font of choice for Apple.Click the “A” button, the Fonts button, in the lower right corner. Up pops the font inspector. With your text box selected, find the Myriad Pro font family in the inspector. You can search for Myriad Pro using the Search field at the bottom of the inspector, or simply browse for it. Select Semibold if you have it. Another good choice is Helvetica (but rather boring). Keep it classy: simple is better.

My size for text is 32, but your button size might be different. It’s an arbitrary decision; whatever size text fits well in the button is what you should use.

Create the highlight

This is the component that makes the glass button glassy. And, iWeb makes it so easy to create. In Photoshop, one must muck with layer masks or the gradient tool, but in iWeb, its all about the color inspector, baby! Easy as pie.

First, we must copy our pill shape, because it will become the highlight. I simply held down the Option key before dragging the shape upward, thus creating a second pill.

We must then change its color and size. For now, we can change its color to white (for both swatches, since it is a gradient). By clicking and dragging the second shape’s bounding box (on the top center or bottom), I can squish the shape a bit. Do the same for the sides: grab either the left or the right handle, and move it in. Hold the Option key while you do this will do both sides at the same time.

Align the new shape above the other; iWeb will help you keep it center. Use the picture as a guide to how things should look:

Now, the fun part. What makes the second shape look like glare on a glassy surface is its transparency. iWeb does this beautifully. With the white pill shape selected, in the object inspector, select the top swatch for its gradient. Now, in the color inspector, there is a horizontal slider near the bottom pane that controls the opacity of a color. We’re doing the top color, so set the opacity at 80% (by sliding or typing in the value).

Select the shapes second gradient swatch, and set it to just 10%. We’re on the last leg of the race! See how good your button looks now?

All that’s left is to set a drop shadow and export!

Complete and export

You know how to do the next part. Click your original blue button, and apply and adjust its drop shadow using similar settings as your text. You can maybe go a little darker, but don’t over-do it.

Exporting is easy. Simply select all and copy. To copy, hold the Command key and hit C. Or, in the Edit menu, select Copy. I can paste directly into iWork, Skitch, ImageWell, Photoshop, or Preview (by selecting New From Clipboard in the File menu). Pasting into Skitch, ImageWell and Photoshop retains transparency of the drop shadow. Preview annoyingly applied a white background. Apple’s Pages has a wonderful relationship with iWeb; pasting into Pages retains every single object as a separate entity. Text fields remain text fields, etc.

That’s a wrap

Hope you had fun. Who needs Photoshop when you can make such beautiful graphics for simple needs with little old iWeb, Apple’s best kept secret.

Labels: Best of, Design, iWeb, Tutorial

Los Angeles Times:

“No previous series, on pay cable or anywhere else, has dared show anything even close to this much skin; the climax, if you will, of the first episode finds a woman … in her 30s masturbating her husband … to orgasm, with the entire act and all relevant body parts plainly visible.”

Labels: Television

Harvard professor shows how diversity leads people to 'hunker down'

Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam has written an intriguing paper (PDF) that correlates race and isolation, that in heterogeneous communities compared to those with mostly homogeneity, people experience higher levels of mistrust in other races, mistrust in actual nearby neighbors, and—most interestingly—mistrust in even their own race.

According to a year-2000 survey (that also uses census data), people who live in neighborhoods in cities like mine, San Francisco, with more races experience

Some aspects were not effected e.g. religious involvement.

• Less a likelihood of giving to charity
• Fewer close friends
• Less happiness and perceived quality of life
• More TV couch-potatoes
• Lower confidence in local government & leaders
• Less a likelihood to vote, yet more awareness in politics and the participation in protest marches

Also, heterogeneous communities are larger, more mobile, less egalitarian[1], more crime-ridden. And, people in heterogeneous areas tend to be poorer, less educated, and less likely to speak English. The survey accounts for certain variables, also. Among equally poor, equally rich, or equally crime-ridden neighborhoods, more races still begets higher mistrust. Not just physical locations, mind you, but this mistrust pattern occurs in all conceivable classes and social groups: rich and poor, black and white, conservative and liberal.

Labels: Race

Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke:

“Marmaduke is going to eat some donuts. His owner-lady somehow does not realize this was a foregone conclusion the moment they were brought into the house, and it may end up costing her her life.”

Labels: Bookmark This

The Joker, played by Heath Ledger in the upcoming Batman sequel, The Dark Knight (IMDb), is set to overtake Jack Nickleson’s as the best portrayal of the villain, proving again my theory that the British(1) make better Batman films. 1. Yeah, yeah, he’s Australian. All that matters is that he talks “funny.”

Picture, from Filmwad. The recon photographer is quoted:

The scenes we saw them film involved the Semi truck….the joker was inside the truck huntched down holding onto a hand-rail. The go one way on wacker and the Tumbler comes from the other direction. The camera car filmes between them. We saw this over and over a few times. I have video but you cannot see the joker in the video, all you see is the truck. So its not worth posting right now. • … As far as the Joker suit goes, it’s apparantly a very dark purple, contrary to earlier reports. Above all, Ledger comes across as creepy as the Joker should. Things are looking up indeed!

Holy Jesus God, I just found this out: Masterpiece Starscream, created, painted, and loved like my current Masterpiece Optimus Prime.

My personal hero, a man—nay, a gorilla-fighting, Santa Clause-slugging, feel-copping hero—to whom Q–Pounder introduced me with the book, The Alphabet of Manliness, Maddox, has his thoughts on pussy douchebags(1) 1. Like me. who try to get him to buy a bitch’s phone like the iPhone:

(Disclaimer: I am a pussy douchebag who wants an iPhone.)

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.:

“You’ve probably never heard of the E70 because Nokia’s marketing team is busy finding every last dick in the universe to suck, so I’m going to do their job for them and tell you about this product. And no, I’m not being paid to do this. I’m just tired of the iPhone fanboys shooting huge sticky wads and high-fiving each other (literally) over their stupid cellphones.”

MOLI:

“…it’s a done deal: Pop’s top couple will move to Apple to run a new music division.”

A sensational report surfaced of Apple creating a record label with Jay-Z and Beyoncé as executives, presumably to directly distribute music through the iTunes store.

I speculated to this end when I heard Apple Computer and the Beatles’ Apple Corps settled their decades-old legal dispute, giving Computer all rights to the Apple brand, as well as the new-found right to move into the music industry.

This makes a lot of sense, and has the possibility to make Courtney Love’s essay on record labels speaks of “work for hire” copyright laws and debtors’ prison-style catch-22s that the labels impose. Courtney Love happy. I'd wager that Apple is in a better position to give musicians better terms than what they currently get at other labels, because Apple's priority is to sell the players. The Apple music label, I would further guess, is simply a way to ensure content for the devices. Better deals, and the musicians' ability to retain the ownership of their creative work, could be the incentives for musicians to take the risk of signing to a new music model.

1. The Pounders is short for The Asian Pussy Pounders. We're everwhere. I can’t believe Bang Ganger, our esteemed Pounders poster, didn’t alert us to the Wii Party Station. I can only imagine the fun with this thing: it holds your cokes, your Wiimotes, keeps scores, has a chip and dip tray, and a hand dryer for nacho grease. If I had one, I would be inviting some nubile Japanese women over, popping in Warioware for the Wii, and truly giving those ladies a taste of what the Pounders are all about.(1)
From Gizmodo

“You thought it’d never come back. That it had passed into the dustbin of hairdo history, forever, first as an embarrassing fashion trend, then as grist for the irony mill. But you were wrong”

—eXile - Issue #267 - Feature Story - Russia’s Mullet Revolution - By Yasha Levine

North Carolina mayor my new hero

… He understands his remarks offended some people, but he cited statistics that more than 60 percent of Charlotte’s gang members are black.
—AP

Mayor Pat McCrory, who is white, said he was accurate when he wrote that “too many of our youth, primarily African American, are imitating and/or participating in a gangster type of dress, attitude, behavior and action.” —TBO.com / The Associated Press

The NAACP denies statistics (and pragmatic observation):

”Mr. McCrory’s comments reinforce that stereotype especially to those inclined to hold on to racist thinking and behavior,” 1.i·ro·ny: n. 1. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected 2. Ken White, president Charlotte chapter of the NAACP [Ken White(1), black president of the Charlotte, N.C. branch of the NAACP] said.

Wonderfully, the good mayor had the testicular fortitude to—get this—stick by his guns and did not retract his statement. Way to go, North Carolina.

Also, on stereotypes: How many times does the stereotype have to be reinforced by the actual blacks themselves before we can all admit that gangster dress and behavior isn’t stereotypical, but rather just typical?

Labels: Crime, Race

In the scene of the secret laboratory where government agents bring a Nokia cell phone to life, an hilarious sign in the background read:

”This lab has worked for [322] days without a security breach.”

Ha!

Here in Franny(1), 1. San Francisco ladies and germs, the city has issued “official notices” on lamp posts for the spick-gang known as the “Nortenos”(2) to read. 2. Fuck me looking for the n with the tilde over it

Metroblogging San Francisco: SF seeks criminal injunction against Norteños:

The notice informs the ‘gang, and all of its members, affiliates, associates and recruits’ of the intention of the city to maintain a ‘safety zone’ extending from 21st and Alabama over to Cesar Chavez and Valencia. The special zone is like others in the Western Addition and Hunters Point where injunctions have attempted to put a stop to shootings and other violence.

The city wants to metaphorically erect a safety zone where murders shouldn't happen in the city, a concept that disregards that such things shouldn't happen in the entire city. Some Mexican asshole living in the area didn’t like the thought of eliminating murderers, being that both he and they were spicks. The Mexican:

A Mission District homeowner and life-long resident Roberto Hernandez said police harassment was a historical problem. Hernandez expressed anger at the gentrification of his neighborhood by “white hipsters,” and lamented the closing of area schools, saying, “There are no more children left to educate.”

In the comments, yours truly:

. . .

I like how Mexicans can state how they hate other races moving into their neighborhood, but I can’t say I don’t want Mexicans. Forget that, I will: I don’t want spicks in my neighborhood.

Signed,
White Hipster

P.S. Kudos to the city for fighting murderous Mexican thugs with—get this—bureaucracy!

What will happen to this deadbeat? He'll receive justice through our military discipline committee. In other words, he'll get a slap on the wrist and relocated. At the very worst he'll be discharged. What a motherfucker. How many times is this? It seems like our proud and trashy are somehow always making a bad name for us. Our dirt bag military peons can't stay on the fucking base and do their job. It's so embarrassing that such lowlifes make up the majority of enlisted soldiers in the military. Fucking trash.
Here's the link: http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/411422

Buffalo Rising | Dog attacks 2-year old child:

A City of Lockport mother, who shortly left her two-year-old alone, made an emergency call Sunday afternoon after hearing her baby scream.

She ran to see what was wrong and discovered that her dog was sodomizing her toddler. The mother screamed, scaring the dog enough for it to run out of the house.

Conan O’Brien talking about writing for Homer made me laugh:

Homer's a real temptation. We had so much fun trying to make him dumber and dumber and dumber that there was one time where Homer’s brain got angry at him because he was so stupid, and so you heard the brain say, ‘That’s it, I give up,’ and walk down a corridor and slam a door. I loved it—but it’s like, ‘Wait, if his brain is his consciousness, who’s his brain walking out on? And who is his brain angry with?’

A blogger's dream wrapped in the crispy taco shell of an application called Skitch is in beta, and I have miraculously been sent an invitation into the non-public beta program. I can’t be more excited, because it is the missing link in creating, annotating, and hosting images for use with blog posts or whatever. The interface is wonderfully thought out, providing animation as a visual cue for the process happening. For instance, when you wish to take a screen grab of a portion of the screen, click “Snap” in the toolbar and Skitch shrinks out of the way and provides full screen cross hairs. It uses vector as its paintbrush, ever so subtly smoothing out the lines I make. And, it responds to the pressure sensitivity of my Wacom tablet. It’s a simple, to-the-point, get-it-done kind of app and I’s likes it.

Digg, the social news site that was once the best source for eclectic, interesting news stories from around the web, has turned into a vindictive, lying, muckraking tabloid thanks to the inclusion of topics that cover politics and the election.

It used to be a man could go to Digg and find unusual stories about tapeworms, missions to Mars, gigantic people marrying their cousins, et-cetera, et-cetera. Now its just a bunch of Ron Paul assholes who digg up their own pro-Paul stories (using methods going against Digg policies) and digg up stories that trash his opponents, e.g. Fred Thompson Thompson, of Law & Order fame. Gong gong!and Rudy Guliani. What makes this so easy is the remote digging feature found on the originating web page. From there, stories can be artificially dugg upward through the ranks.

Typical Ron Paulsian story:

Digg - Nixon on Fred Thompson: “Dumb as Hell”: “Excerpt: ‘Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called ‘dumb as hell.’ The president did not think Thompson was skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee’s Democratic counsel.’ More…”

Solution is to take away that remote digging feature and avoid topics like politics that foster negative posts. And Ron Paul can go suck an egg.

Machines collide in funnest movie of the summer

1980s childhood blossoms into explosive on-screen orgasm

Optimus Prime returns to theaters after twenty-one long years in Michael Bay’s did-it-up-right movie Transformers, which changed—nay, transformed— my dull weekend into an enterainment-sensory mind-nuke, leaving me absolutely wowed. Leading the charged onslaught to my eyes and mind is the spectacle of special effects, bringing to live action giant transforming robot aliens.

The absolute key to Transformers working so well is the CG. They looked and moved with satisfying realism because of the new design of characters; the believable animation of large metal monsters acting, thinking, and emoting; and the abandonment of staying 100 percent true to the 1985 originals.

The new Prime and gang look badass, and their new complicatedly fluid design makes for cooler transformations. In the third act of the movie, Megatron* Megatron is played by—surprising to me—Hugo Weaving: Matrix’s Mr. Smith. is running amock and the arrival of Optimus Prime, rolling up fashionably late in 18-wheel style, gives us the ultimate transformation money-shot, with the camera circling from around and underneath. We get to see gorgeously complicated metal reconfiguration unlike what we saw in the 80s. In that, Prime just shimmies his arms into his torso and folds his legs backward. The Autobots and Decepticons’ new bodies, much like the Alternator toys, bring the two teams into the modern era: Prime transforms into a mordern 18-wheeler, instead of the old 70s Freightliner; Starscream rockets through the sky in a stealthy Lockheed F-22 Raptor, instead of the F-15 Tomcat; and most striking of all, Rachet is no longer an oddly shaped, out-of-place Japanese ambulance, but rather a new Hummer. The badass-est Transformer was Barricade, the Saleen Mustang police cruiser cum Decepticon. Second favorite: Blackout, a Sikorsky MH53 Pave Low helicopter. While on the subject, it is good that Bumblebee is no longer his iconic Volkswagon Beatle. The first half of the movie would be too much like Herbie the Love Bug.

Animation, too, was killer. In the slapstick scene where a multitude of Autobots destroy the Witwickys’ yard, humor comes from the action of the giants. In one moment, Optimus Prime pinches the bridge of his nose in thoughtful frustration. Michael Bay takes the shit too far, in a scene where Bumblebee pees on John Turtorro’s Agent Simmons And another, Bumblebee shushes and guestures to the other Autobots while Sam Witwicky stalls his father. On second viewing, my fellow Pounders, take note of this.

By contrast, the people in the movie were much more the cartoons than the Autobots, save Poor Jazz: Why is it always the Transformer brothas that bite it in the movies? Jazz, who single-handedly set the black Transformer minority back by ten years. I was praying that at some point the porn star high-schooler with the skin of a 25-year-old would either bite it, or bite it. The predictability of Sam getting with her was only outweighed by the inprobability. If we saw her in the original cartoons, we’d be saying she’s a little over the top. Equally, John Turtorro as goofball Sector-7 agent Simmons was a little too hand-drawn. Other characters had no real purpose. The fat black hacker had no real role that couldn’t have been performed by the blonde woman. (Or, just have him be the film’s analyst role.) Similarly, the two hippies accompanying hot blondie, Fatty and Skinny. Did we need them? Shia Lebouf was fine, though, as the boy who befreinds the Autobots, having great comedic acting.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention how cool it was for the filmmakers to use the original cartoon's transformation sound. Choo-chah-chee-chee!

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Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature:

“Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, …according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex”

No sex and booze are the makings of a violent group of blue-balled kamikazes with too much idle time.

Let me be the first on this website to say that Transformers the movie is every bit as awesome as it should be. In other words, it delivers on a magnitude of 5. That’s a lot. A whole lot. I wasn’t a big fan to begin with (T can back me up here since he got me into the series moreorless) but this movie delivered with its eccentric Bayian presentation and equally as moving soundtrack (Team America I’m looking at you).

Being the owner of G1 Season 2, as well as both seasons of Beast Wars and Atari’s 2004 Transformers game I feel I’m somewhat qualified as a mild-mannered T-geek. And after the spectacle that is the movie I’m neither afraid nor ashamed to publish my status as a motherfucking fan. And like this rediculous blog andYou’ve got the touch. You’ve got the poooowerrrrrr! all its crazy members, there’s more than meets the eye [cue White Lion song NOW!].

Islamic murderers laugh as they watch a browbeaten western civilization propagate pro-Islam messages, essentially doing the job for them, according to Muslim columnist and ex-terrorist cell member.

Hassan Butt for the Daily Mail:

Mr. Butt developed his genocidal rage one day, at around 3:15pm, when the cruelty of school children was evidenced by a ceaseless chanting over by the backstop. Butt was never the same.

“When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us.”

The problem, states author Hassan Butt, a former terrorist recruiter, is Islam’s theology, and the reluctance of clerics to broach the subject of the “with us or against us” preaching.

The Washington Times:

“U.S. District Judge Tom S. Lee ruled late Friday that Noxubee County Democratic Party leader Ike Brown and the county Democratic Executive Committee ‘manipulated the political process in ways specifically intended and designed to impair and impede participation of white voters and to dilute their votes.’”

In Safari, a double-click of a paragraph of text or picture zooms to that region. I wonder at what, exactly, in the web page’s code is the iPhone looking for knowing how close to make the zoom. Is Safari looking for <P> paragraph tags or possibly <DIV> tags, I wonder.

And, knowing what it is using, how could web developers use that information to optimize the experience for iPhone users.