With TightVNC installed at home and at work, I can continue to be lazy about logging off from my IM but not miss any messages while I’m in transit. Ahh, the wonders of technology.

A friend sent me a link to Kartoo, a pretty awesome search engine which shows visual connections (all rendered in flash from php apparently). Pretty damn cool.

Cryptome has a short Echelon/Echelon II interview up. Also, more proof we’re living in sci-fi distopia, America’s Army, “The Official U.S. Army Game.”

Developed by the U.S. Army and a world-class team of Department of Defense experts in simulations and virtual environments, America’s Army will be available in August. The Army will distribute America’s Army for *free* in response to requests at America’s Army and GoArmy.com, through distribution partners that include leading computer game magazines, at Army events, at recruiting stations, and through internet download. The game is rated “T” for Teen by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

Of course, it’s free, and it looks like it might be fun, so sure I’ll be getting a copy. I don’t think I’ll be signing up at the recruiting station anytime soon though. Of course, Joe Camel didn’t make me want to smoke either, but apparently that kind of stuff works on some people.

Exifer for Windows is a great freeware program that lets one view, save, restore and edit (some fields) of the exif information in JPEGs. It has a great date restoration feature that let me recover my timestamps (resetting the file date based on the exif timestamp). Very neat.

If you run you’re finger across the screen, you’ll see that the thin film of dust is in fact sitting on this site and not on the monitor. Obviously things have been slipping around here. Of course, I was pulling all-nighters at work last week working on a project while all that interesting stuff was going on at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. If I ever get a chance, I should probably catch up on what sounds like some real interesting stuff: kottke, peterme 1, 2, blackbeltjones.com… oh wait, got to boingboing and found out that aaron ‘blogspace‘ swartz, boy genius, has put up a collection of just about all the etcon notes in existence on a single page.

This of course makes me feel slightly guilty about the SXSW notes I never finished putting up, as well as the kms i’m never going to get finished (not at this rate anyway), but well, after taking a few breaths I’m over it. At this point I’m just going to try to get my offline and work life organized for a while. I get the feeling that I need to acquire some superior organizational/time management skills.

Um, finishing off with some random thoughts. E3 this week… down the block… obviously I won’t be there, but I’ll be catching lunch with an old college friend who will be. I’m 21. Isn’t that too early to be getting nostalgic about college? Of course, yet another one of my friend’s is going to be going down the aisle soon.

On that note, looks like I’ve been misssing out on some comedic gold courtesy of the Peanut Gallery on BlindDateBlog How rusty has so much spare time I don’t know. Doesn’t he have a website to run?

Jonathan starts things off with a description of a kiss that reads more like a Greco-Roman Wrestling manual. “I’d start off with a clinch, holding my upper lip against your lower gums, and pinning your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Then I’d reverse it and whip my tongue against your left cheek, while at the same time using the leverage of my molars to twist your lower jaw into a reverse Kowalski. Then I’d go for the pin, gripping your nose between my lips and twisting over and sideways, firmly settling the weight of my chin onto your uvula.”

And you thought you’ve seen everything.

I wound up going with some friends and saw the 12:01AM screening of Episode 2 (funny since I didn’t really plan on seeing it at all, much less on opening night), digitally screened at the newish Grove theater. We caught the digital projection, which well, was interesting. First, about the projection, during the first few minutes the picture was offset about 5-10% to the right of the screen and crawling. Apparently, just because it’s digital doesn’t mean that the projector monkeys won’t find a way to screw things up (remember when there used to be real projectionists in the booth? no, me neither, but I’ve heard they do exist… in Chicago at least). Also fun were the occasional screen blankings and one or two tearing/vsync errors. It occurred to me that while the next generation of kids might never see scratched up and dirty reels or projectionist dots, they’ll be completely used to the digital artifacting from the digital projection technology.

Oh, about the movie. Well, the grip of people I saw it with seemed to enjoy it, and I don’t want to rain on that parade, but even coming in with incredibly low expectations… but, wow, the dialogue, characterizations, and story were laughably bad. There is a continuation of the byzantine unrest in the Republic involving factions of various trade organizations, blah blah blah, but honestly, my eyes glazed over at the screen crawl. That’s really weird, because I remember when first reading the crawls on the earlier Star Wars movies that they were simultaneously 1) much simpler and 2) much more engaging. It got me thinking… it can’t be that hard to make an entertaining space opera can it?

Of course, that’s oversimplifying, seeing as it’s not just some random movie, but “STAR WARS”, part of a mega-franchise with so many expectations. But really, does that make it impossible to make a movie that can engage on something beyond a visceral level? I mean, it’d be fine that was what was being aimed for, but somehow, sitting through quite a bit of lengthy exposition, even worse dialogue, and more than a few hackneyed plot devices, I get the feeling that Lucas was trying to say… something. On the bright side, there were some ‘dramatic moments’ so silly that I just burst out laughing. Very entertaining in a MST3K way. So, no, Anakin’s journey to the dark side isn’t very compelling at all, and his ‘romance’ with Padme is actually slightly creepy, and isn’t very convincing (Jedi mindtrick explains it I’m sure).

Oh, and while I’m kvetching, It’s funny that on a visual level, I actually much prefer the the older films. Just about everything in the movie is computer generated, green screened, and composited, and unfortunately… you can very much tell for the majority of it. From the bad character interactions, to the ever-present shine, it just made the whole movie look like a giant video game. I don’t necessarily blame the technology, it seems to be more of an aesthetic decision than anything else.

Hmm, that’s a lot of writing, really late at night.

Update: here’s a nice summary thread on /.

After several very stressful hours of sketching, pixel, and polygon pushing (and some very helpful feedback from a friend, which helped me polish it off) I was able to get a working solution for the screen designs of the Event Calendar project I’ve been working on. This actually would have been fine if it wasn’t for the fact that I realized that there was an intractable problem that required a complete overhaul of the layout… with the beta launch in threetwo days.

Thinking about it, this would have been a very useful design excercise. (Not to mention great for interviews). I’ll probably do a little write-up/post diagrams in the next few weeks if I make it out of this week alive.

I shoulda bought that case of Red Bull when I was at CostCo.

Wow, Eric S. Raymond has a blog. Despite the media coverage, and seeing the number of people blogging, (as well as reading and listening to way too much community pundrity,) I’ve never really taken a step back and be struck by the phenomenon. For some reason, the combination of reading some of the most recent round of articles and seeing some of the conversation around them made me do that.

Whoa, these light grafitti photos are amazing rad. Worth installing shockwave for.