Everyone on the net is buzzing about Spore, the latest simulation game from The Sims creator Will Wright. The idea behind Spore is you create your own free-form creature and guide it from a simple-cell organism to an interstellar exploratory civilization.

The game is being praised for its social features built right in to the game like profile pages for your creatures, YouTube integration, and the ability to interact with other players characters in your game. The full game will be released in September but the Spore Creature Creator was released yesterday.

There’s not much to do in the creature creator except for, well, creating creatures. It’s similiar to (and just as addictive as) the Mii Creator found on the Nintendo Wii. After opening it up and getting my orientation with the program I started working on my first creature: Snardr.

Aww isn’t it cute. But some people have gotten a bit naughty making phallic creatures, for example. A quick search on YouTube brings up more than 350 Spore Penis Creatures The Spore Penis Monster is my favorite. I guess it is to be expected.

What does one of your Spore creatures look like?

I got off the Metro today surpised to see a heavy down pour but the sun was out and shining bright. I did manage to see a rainbow on my walk home which made up for the inconveinence.

Today is June 17th and that means Firefox 3 becomes official. After several betas and release candidates the successor to the #2 browser in the world has finally been thrusted upon us. You might want to skip Firefox 3 if you don’t use any addons, only use one tab at a time and/or enjoy a slow, bogged down web browser. Besides better memory management, the new “awesome bar”, and refreshed interfaces that better integrate into the look of your operating system, Firefox 3 manages to pack in over 15,000 other improvements.

To draw attention, the folks at Mozilla headquarters decided to break the Guinness record for the most downloaded software in a 24 hour period. Hence Firefox Download Day was created.

I updated Firefox on my MacBook Pro, on my Windows XP virtual machine running in VMware, my ancient PC at work, and even my huge Windows laptop. That last update was particularly tricky as the wireless card for my desktop replacement died and I had to tether it to my Mac via a cross-over cable. Here is a picture of the irony.

Apple makes a great $2700 wifi card!

How many computers did you update today?

P.S. Get your own certificate.

UPDATE: Now you can track the number of downloads in real-time as well as see the average number of downloads per minute!

I was browsing through the pages of Freshome.com when I saw these hideous monstrosities of furniture.

and the fugliest chair to rule all fugly chairs…

Who in the world bought these things?

(via Freshome.com 1 & 2)

Someone at Quiznos sure does’t know their proportions. Just look at this sandwhich. Maybe they were going for the golden ratio?

I stumbled across this Mobile Firefox Interface Concept video today over at Aza Raskin’s blog. Taking a cue from Apple’s iPhone, the Mozilla team envisions a browser controlled by finger gestures. But rather than just being able to zoom and “throw the page around” the mobile Firefox guys built an interface around simple actions. For instance, if you flick your finger slightly to the left a navigation sidebar appears revealing the back, forward, bookmark, and page info buttons.

The beauty of this design is it maximizes every pixel available on a tiny mobile screen for the content itself. The interface only appears when you need it and neatly tucks away when you don’t. Here is the full video to show these ideas in action:

I really like where this is going and wait in anticipation for the official release of Firefox mobile in the next year or two. For now though you can play around with the limited web demo.

I’ve been saving these two dead bugs for a while. I really wanted to take some detailed, close-up macro shots of them when I found the time. Well tonight was that time!

I believe the bug above is called an Assassin bug. At least that is how I always refered to it. As you can see this little bugger collected some dust while laying on it’s back.

Assassin bugs get their name because of the speed that they have to grab and poison their prey. They are carnivorous, or meat eaters, and use their powerful, jack-knife forelegs to grab their prey. They have sticky pads on these front legs, made up of thousands of tiny hairs, that stick to their victims and keep them from getting away. – source

This looks like a typical honey bee found all over North America. It was hard to find an interesting angle for this guy but I ended up laying him on his side so I could get a glimpse of his underside.

For both of these pictures I used a Tamron 180mm 1:1 macro lens on my Canon 300D. I used an old Sony 200 watt video camera light to keep the shutter speeds high in order to reduce the effects of camera shake. When you are zoomed in as close as I was even the pressure on the shutter button is enough to cause unwanted motion blur on the subject.

I experimented with different apertures mainly around f/5.6, f/8.0, f/11 and f/16 to see which would give me the best focus. f/16 was the one used in both of these photos and proved to be the winner of the night.

Photographing dead, lifeless bugs is good practice but I have no idea how macro photographers capture live, moving bugs with such crispness and clarity. One of these days I will venture outdoors with this macro lens and see for myself how to do it.

Absolutely nothing! Felines were made for the hot and humid DC weather minus the fur coat.

The human-powered search engine, Mahalo, sent me a goodie bag with a beach towel, a tote bag, and a hat. Clearly hats are not my thing.

If you are part of a company giving out free swag get in touch.

If only I had a tree that grew beer, I would be a millionaire. Or drunk.