Category: Interesting

In the past 2 days I have been getting comments in an old post about Prince Naseem’s Mercedes SLR Crash. The comments are from people talking about Prince Naseem and his cousin and some stories and stuff. But the conversations sound strange, and why are they posting in my blog you know? I think I read about something like this before though. They spam conversations on a subject to get a higher rank in google or something.. I don’t know just see this for yourself. [Link]

Seems a recent trend in Japan is for girls to get anime like eyes. If you notice in the majority of Japanese animation, girls always have gigantic monochromatic pupils. Now young Japanese girls can look like the girls from the animations by wearing inky black contact lenses. According to a 15 year old girl who wears the contacts, “The bigger the character’s eyes, the cuter they look”. [via]

This photo was taken with a hidden camera at Moyie Springs, Northern Idaho. The owner of property noticed foot tracks some weeks earlier and set camera up in tree along path of tracks. This picture was taken from that camera mounted in the tree. It seems that the Bigfoot took a bite of the red fir tree bark. In the original that I have you can clearly see a piece of bark in the air. I circled the bark in the photo.

This is the only close up photo of Bigfoot that I have ever seen. Very large body and face. The original shows the face and teeth in great detail. Very large mouth and teeth. Not sure of the date. I was told a few years ago. There have been many sighting of Bigfoot in the Northern Idaho area near the Canadian border. Very rugged landscape with many mountains. [via]

Someone is selling a 1999 model VW Golf on ebay that belonged to the new pope Ratzinger. I had a 1996 Golf in the same color. Cool. [Link]

I tried using A9 ages ago but I never got into it. Today Tivo Guy tells me that if you are an A9 regular user you can get a π/2 (thats pi over 2) amount of discount on Amazon. Thats around 1 point something percent off by just using A9. Not a bad idea, so I decided to check out A9 and I was incredibly surprised at how much it has improved since the last time I used it. Its fast, very customizable, it remembers your previous searches and my favorite part.. you can search for websites AND images AND wiki all at the same time! Really cool check it out www.a9.com

Guess-The-Google is a very cool game. Basically the game displays some images and you need to figure out the word that was used to google it. I got 221 points the first time, 145 the second.. [Link]

Over lunch me and Tivo-Guy were talking about Amazon and how the perfect business would be to have an online store where you never have to update and it would bring you some money in. So when lunch was over I came back to the office and did a bit of searching and I found a free software that sets up an Amazon store on your server that works with your own associate account. I showed it to Tivo-Guy and with his help we got my store running on https://248am.com/store

Check it out, everything on amazon is in my store. You can search, browse, and read reviews. Just like you were on amazon. Now the plan is to fix up the site, get it looking good, and then I will get a good catchy domain name and setup my own store. I love this!!!!!!!!!

PSP Magazines is a site that enables you to download magazine snippets and load them on your PSP. You can currently download snippets from the following magazines:

BLENDER Magazine
Car & Driver
FHM Magazine
Gamespot.com
MAXIM Magazine
Mountain Bike Magazine
Road & Track
Rolling Stone Magazine
Snowboard Magazine
STUFF Magazine
Sports Illustrated
SYNC Magazine
WIRED Magazine

All this is for free, here is the link.

I have had atleast 3 people ask me today who is Jason Kottke and what is being Kottked. Firstly Kottked is just a word I made up to imply that my site was linked by Kottke. Who is Jason Kottke? This is what was on Wikipedia (yeah he is listed on Wikipedia!):

Jason Kottke (born September 27, 1973) is a well known blogger and former web designer currently living in New York City. He designed the popular Silkscreen font which has become widely used in web design and has won a Lifetime Achievement Award as a blogger.

Kottke was a pioneering blogger who began his blog in March 1998. As of 2005, his blog is one of the highest-ranked personal sites on the Blogging Ecosystem.

In 2000, Jason Kottke and then-girlfriend Meg Hourihan were profiled in a New Yorker article, You’ve Got Blog, which introduced blogging to a wider audience. The minimalist web design of kottke.org is considered influential, and Kottke was one of the first bloggers to create a sideblog called “Remaindered Links”, which are interesting web links with no commentary. His contributions to blogging were acknowledged when he won a Bloggie Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.

His blogging also got him in trouble with Sony when he broke the news of Ken Jennings’ loss on Jeopardy!.

On February 22, 2005, Kottke announced he had left his web design job in order to work on kottke.org full-time. He pledged that all content on the site would still be free while encouraging readers to become “micropatrons” by making an optional contribution of any amount. This made him the first person to “professionally” pursue his weblog without sponsorship. By close of business on the day of the announcement, there were over 200 people listed as micropatrons on his website. As of April 15th, 2005, the total number of micropatrons stands at 696.

[Wikipedia]

Yesterday Adobe announced a merger with Macromedia. The largest issue I saw with the merger was that Freehand would be killed off. That didn’t matter to me since I prefer Adobe Illustrator but I know there are many designers who prefer Freehand. So I decided to do some research and this is what I found out.

It turns out that this is not the first time Adobe buys a company that owns competing products. Back in 1994, Adobe purchased the company Aldus which back then was releasing Freehand which it marketed under license from Altsys Corporation. Adobe also picked up Aldus’s PhotoStyler which was a competing product for Photoshop and Hitchcock which competed against Adobe Premier.

After the merger, Adobe killed both PhotoStyler and Hitchcock in-favor of its own stronger products Photoshop and Premier. Freehand was the biggest issue back then though. The merger between Aldus and Adobe came close to collapsing many times because Altsys Corporation who had licensed out FreeHand to Aldus claimed that it would be unfairly hampered by Adobe’s competing product Illustrator. To resolve this issue once the merger took place FreeHand was sold off to Macromedia. Now after yesterdays Adobe and Macromedia merger, Freehand is back with Adobe.

The biggest gain of the Adobe and Aldus merger was the software Pagemaker. Pagemaker was released in 1985 and is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing field.

The issue with Adobe’s GoLive webdesign software conflicting with the newly acquired Macromedia Dreamweaver software was also dealt with before. In 1999, Adobe acquired GoLives CyberStudio software and renamed it to Adobe GoLive. With that acquisition, Adobe killed its own webdesign software PageMill due to the superiority GoLive had.

In conclusion, although the merger between Adobe and Macromedia is a big thing, its also not the first time something like this has happened. Out of the previous mergers Adobe was able to improve its suite and benefit us all. But, monopolies never are a good thing either and if Adobe decides to slack off then we will all be in trouble. Many people are now expecting Adobe to purchase its major desktop publishing competitor Quark. But I believe that might not happen since all Adobe would gain is to kill off a competitor its already slowly but surely beating. So we will now have to wait and see what Adobe will do next.

Resources:
Aldus and Altys settle dispute over FreeHand
The Aldus Adobe Merger
Adobe kills Aldus PhotoStyler, Hitchcock
Aldus on Wiki
Adobe acquires Aldus
About Adobe, Premiere, and All That

Hi miskan!

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for! Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Jan 31, 2007.

2. More capacity! Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends! This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,
The Flickreenies.

I just found the coolest website, something I didn’t know existed in Kuwait. The site is actually a car talk forum but based in Kuwait. The members there discuss their latest car upgrades, or a recent car they spotted or which car they raced on what street. Its amazing stuff. Here are some examples of the topics they are discussing:

A8 Quattro Killed moi….. was worth it..
DB9 spotted (with pics)
Driftmaster accident (wallah maa testahel)
HaSsOnY Car Accident!! Gulf Road
SLR in Q8 (with pics)

There are tons more interesting topics and sections for all street racers or car modifiers in Kuwait. Very very interesting stuff and all this is in Kuwait! The website is Q8speed.com. The picture above of the Lamborgini’s is from a Q8 Speed gathering at AUK.

In St. Petersburg, Russia they are looking for ways to keep customers at the pump. Phaeton holding announced that it will develop 15 “luxury” gas stations to capture the higher end of the gas market. The new stations will have free internet, sushi bars and women in “flight-attendant style uniforms” to attend to the vehicles. The idea is that customers are willing to pay a higher price for better service and that the gas stations might become the new hot spots. [details]

Why don’t we have luxury gas stations here? Actually, why don’t we just have more normal ones! They are too few and too far apart here.

I was adding stuff to my amazon wish list and one of the stuff I added was Nine Inch Nails new album called With Teeth which is coming out next month. Out of curiosity though I decided to check and see if any of the songs were available on P2P networks. Surprisingly they were! So I downloaded a whole bunch and I have to say these new songs are sooo fucking cool. I can’t wait till the new album comes out on CD. I noticed also its more electronic then the previous albums, one song sounds drum n bass while another sounds ambient. Overall though this is gonna be one amazing album. My favorite song is Right Where It Belongs. I have had it in loop for the past 30 minutes. I uploaded a 1 minute teaser so you can hear it. [MP3 Link] If anyone wants to preorder it here is the amazon link.

Lyrics to teaser above:

What if everything around you,
Isn’t quite as it seems?

What if all the world you used to know,
Is an elaborate dream?

Just read this on boingboing and found it too funny:

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist in the 2004 campaign. Among them are “Circle Back” by John Hiatt, “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” by Joni Mitchell and “My Sharona,” the 1970s song by The Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor in charge of music coverage at Rolling Stone, cheerfully branded “suggestive if not outright filthy” in an interview last week.

So his friend Mark McKinnon gave him songs from his collection, thats stealing. [Link]