+ abnormalbehaviourchild is very prolific. Niko Stumpo’s style is intense and unrestrained. I saw a tshirt she and Scien did for Threadless, a tshirt company in Chi-cago that takes designs from it’s community and prints 4 to 6 each week. link via monoki via a random link on confusedkid, via …

+ Just a tip to anyone trying to come up with a budget for painting the interior of your home. It is not cheaper to do the interior than the exterior. Think of it this way. Not only are there the same amount of walls on the interior as the exterior, but there are more. Visualize that there are walls defining the main box of the house, and within that box there are walls defining the boxes of the individual rooms. Plus there are ceilings in every room and much more trim…I just spent 3 1/2 hours checking out a house and calculating my estimate, only now I hear they have a budget of around $3000 for the interior and around $6000 for the exterior. My number came in around $5800. - I guess I won’t get that one…and I guess I no longer do estimates without knowing the budget first.

+ Just installed the freeware application Cerberus FTP Server, and it’s simple enough that a dummy like myself can install and set it up in under 2 minutes.

…provides powerful, multithreaded FTP server performance without sacrificing ease-of-use. Designed to use very little CPU and memory, Cerberus features a user-friendly interface that can be easily hidden or accessed from the system tray. The server is able to listen for connections on multiple interfaces (Multi-homed PCs), run as an NT service, resume failed transfers, and offers an easy-to-use manager for controlling user access to files and file operations. Connection limit, timeout, and IP access can be controlled by the administrator as well as a variety of other settings. In addition, Cerberus FTP Server offers statistics on connections as well as robust logging capabilities.

+ David ICQ-ed me a great link to a SecurityFocus column by Scott Granneman who describes a visit from Dave Thomas an FBI agent who’s also a computer security expert. Granneman teaches security at Washington University in St. Louis and had Thomas speak to his students, friends, and associates on security threats; trojans, viruses,spam, and internet crime. That it’s possible to purchase millions of creditcard numbers for a few pennies seems pretty out of control.

Dave also had a great quotation for us: “If you’re a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac.” Basically, police and government agencies know what to do with seized Windows machines. They can recover whatever information they want, with tools that they’ve used countless times. The same holds true, but to a lesser degree, for Unix-based machines. But Macs evidently stymie most law enforcement personnel. They just don’t know how to recover data on them. So what do they do? By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.

+ How to cast resin. Includes various mold constructs and casting processes. From the Alumilite Corporation..

+ Everyone talks about wanting Bush and his cronies out. Well make the effort. MoveOn.org wants to run an anti Bush ad during Super Bowl Sunday February 1st (one of the most watched time slots in America). CBS refuses to run it saying it’s too contraversial. It’s not. CBS wants Bush back for another term. Do you? The ad is controversial, but certainly not TOO controversial.

Watch the video and afterwards fill in and send a message to CBS requesting they air the ad.

Also of note is that MoveOn.org is hosting a video of the real US President Al Gore’s January speech on the history and politics of the environment in the US and the world. - also available as a text file. - Quite an impassioned speaker Mr. Gore. An hour and twenty minutes definitely worth spending to hear him talk about the current US administration’s behavior towards our environment; they disregard a hundred years of efforts by every previous administration to improve and protect the environment. He accuses the Bush Administration of “actually appointing the principal lobbyists and lawyers for the biggest polluters to be in charge of administering the laws that their clients are charged with violating.” They’ve also “gutted the protections of the Clean Air Act,” including revoking the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) determination that Mercury is a hazardous air pollutant; mercury released into the air by coal mines is not regulated. And they removed the corporate tax which supported the Superfund program, an arm of the EPA that cleans up hazardous waste sites. - In early January the EPA reported that the Superfund was unable to continue due to a shortfall of nearly $175 million; it used to have $3.8 billion in resources. This was under reported according to my news.google search. - the media distracted by so many other important issues, like putting people on the Moon and Mars perhaps. - it’s a fucking travesty that the world has to suffer the likes of Bush and Cheney, when Al Gore is the real President of the United States…

PinholeDesigner 2.0

+ PinholeDesigner is a program for Windows and is aimed at making the calculations for designing and using pinhole cameras easier. Amongst its main features are calculations for the optimal diameter of the pinhole and the exposure times for pinhole cameras.

This program offers:
– calculation of the optimal diameter of the pinhole
– calculation of the optimal focal length
– calculation of the f number for a given combination of pinhole and focal length
– calculation of the exposure factor for f 22
– calculation of the exposure times for a given f number of the pinhole camera
– calculation of the extended exposure times due to reciprocity failure for the majority of commonly used films
– saving exposure table as Microsoft Excel file or text file
– calculation of the angle of view, with diagram
– calculation of the magnification and size of the subject on light-sensitive material
– calculation of the zone plate with optional number of zones
– calculation of the f number for the zone plate
– saving the zone plate in Adobe PDF format
– conversion of millimetres to inches and back

+ The Dirkon Camera is a camera made with stiff paper (available as a .zip or an Adode Acrobat .pdf file). Originally it was published in the Czeck magazine ABC mladých technik? a p?írodov?dc? [An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists] in 1979. “The name Dirkon is a play on words based on the combination of the parts of two words: Dirk- is the beginning of the Czech word dírka – pinhole, and -kon is the end of the name of a well-known Japanese camera which needs no introduction.” via: MilkandCookies

+ Under the credits for The Corporation there is a narrow band that displays a scrolling list of web-links . When I came home after watching the film, I went to the website thinking the links would be there. There. Yes. Easy to find. No. Took me a while to find them. The list is on the very bottom right of the media relations page. These are great links which either merit their own page or a dropdown menu. - I heard a rumour from a reliable source that the website was done for nearly free..which might partially explain this usability issue - you MUST go see this film!! It lays bare the history and secret life of the Corporation, and puts it in a light bright enough to un-dull anyone’s corporate media repressed senses.. (update: email from The source, the site went up in a hurry and is currently in redesign..)(update 2: the site has been relaunched with a new design, still with the usability issue of where to find the links. Making it obvious that the focus isn’t so much following through on ideas raised in the film as hyping the film and the film makers..)

+ By What Authority publishes quarterly. They have an archive of three years of informative pieces on corporations, law and democracy.

+ Saw the film The Corporateion with Rebecca (and 5 other friends) who mentioned it to her Mom and Mom’s partner M.J.. M.J read an expansion of one of the film’s ideas that some Corporations are run by Psychopaths (Vancouver Sun).

+ The American Civil Liberties Union has acquired documents proving that the US police database system called MATRIX is a Data Mining Program. It is configured to sift through “20+ Billion Records From 100’s of sources” and rate you as a threat to society. .or not.
VIA resource.full where there is more on this topic.

+ My lovely friend Michelle has just launched her on-line clothing store R e f r e s h V i n t a g e . - she’s always had an incredible eye for beautiful things, and a keen eye for stylish clothes. I browsed her stock and it is all very hipster, urbanite, vintage fashion. - I think she under prices everything, but hey, I haven’t been in the clothing industry for over 15 years. - go check it out! - January appears to be Michelle’s incredibly significant month. She’s also off to elope in Mexico with Mike, her man of 7 years. - I guess I haven’t a chance of getting her back anymore, huh Mike!? Ha, ha. - she and I were a couple for 6 years, back in the days. Michelle’s a wonderful woman. Mike is a great guy, and I think it’s about time. - Mike designed some especially cool rings that maybe I can get an image of. You have to see them. Makes marriage seem worth it, if only to wear hip rings..
- speaking of rings. I didn’t get to see Stephanie’s on Friday.

+
My Scrabble© Score is: 8.
What’s your score?

+ A rare “human interest” post today. Shit. This sucks. Sounds like an incredible woman was out walking her dogs and they all got electrocuted. She died. - my heart goes out to her longtime boyfriend Alex Wilbourne.

Is it offensive to mention in the same post as the Electrocution that Goatse has had it’s domain taken away? - the link is to a petiononline where you can add a protest signature if you believe in free expression. Personally I think Goatse is one of the top ten most offensive images I’ve ever seen, but I signed the petition without hesitation. link via plasticbag

+ Did I say how much I like Yumiko Kayukawa’s work? I know, I didn’t. I like Yumiko’s work. I feel all warm and mooshy when I look at it. I’m really into how her sense of the sensual is revealed in colour, contour, and the gentleness that makes her subject so palatable.

+ Recent Music list:

+ Fontifier:

Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer.
It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a computer font that you can use
in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.