Bloc on the Oceanfront

For a tour diary contest. Please excuse all attempts at shimmery and emo metaphor given that it was for a contest to win free schwag...

Bloc Party brought their rock only a few hundred feet inland from the ocean to a group of thrilled concert-goers at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. Kele, Gordan, Russell, and Matt guided the throng of supporters threw some great new songs and led energetic singalongs of classics
from Silent Alarm. It was all cut short when the skies opened up and began dumping water and lightning on all in attendance, but there could've been no better ending than the Bloc baptism that befell the crowd. It was all for the best, as Gordon put it: "no one's dead... yet."

It would've been an incredible way to go...

Needless to say, I enjoyed myself.

New Motivational Poster Propaganda

I found a fun tool that can trigger a small lapse in productivity if you have a few flickr photos lying around. Try out fd's Flickr Toys, the fd this time not at all standing for fatdog (though I wish I would get off of my ass and do something with the flickr API already). There are a few really fun ways to manipulate your photos onto billboards in Times Square or milk cartons, segment a photo across a simulated stack of polaroids, and more. I went with mocking up a few motivational posters with some of my favorite pictures on them. Unfortunately, the output isn't really of printable size, likely because fd's site has an "order a print of this" feature that they probably want you to use should you attempt a big print out. But check out the look:

There's a few more and perhaps a decent amount more on the way. See what posters have been cooked up so far.

This is my job

Stuff like this comes across the bug report wire all of the time:

I also noticed that the values were being overwritten. So assuming there was a value that looked like "A quick brown fox" and a second value that looks like "A big bad dog", I sometimes see this "A big bad dog fox".

I would like to see one of those big bad dog foxes, actually.

Happy iCal Day

For the enlightened of you using Macs, I realized today is iCal day. Check out the dock icon for iCal:

The icon looks exactly the same when open and closed, today (iCal changes its icon to display the current date when open) I did a minimal amount of digging and the reason that July 17 was chosen as the display date is just related to the release date of the first Mac OS X that included iCal (maybe 10.2?). Nothing majorly exciting about the date selection for the icon, but the icon being identical on and off today is cool... to me.

Don't be sad you sucked, have fun that you tried.

This sounds like me when it comes to modern video games ... and retro video games ... and nearly all video games ... anyone wanna buy a used XBox with a few games?

"...Failing at a game, the study argues, can be just as pleasant as succeeding..."

Oh, Master Luke. Your productivity is shot!

If you've got a connection to the Internet (which you should as you are reading this) and know how to run telnet on your computer (which you should, since I'm gonna tell you) and have a couple hours on hand, I'm going to show you the greatest workings of the some of the best l337 hax0Rs ever.

Treat yourself to STAR WARS in completely animated ASCII.

If you're on Windows, open up the "Run" window (Windows-key and R simultaneously on your keyboard ... or Start > Run...). Enter this into the text box:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

And you will be treated to a wonderous delight. Just let it run like a movie window, because you're going to love it. There goes your productivity for the day.