ToySight

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ToySight Marble Factory

ToySight is hands down one of the coolest games for the Mac that I’ve seen yet. It’s a collection of several small mini-games and “toys” that you play by using your iSight camera as the controller!

Toysight is set of cool games and toys to play using your iSight™ or similar firewire camera. Using a system of object and motion detection to track your position, Toysight allows you to control buttons, sliders and perform gestures on the screen, putting you right in the action!

It’s a little hard to describe without seeing it, but if you’ve got an iSight (or other FireWire video camera) you’ve got to download this and check it out.

About airplanes

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After his many years of flying with the USAF and AANG, I’d bet that Dad has heard many of these before, or can at least vouch for their truism…

Though I Fly Through the Valley of Death…I Shall Fear No Evil…For I am at 80,000 Feet and Climbing.

— sign over the entrance to the SR-71 operating location Kadena, Japan

You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.

— Paul F. Crickmore, test pilot

There are more planes in the ocean than submarines in the sky.

— Blue Water Navy truism

When a prang (crash) seems inevitable, endeavor to strike the softest, cheapest object in the vicinity as slowly and gently as possible.

— Advice given to RAF pilots during WWII

The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you.

— Attributed to Max Stanley, Northrop test pilot

A pilot who doesn’t have any fear probably isn’t flying his plane to its maximum.

— Jon McBride, astronaut

If you’re faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible.

— Bob Hoover, renowned aerobatic and test pilot

If an airplane is still in one piece, don’t cheat on it; ride the bastard down.

— Ernest K. Gann, author & aviator

There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime.

— Sign over squadron ops desk at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ, 1970

Now I know what a dog feels like watching TV.

— A DC-9 captain trainee attempting to check out on the ‘glass cockpit’ of an A-320

If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it’s probably a helicopter — and therefore, unsafe.

Without ammunition, the USAF would be just another expensive flying club.

What is the similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots? If a pilot screws up, the pilot dies; If ATC screws up, the pilot dies.

The three most common expressions (or famous last words) in aviation are: “Why is it doing that?”, “Where are we?” and “Oh SHIT!”

Weather forecasts are horoscopes with numbers.

Progress in airline flying; now a flight attendant can get a pilot pregnant.

Airspeed, altitude, brains. Two are always needed to successfully complete the flight.

A smooth landing is mostly luck; two in a row is all luck; three in a row is prevarication.

I remember when sex was safe and flying was dangerous.

Mankind has a perfect record in aviation; we never left one up there!

Flashlights are tubular metal containers kept in a flight bag for the purpose of storing dead batteries.

Flying the airplane is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding or doing anything about it.

When a flight is proceeding incredibly well, something was forgotten.

Just remember, if you crash because of weather, your funeral will be held on a sunny day.

Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you.

The three best things in life are a good landing, a good orgasm, and a good bowel movement. The night carrier landing is one of the few opportunities in life where you get to experience all three at the same time.

If something hasn’t broken on your helicopter, it’s about to.

You know that your landing gear is up and locked when it takes full power to taxi to the terminal.

(via the usual suspects)

That's gotta hurt…

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Each evening, I get off of work right around 9:30. I set the alarm, lock up, and start walking down the street to my bus stop, which is about four blocks away. As I’m walking, I walk next to and then underneath one of the I-5 off ramps (Exit 162 to Corson and Michigan, in Georgetown), so there are always cars and trucks driving by.

Last night I was walking my merry little way along, when suddenly I heard an absolutely horrendous sound over the music from my iPod from behind me — the scream and cry of tortured metal. I turned around just in time to watch a car that had just made it off of the ramp skid to a stop in the middle of the street with sparks flying out behind it, as its front left tire went rolling and bouncing across the road, eventually swinging around and rolling to a stop about twenty feet behind the car. Luckily for the driver (and anyone else), it was a slow night, and no other cars were around when the tire fell off. The scene was still for about ten seconds, when the driver’s door opened and the driver got out and started walking back to retrieve their tire.

Kind of scary, and not a little impressive — that’s just not a sight you see every day. As there wasn’t much for me to do (I know jack all about cars, don’t carry a cell phone to summon help with, and the driver appeared to be okay), I turned back around and continued on my way to the bus.

Man that was a nasty sound.

9/11 could have and should have been prevented

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Hot damn. It’s sounding more and more like the upcoming investigation into the events preceding and surrounding Sept. 11, 2001 is going to cause some major firestorms — and could seriously damage Bush’s reelection efforts.

For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.

“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” said Thomas Kean.

“As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done,” he said. “This was not something that had to happen.”

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.

“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Kean said.

[…]

Asked whether we should at least know if people sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions, Kean said, “Yes, the answer is yes. And we will.”

The public testimony begins next month, and will be worth watching very, very closely.

(via Kos)

Some slight design tweaks

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I’ve done a little light fiddling with the design here in order to clean up some details that had been bugging me.

I started by adding a light grey background to blockquote elements in order to make them a bit more distinct from my babbling. That ended up making the page feel a bit heavier than I wanted, though, as the lightest grey I could use was the same grey that made up the background color in the lower section of each post’s title bar.

After fiddling with a few different approaches, I finally decided to use a slight gradient rather than a solid grey for the title bar, starting darker on the right and fading to white towards the left. The blockquote elements still felt a bit much, though, so I ended up creating a second, lighter gradient to use for their background as well. I’m not entirely sure I’m satisfied with the end result — while I like each effect individually, I’m not as sure about how they interact with each other on the page. Still, it’ll do for now.

Left and right floating elements (such as pictures and Amazon item links) have been nudged a few pixels outward in order to better align them with the outside borders of the post title bars.

Lastly, I removed the grey background behind the post titles and replaced that with a drop shadow effect behind the title text. The one downside to this approach is that it’s currently only visible in Safari (I believe), as Safari’s currently the only browser (that I know of) that supports that particular CSS attribute. The rest of you just need to upgrade. ;)

Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1)

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I just noticed that Safari got updated along with today’s release of the 10.3.2 upgrade for Panther. While I’m assuming that all of the recent changes mentioned recently on Surfin’ Safari, the single most exciting improvement for me (from a UI perspective) is that we finally have tooltip support for title elements!

![Safari gets tooltips!]

[Safari gets tooltips!]: https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2003/12/graphics/tooltips.jpg {width=”487″ height=”94″}

Update: Well, it looks like my assumption may have been wrong — after playing with some quick CSS code, we may not have gotten all of the WebCore updates (in fact, it may be that WebCore hasn’t been updated at all, and it was just the Safari UI that got the tweak). Still, much as I’d like to have the new CSS goodies, tooltips are still a good thing!

Linkdump

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I’m generally not a huge fan of ‘linkdump’ posts, but if I want to get these posted before having to run to my bus…

MiddleEarth mania, week two: The Two Towers

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And speaking of LotR, I just realized that I’d completely forgotten to say anything about seeing LotR:TTTEE at the Cinerama on Saturday.

As we’d done the week before, Prairie and I started by wandering downtown for some food (stopping by the Red Robin at the waterfront this week), then working our way up to the Cinerama in time to stand in line for the show. The weather wasn’t nearly as nice this week as it had been the week prior, instead treating us to wind and rain — typical Seattle winter, really, so we didn’t complain much. We did, however, stop off at Bed Bath and Beyond to pick me up a decent umbrella, and took a quick swing through Starbucks to get two large Caramel Apple Ciders.

Yes, yes, I know — friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks. But not being a coffee drinker, I didn’t get the coffee, and their Caramel Apple Ciders are truly wondrous things. So there. ;)

So, cider in hand, we wandered over to the Cinerama to start waiting for the show. When we got there, there were only two people in the line, so we elected to wait under the overhang of the building until the line started to grow. Once the line hit about ten people, we figured that was as long as we wanted it to get before jumping in — up went the umbrella, and we staked out our spot.

The next hour or so was spent attempting to stay warm and dry, and chatting with the people around us in line. The group behind us had planned a needed dental trip to Seattle to coincide with the show, and just behind them were a small group of three girls who had brought a tarp to stand underneath. Fortuitously enough, the Cinerama apparently keeps a small stash of umbrellas around for such occasions, and an employee soon came out to distribute umbrellas along the line for those who didn’t have them, provoking great glee from the group of girls when one of them got a frilly purple umbrella to use.

Eventually, we all made it in. This week was a little more exciting for Prairie and I — last week, we’d each already seen the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD, so the novelty was primarily in seeing it on the big screen. This week, while I’d already broken down and watched the Extended Edition of The Two Towers on DVD (I couldn’t wait!), Prairie had not, so much of the movie was entirely new to her (and she loved it).

Apparently, she wasn’t the only audience member who’d held out on seeing the “new bits” until they could see it in the theater. The audience for the show was great — gasping, laughing, and often applauding throughout the film. Legolas got two rounds of applause (for his vault onto the horse during the warg attack and the love-it-or-hate-it shield ride down the stairs [for the record, I think it’s goofy and a bit unnecessary, but not something I’m going to raise a huge fuss about, either]), Gandalf’s appearance at the top of the hill at the end of the battle at Helm’s Deep prompted another surge of applause, and there were a few more here and there.

The new/extended scenes got their fair share of appreciative laughs, too — especially Merry and Pippin drinking the Ent Draught in Fangorn Forest, and later discovering the larder (complete with two barrels of pipeweed) after the siege of Orthanc.

And that was that — two down, one to go. This upcoming Saturday at 7:45pm, we’ll be settling comfortably into our seats to watch the end of the trilogy. Finally!

It's almost time…

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Metacritic currently has LotR:TRotK at 95/100.

Rotten Tomatoes has it at 98/100.

The movie opens tomorrow.

And I don’t see it until Saturday night.

Yes.

I’m whining.

Update: Phil‘s not helping…;)

Hey, you could totally include me on your “It’s about time” entry.

On a scale of 1 to 100, I give it approximately a “fucking awesome.” (That marks the third time I’ve said that tonight.)

(via iChat)

Update: Neither is Kirsten…

I just got back from seeing the Return of the King.

I have not the words for what I just experienced. Saying it was the best film I have ever seen would be an understatement.

But I’ll say it anyway.

That was the best fucking film I have EVER fucking seen!

…I can’t believe [Michael’s] waiting until Saturday.

This is going to be a long few days!

Another star for Clark

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Just not another star on his collar. Rather, the four-star General’s newest star is none other than Madonna, who expressed her support for Clark’s campaign in a CNN interview.

“I think he has a good handle on foreign policy, I think he’s good with people, and I think he has a heart and a consciousness,” pop singer Madonna said. “He’s interested in spirituality — I mean, those things mean a lot to me.”

I guess everyone else just better throw in the towel, huh? It’s all over now!

(Naaah. I’ll stick with Dean.)

(via Don Nunn)