Lazy Sunday Afternoon by Brandon Bird features Christopher Walken building a humanoid robot in his garage, presumably on a Sunday afternoon.

I really like the quirkiness of Brandon’s paintings. Most of them feature celebrities in odd situations like The Anguish featuring Michael Landon in a stream holding a squid. Or one of my other favorites, No One Wants To Play SEGA with Harrison Ford, showing the popular action movie star holding a Sega Genesis looking on at two kids playing Nintendo, ignoring him.

Prints of the paintings are available in different sizes and in some cases the original is even for sale. Check out the rest of Brandon’s funny paintings.

by Rob-Sheridan. A wallpaper version is also available. His painting titled Cereal Mascot Reunion is also worth a look.

The text on the piece of paper inside this nice Mercedes Benz parked at the Glenmont metro station reads “Metro Quality Control Inspector”.
The flowers have bloomed outside of my apartment.

The technical bits of photography can be a bit tricky. Understanding the effects of different aperture settings comes with lots of experimenting. For example, focusing at infinity sounds fairly straight forward. Essentially everything in the background will be in focus. But depending on the aperture you have set, the items in the foreground may be out of focus. Luckily Robert Seber has posted this helpful chart to his Flickr photostream showing the minimum distance you need to be to get everything sharp and in focus.

To quote Robert on how to read this chart:

Suppose you are using a 20mm lens focused at infinity. Something in the foreground is 12ft away. The point at which 12ft and 20mm intersect is closest to the f/13 line, so f/13 is the aperture to use.

Suppose you are using a 50mm lens focused at infinity. Something in the foreground is 6ft away. No line on the graph is close to this. At this point you need to re-think your shot and move further from the foreground, otherwise it will be intolerably soft. 26ft to the foreground will allow you to use an aperture of f/22.

Suppose you are using a 10mm lens focused at infinity. Something in the foreground is 12ft away. You’re above the f/8 line so f/8 will work just fine.

The basic rule to take away from this is the longer the focal length you use the smaller the aperture you will need to use to get the foreground sharp, or the further you need to move back.

You should also check out Robert’s photos. His macros are really top notch.

A friend sent this to me and it is just too funny not to post. Apparently it has been going around since 2002. A real gem of a farewell e-mail. Take a look:

Subject: Kiss my Ass Bitch

Well as you all know today is my last day at the firm. I am not going to keep anything a secret like this bull shit firm likes to do. I understand that it was a consensus from the managers and partners that my employment with PwC should cease to exist. So I want to take this time to let all of you know how I feel about you:

To the partners, you are some of the most arrogant, pompus, jack asses I have ever met in my entire life. You have no heart. Just like you fired Mike Bodiker, like you fired Bob Sokol, yet you kept your six figure salary, and they had families, mortgages, etc. You really have some serious mental issues. I am not going to go out like that and not get my word out. So if you see me in person don’t even speak to me. Because I will DEFINITELY tell you how I feel about you to your face. Dave Whitman, you are an arrogant, selfish, racist BITCH. You think you are the shit because you are a partner. You ain’t shit or your fat ass ugly wife. She looks like she came straight out of the trailer park. You can’t even match your clothes right you pussy. You need some help as well. Stan, you are just fake.. That’s all that I can say about you. Ya’ll ain’t shit. Try to use big words, talk intelligent, you are an ignorant basturd. So Dave Whitman, John Quinn, Stan, Mark, and whoever else can kiss my blk ass.. I never liked none of ya’ll. I don’t care what you think about me.

Debbie Johnson you are just a fake BITCH. You smile in people’s face and talk shit behind their back. You ain’t nothing but a scandalous fake ass bitch.. I hope they pay you enough money to be fake…. All you will ever be is an HR lady for PricewaterhouseCoopers. And you probably got your job by sleeping with one of the partners you scandalolus BITCH. You ain’t shit but a ho for all the partners to pimp!!!!

Greg muller you can kiss my ass too. If I see you out in the streets, I will tell you the same.. You ain’t shit.. Been working here for years and I bet you don’t have over $5000 in the bank.. You are fake as hell too.. I have NO respect for you at ALL. So once again, you can kiss my blk ass. And if you see me out, don’t speak.

Steve Panning, kiss my blk ass you non dressing ugly ass fake BITCH. You have no balls man. And you going to step to me like you were upset with me for changing my schedule. You can kiss my ass like the rest of them. If I see you in person, please don’t speak unless you want to get told off.

Maybe I can take you shopping so you can find some clothes that match!! ps.. get a face lift and maybe you can get a prettier girlfriend!

Now that I have got that out of the way. I want to say thank you to the people that did remain my friends throughout my short time here. Monica, you know I will never forget you. You have given me a lot of help personally and professionally. Lindsey, Brian Kerrigan, Sara Beeler, I have no problem with you guys at all. Nancy you are truly wonderful. I really wish you well with this company. I’m sorry you had to read all of this foul language and stuff but as you can see I am highly upset. You are one of the nicest, sweetest ladies I have ever met in my entire life.

June you know you are my girl. It is about time someone voiced their opinion and let these fake people know what’s really going on. You know I don’t give a damn…

Now I am going to say that I am not sorry to go, or sad to leave. I truly hated this place. Getting up to come to work every morning was the worst thing that I have ever had to do. I know a bunch of you guys feel that way too but are too afraid to say it. Believe me I am not worried about finding a job, I was making money before I came to PwC, and I am making money now. I will make money today. As a matter of fact, I am making money as we speak. So never sleep on the shy quit people. Because we are always up to something. Do you think I was really going to just sit around and take your little $40K salary and be satisfied. I am about making real money. And this shit at PwC is no real money. So John Quinn you can take your $40K salary and stick it up your stuck up asshole. You fat fake bitch… Maybe you need to see Jenny Craig so you can loose some weight you fat bastard.

So in closing once again I would like to tell Greg Muller, Steve Panning, Stan Kwiatkoski, Dave Whitman, and of course that BITCH Debbie Johnson to kiss my ass.. I can not stress enough how much ya’ll ain’;t shit… Will Bryan, oh yeah I forgot.. You fake scandalous basturd. You know you ain’t shit.. Driving a damn ford escort… I can tell you don’t have no money. Oh yeah, you are probably taking care of them babies.. well have a good life basturd.

Debbie Johnson I have to call you a BITCH one more time. There is no better word that fits you. LOL You definitely ain’t shit…. I will call you a BITCH to your face…

And Dave Whitman, I will end with you. You just another fake, non dressing, arrogant bitch. I don’t know why you arrogant. If you got so much money, how come you can’t get a prettier wife than that. Instead of some fat, ugly hag? I don’t understand it.

Well I am out. If any of my FRIENDS want to get in touch with me. Please call my cell phone at 402-0728..

Take Care and I wish you well. *sarcastically*

Saw these on M street which stopped me in my tracks to take this picture.

There has been a lot of commotion about net neutrality and packet shaping in the news recently. All of the stories that I have read have been from the point of view of the common Internet user whose freedom of access has been threatened by the gatekeepers of the Internet, the service providers. On the recent episode of Security Now, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte take an objective look at how the Internet clogs up and what the ISPs have to do to manage their network. Starting off at how the HTTP protocol was designed through how ISPs swap traffic at the backbone of the Internet (known as peering) to the future of fatter broadband pipes, Steve doesn’t miss a beat.

To be frank about it, the Internet is short on bandwidth. There is simply too much demand and not enough space to squeeze all of the data around the world fast enough. Everybody wants fast, snappy web pages to spring up as soon as they click a link. But services like Bittorrent tend to max out the network’s resources causing the other web traffic to grind to a halt until the bottleneck is gone.


Map of the under-sea cables connecting the continents to the Internet. If one should fail then the packets will be sent through an alternate route.

The Internet was designed for traffic to automatically re-route itself for the best available delivery route. But if the packets encounter holes, your connection will slow down the sending of packets in hopes that the strain on the route to the destination clears up. This is why your connection might seem to slow to a crawl around the time people are getting off of work and heading home to surf the web there.

The Internet was never designed with the scale that it is today in mind. ISP’s are simply trying to manage their networks for the sake of everybody’s experience. For the sake of the net, researchers are busy devising new protocols to make network traffic more efficient but it is a tough nut to crack with many variables to take into consideration. And then there is always the ethical and political issues. Internet congestion is one tough pill to swallow!

You can listen to the 1:21:12 mp3 for Security Now Episode #139 and follow along with the transcript.

The guy behind the blog nihilogic.dk decided to partake in an exercise of game design using JavaScript. Choosing the classic Super Mario Brothers game, his proof of concept is considered a success. The whole thing weighs in at 14Kb and the entire game is contained in one JavaScript file.

“There are no external image files or anything, everything is rendered with Javascript using either canvas elements or old fashioned div-making tactics (for IE). The sprites are stored in custom encoded strings in a format that only allows 4 colors for each sprite but in turn only takes up around 40-60 bytes per sprite.”

Granted it is very brief and not entirely true to the original gameplay, it is still downright impressive that something like this can even be accomplished with a web-based scripting language.

If you are interested in seeing how the whole thing works, you can sneak a peek at the uncompressed code.

Keeping with the 8-bit video game theme of this post, Tetrageddon.com is an odd Flash site. The style of the music and graphics is in homage to the 8-bit videogames of years past but there are no explicit directions about what to do. Instead you are left to fend for yourself exploring the site and uncovering the wacky consequences of your voyage. The whole thing is “CENTALLY MHALLENGED” to borrow from the sites page title.

Tip: on the main page hold the up arrow key and make sure you allow pop-ups for the site.

If anyone can figure out something interesting to do at Tetrageddon.com let me know in the comments.

The following may look like small little fairy babies but they are actually made of chocolate. A perfect treat to satisfy your cannibalistic cravings.

(via english.pravda.ru)

Buying an engagement ring for your significant other can be both exciting and nerve-wrecking at the same time. Thankfully I survived the process and can now offer these tips I picked up along the way.

Note: These tips are aimed at guys from the perspective of a guy.

1. Unless you’re the ballsy type, don’t try to pick out a ring on your own!

   I thought picking out an engagement ring would be a straightforward task. But after seeing the thousands of different minute details to pick and choose from I quickly reconsidered. Just take a gander at BlueNile.com, a good starting point for ring shopping. Can you guess which diamond type your lover would like? White gold, yellow gold, or platinum? Solitaire, side-stone, or three-stone? Four-prong, six-prong, comfort fit, knife edge, intertwined, cathedral? These things matter.

2. Talk to your partner about the ring.

   Keep in mind this ring will be with the two of you for the rest of your lives so the recipient better be happy with it. Besides, open communication is a good trait for marriage.

3. Set a budget before browsing

   Engagement rings are the ultimate intersection between emotion and money. You run the risk of setting yourself up for disappointment if you dive in without setting any ground rules. It is easy to raise expectations when shopping around but damn near impossible to lower them. Coming to an understanding about budget and quality between the two of you beforehand will make things sail smoothly.

   And it doesn’t make sense to go into debt before the wedding as there will be other things that require money after the two of you tie the knot (like a down payment on a house!). In other words don’t get more ring than you can afford.

4. Talk to other family members about your plans.

   Not only does this fall under the category of the more communication the better, but you could also save a lot of money. You never know if a close relative has a diamond ring sitting in a security deposit box just collecting dust. Now you shouldn’t go around demanding old jewelry, but if your family doesn’t know that you are thinking about getting married they won’t know to offer their old gems.

   The diamonds in Kristina’s ring were from my grandmother’s ring passed down to my mother. They were certainly better diamonds then I could afford and the sentimental value of the family history made the engagement ring unique and extra special i.e. more romantic.

5. If possible, record the proposal on video.

   This is one of the biggest moments of your life. Capture it on video so you can show it to future generations and re-live the day in your later years. With the rise of online video, passing a video around to friends via social networks will bring you in contact with people you haven’t heard from in ages. People love seeing exactly how your proposal went down.

It all might seem daunting at first but take everything one step at a time. Try not to let the stress get to you while seeking out the perfect ring to satisfy the needs of both you. Keep your eye on the prize which should be to show your companion how much you care about them and that you want to be with them forever.

For more engagement ring shopping tips check out the guides at Mahalo.com and About.com