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Naked Eye

Think you can tell a doctored image from a fake? Popular Science links to three tests you can take to gauge your powers of discernment (the first link is fubar; correct link). First two quizzes on general imagery (mostly images I’ve seen floating around the net), the last tests your ability to tell between photographs and renderings. I scored 75-80% on the first two, 90% on last. You?

Entertaining, but raises real questions where news is concerned, especially when that news comes from less-trusted sources like blogs, but also in the realm of increasingly popular photo illustration.

Thanks Ken Light

Music: Land of the Loops :: Patience
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Ozone Stops Shrinking

Nice to see a shred of environmental good news amidst the morass of disasters both man-made and natural: According to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the Ozone layer has stopped shrinking, thanks to 20 years of international efforts to reduce CFCs, proving that attention and cooperation can make a difference. But don’t get too excited — we’re not out of the woods just yet:

“Chemicals pumped into Earth’s atmosphere decades ago still are affecting ozone levels today,” said Sherwood Roland of the University of California Irvine. “This problem was a long time in the making, and because of the persistence of these chlorine compounds, there is no short-term fix.” The ozone layer remains so thin that cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation is still getting through.

Still, it’s progress.

Thanks Jim

Music: Elton Britt :: Give Me a Pinto Pal
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Miles Starts Preschool

Miles Preschool Paint Hard to believe this day has come already. Seems like Miles was just born, and now suddenly he’s in preschool. Bittersweet sending him off to spend three days a week in the company of peers, riding tricycles and gluing beans onto sheets of cardboard, but we’re very proud and so is he. He absolutely loved it. Amy looking forward to kick-starting her adult life again. Miles’ words have become sentences, and sentences have become paragraphs. His speech swerves delightfully in and out of surreality. His deep penchant for pushing the limits of his physicality is now firmly established, and he continues to astonish with his feats of derring-do (almost stopped our hearts today when we found him walking on top of monkey bars 6 ft. off the ground, rather than hanging from them). Like any 2-3 year old, he has his moments of abject refusal / self-determination, but they’re relatively infrequent and pass quickly. He’s starting to spell, loving to count, and is already memorizing dinosaur names that Amy and I can’t even remember, not to mention the names of obscure sea creatures (“Daddy, that’s a clown trigger fish, not a parrot fish!”). He recently picked up on me saying “Rip. Mix. Burn.” and walked around the house for two days saying “Rix. Mip. Born.” Testify!

Music: Mike Watt and the Secondmen :: Reed ‘Round My Waist
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Ballmer’s Latest Conniption

Searchblog has dirt on yet another coronary outburst from that Microsoft humanimal Steve Ballmer, in the form of a court document detailing his reaction to losing a top engineer to Google.

Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” ….

Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

May Ballmer drown in his own sweat. The guy should be a clown in the WWF, not head of the world’s largest technology company.

Music: Leo Kottke :: Watermelon
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MT 3.2 Upgrades

Just finished upgrading this blog and Battelle Media to Movable Type 3.2. Upgraded the J-School installation on Friday. Lots of cool new tools. My crude little comstop script has been obsoleted by the new Feedback Master Switch — one-click ability to disable comments and trackbacks for all blogs under an installation whilst undergoing massive spam-bombing. Slick. Also liking the new Junk “folders” for suspected comment and trackback spam. Ignore them and the system will auto-delete items after x days. StyleCatcher theme plugin already turning out to be a great timesaver at work for new class blogs. 3.2 turning out to be one of the most impressive upgrades in memory. These are the kinds of things computers are supposed to be good at.

Music: Sun Ra Arkestra :: Prelude To Stargazers
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Seeking Comcast User

Getting close to nailing down an alternate SMTP port for traveling Birdhouse users. Have confirmed that it works with SBC/Yahoo!, and want to make sure it works with Comcast Cable Internet as well. If you use Comcast (or another cable provider for that matter) and would be willing to help me with a quick test, please contact me. You don’t need to be a Birdhouse customer to do this. Thanks in advance!

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Free Opera

Not sure how many people are using the Opera web browser these days, but if you’ve ever hesitated to try because it isn’t free, the company is celebrating its 10th birthday by handing out free reg strings for all platforms. Get ’em while they’re hot.

Opera has always been great, and I remember how grateful the BeOS user community was to see the BeOS port of Opera. But in these days of free Firefox etc., there isn’t a whole lot of incentive for people to try unheard-of browsers. Still, Opera has always been famous for its strict adherence to W3C standards, so it’s an important element of a webmaster’s toolkit.

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Debt Relief

Had a mini-disaster a few nights ago and corrupted most of my email inbox (long story), slashing my “To respond to” list from ~150 to ~20. After the initial “Oh, crap” reaction, a strange feeling of peace washed over me, and lingers. Can’t tell you what a relief it is to have that much perceived obligation erased in a flash. I do feel bad about all those great unanswered threads vanishing into ether, but ultimately, it was like getting a big stinky boot off my neck. 

After witnessing newfound lightness in my step, Amy has promised to start deleting random blocks of messages from my inbox.

Music: David Bowie :: It Ain’t Easy
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StyleCatcher for MT

File under “Long overdue”: With the release of Movable Type 3.2 finally comes the ability to switch between installed template styles with a few clicks, bringing weblog customizability more into line with what WordPress has offered for quite a while.

Several nice ones in the library of styles Six Apart is offering in its first round. Oddly, three-column designs are conspicuously absent from the display of new styles, though they say that the designs work neatly in three-column layouts (hacking a two-column CSS design into three columns has traditionally been non-trivial for general users; one of those areas where table-based design is vastly easier). Now that MT styles can be neatly packaged for download / install, looking forward to seeing what kinds of contributions the user community comes up with.

I’m pretty content with the current Birdhouse design for now, though I do enjoy messing with things from time to time. But lately I’ve been almost begrudgingly recommending that customers setting up new blogs use WP rather than MT, primarily for this reason. StyleCatcher evens the score.

Music: David Bowie :: Moonage Daydream
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Liberals Under My Bed

“… with the nation’s libraries and classrooms filled with overtly liberal children’s books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use, kids everywhere are being deluged with left-wing propaganda.” So what we apparently need is a primer for children of conservatives. Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed:

This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.

Yep, that’s what we see at every turn — a deluge of left-wing propaganda. We’re swimming in it, apparently. Damn liberals and their damn broccoli.