Mr Man is looking up tourism sites for France. The might win another award this year and the International shindig is in Paris this year (two years ago we went to London on their dime when he won last time).

Not that we want to GO to France, of course. I ONLY want to stay long enough to hop on a eurorail train to Germany. But being I could spend the whole Trip in the Louvre alone I could deal with THAT much of France - if I had to. He’s very anti-me-bailing-on-him-and-running-off-to-another-country-instead-for-a-week. Go figure.”

Finding a French Tourism site that even has English pages at all is pretty hard, and the one he found and is looking at now will only send you two brochures free. A third on costs you.

Accenté en Francais - repeat what we have been saying for ten minutes:

“No no no, you cannot be too interested in Paris, American!”

The DNC speeches free on iTunes (iTunes link!)

Let it be know that the Reader (hereafter called “you” have been seriously lacking in commenting duties as a reader/visitor as of late.

I divorce you I divorce you I divorce y– ooh cookies!

I am doing a business card for the lady at Retrojane (who’s site I did) just realized I had to REALLY SEARCH to find my Pantone book. It’s been that long since I’ve used/needed one.

And then I realized I would not even have this one at all if it weren’t for my brother finding a NEW one the designers/marketing folks at work were throwing out for no good reason (it’s NEW - good till 2007) and gave it to me a few months ago.

What a bad designer I’ve become. For shame. They should take my IDSA IDEA award away.

Apple accuses Real of ‘hacker tactics’.

I’m so unexcited by this news, first, it’s Real for christssake - their media player sucks. They’ve never managed to get the damn thing to work on macs right. I doubt they can manage this application of theirs to make their music downloads work on iPods to begin with.

I have personally fought RealPlayer for I think for going on ten years. It has NEVER worked right on the mac. In all this time, you’d think they’d hire a mac programmer and whip it into shape. There are hundreds of thousands of free mac shareware applications made by single people that work far better than anything real has ever come out with and they are a corporation with I imagine dozen of prgrammers. If they won’t take the effort to make their signature player work on the Apple’s platform, what should make me believe they “get apple” now?

If it does actually work I bet it’ll be so damned difficult, buggy and troublesome (so much like all the other Real software) that it just won’t be worth the effort.

They don’t even address the whole ownership thing, which iTunes does best. When I buy a song off iTunes, I own it. I don’t have to subscribe to anything to get the right to use it, which is how it seems all the other “services” work. Which is why Apple and iTunes succeeds and the rest scramble and pull this crap. Sure, I can only play that on a mere 10 machines but I can play it my ipod or a CD which is all I want or need really anyway. It’s certainly more than anyone else gives you in comparison.

Oh sure, I imagine Jobs is hopping mad on the phone, but I bet he’s laughing once he closes his office door.

Now that Real has made such a huge deal of this it can’t be anything short of “fabulous” the critics waiting for it to come out. And well, we know Real can’t do that. This is a whole new level of expectation for them to try to fulfill. They have never been able to work more than “Eh, it works at least” from the windows side, and the mac side Real is little more than a curse word. “It works at least” is not going to be enough for the community of users so used to high end offerings from Apple. (Even for those just hitching on the iPod part of the ride.)

The media and iPod community’s laser beams will be focused on this new app. It won’t take any kind cuts if it’s not up to snuff. After they are done slicing up Real’s first shoddy and sad effort into the iPod field it’ll be forced to scamper off to lick it’s wounds. Hopefully, we won’t see it in these parts any more. Sure, It’ll be lurking in the woods on the outside of town, occasionally coming out to sell trinkets it picked out of people’s garbage. We won’t look it in the eye and it’ll go back into the woods again and we’ll forget about it until next time.

I just wish the RIAA would let companies use Mp3s, then all this proprietal garbage wouldn’t matter. I could buy songs from whoever I want, they could compete for price and I could play it on anything I wanted.

Oh, I need to stop drinkin’!

Cartoons inspired by Spam

Brand yourself with my my personal political statement.

A page chock full of Movie Title Screens.

Just for clarity sake for those traveling abroad: two links to explain what is London and what isn’t London.

Meet Mark the 26 year old Virgin.

Will Ferrell is mad genius in his hilarious GWB pardoy.

Check out the sheet music for Oh, Susanah! But Watch out, that second verse is a doozy. It’s no wonder we’ve never heard it. I know it’s from a “different time” and all, but even for THAT time it’s pretty shocking. I’ll never look at that song the same way again. (link from Godfrey)

I just had to MT-Blacklist over 122 comment spams from my blog.

NOT KIDDING! They came in a twenty minute period. 122 in 20 min.

Took me 30 min to MT Blacklist them.

They call had the same email (der@xoxma.net) and the same URL (anti-exploit.com)… but of course, the IPs were all different, so my chances of actually banning the bastard are Nil.

Just a warning to the blogging folks at large. We have a spammy pig on the loose. I want his head on my wall right now.

In looking for a way to set my iPod’s screen contrast so I dont have to set it everytime I use it I found this: Apple Computer Rejects The Dirty iTunes iMix.

Pretty funny. I like how he closes the list off.

Join Matt Frondorf as he drives from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, his camera clicking at every mile. Retrace his trip through the Picture Viewer which requires the Flash 4.0 Player.

Want that special “homage”? Famous Fonts

There is an
Apple iPod Firmware Petition asking Apple to offer some of the software changes on the new 4G updater available for 3G pods (like deleting on the go playlist songs, and changing menu structure, and improving battery life)

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A storm moved through about this time last week, it never actually hit here, but blew past. This picture doesn’t even capture it right, it was blood read and orange wedged between black and the brightest sky blue ever. Like you took a knife and cut the sky’s throat.

I have never seen a sky like this, with the huge black clouds. People were stopped along the roads to look at it. I was expecting the Four Horsemen to come riding up beside me.

The second pictures show the rain, like smoke drifting down into the red layer. I took this from a tall hill that over looks the steel plant I live next to, off on the darkness next to that fire stack is my house somewhere. It looked for all the world like Mount Doom from LOTR.

Being it was dark, and weird and I was using digital in night mode without a tripod some shots came out a bit fuzzy, but you get the idea. Freaky eh?

I took this last week while my mother in law was driving us to Yellow Springs, just up the road from our hometown (Ohio’s 1960’s Berkeley/San Fransisco). It was such a gorgeous day, temps in the low 70’s - so perfect that when passing these fields I was snapping away.

The sky was so bright and bold it threw the grass off, and made it all dark I think I photoshopped it quite well thank you to make it look normal.

Having just gotten the new They Might Be Giants album “pine” I have to say it KICKS ASS!

It’s very old school TMBG, a nice reminder why you loved them to begin with. Experimental Film especially reminds me of the Apollo 18 album.

If you love TMBG go to their site above and download the tracks direct from them for 99cents each. (That means they get ALL the money, not just a tiny portion, and thats a good thing.)

RetroPod!

The SCA, the non-profit medieval reenactment society I belong to (and have for 13 years) for many decades has been heavily membered by Military personnel. In my area, which is home to Wright Paterson Air Force Base, I know of many members who were already in the SCA when they were transfered here, or left to join a new group when they were transferred out.

Recently, in the Kingdom on Ansteorra (Texas, Oklahoma area), one of our members there was killed in Iraq.

Here is a interest piece by NPR : Remembering Lt. Brian Smith.

At least as of this very moment. This Land is back online at JibJab. It will however take about an ice age to download (not kidding, even on cable it took me 15+ min for 3.7MB) being it’s the hottest topic on the net since Janet’s nipple.

Read their blog too, but it doesn’t cover the last few days server crushing hordes.

I’ve never seen a net short take off like this before. It hit everywhere, and I mean everywhere at once.

If you would like to save it to disk for rewatching locally, go here and wait for it to load, then save as.