Halloween 2008


Another year, another celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. Our annual Halloween party took place at The Point, a bar just behind the Bell in Hand in Fanuel Hall. It was a much more intimate venue and worked much better for us this year than the huge hall we had last year. If it had been just slightly larger and just been our friends, I think it would have been perfect. That being said, it was a blast. There were unsurprisingly several Sarah Palin costumes and only one Joker costume. There were certainly some creative costumes like the hot air balloonist, the pedophile, Roger and Jessica Rabbit and the Powerpuff Girls. Two larger groups had themes. Dave, Max, Nate, Jamie, Amy, and several others went with a monopoly theme. Dave was the monopoly guy. Amy was Chance. Jamie was Community Chest. Nate was Go. And Max, well, Max was a thimble. I think he would have had an easier time selling himself as humpty dumpty.

The other group costume was using the Celtics theme. Davidson and I were Brian Scalabrine and Scott Pollard, respectively, the only two white guys on the Celtics this past year, both of whom sat on the bench throughout the playoffs. Some of the girls dressed up as Celtics dancers and Duke dressed up as Gino because everybody was a winner.

It was a challenge to have a costume with no pockets, but it made things interesting. And yes, I brought my own coozie for my beer bottles. I’m just that awesome.

I have amazingly already posted my pictures here.

Happy Halloween!

Ubiquity


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Mozilla recently revealed an add-on for Firefox called Ubiquity. Basically it serves as a command line for your browser. The catch is that most of the commands are created by users and creating commands is very simple. This allows people to flex their creative muscle and take advantage of current API‘s that are available for different sites and create really useful (and more often useless) mashups. If you watch the above video, you can see a few examples of the mashups I’m talking about. Having recently moved into a new apartment, I can fully appreciate the example where he mapped several craigslist apartment listings on a single map with just a few keystrokes. If I ever find some free time, I’d really like to explore some of the things you can do with this and whats already out there.

Pocket Power

[UPDATE] It seems most of my images from this article have disappeared. I’ve written a more in depth article on this topic for Powet.TV anyway. You can see that here.

In my seemingly constant quest to unpack and sift through my things to try and make more room, I came across several items I did not think were still in my possession.



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Transformers get more human

My wonderful girlfriend linked me to a couple of pieces of art on DeviantArt. The artist took Transformers and tried to draw them as they would look if they were actually human. Some of them are spot on, others are just too generic to get who they are, but overall its a fun idea and neat to see the interpretations that translate really well.

Animated Characters in Color

G1 Decepticons in Color

G1 Character sketches in black and white

This actually reminds me of one of the episodes from the original series where Ultra Magnus, Arcee, Springer and I think one other had their minds switched with humans or something along those lines and the bodies they were put into were great human interpretations of the robots’ personalities.

Water Damage

As several people who have seen my new apartment can attest, there is some water damage in my ceiling. It was there when I first saw the apartment, but I was told that it would be repaired and fixed by the time I moved in. That never happened. A month later, nothing has happened to see it repaired. I saw the Super the other day and asked him to stop by and he said he would as soon as he was done with what he was working on. Needless to say, he did not show up. He’s a busy guy. I understand this and he has a lot of apartments to look after, but this is severe damage that is going to lead to mold if it already hasn’t. So I just left him the following friendly note:

XXX,

I have had severe water damage to my ceiling since I moved in. I pointed it out to you, but I haven’t heard back at all. It is still actively dripping water and I saw a mouse poke its head through the hole in the center of the damage. I was hoping you could take a look at it before it gets any worse. I’d like to get this repaired and patched as soon as possible before the winter snow comes to make things worse.
I’m available nearly every weeknight between 6pm and 9pm to show you the damage. I think its caused by the cable utility box outside my window. I’ll show you when you stop by.

If you need to get in touch with me, you can reach me at ###-###-####.

Thanks in advance,

Bradley
## XXXXXX Ave.
Apt ###

I folded the note and taped it to his door. He had said that if I had a problem to just leave him a note if it wasn’t urgent. I really want to resolve this in an amicable way. I’m going to give him plenty of time to respond, but I need this ball rolling. If I do not hear back from him by the time I have to send in my next rent check (sent one in today), I am including a copy of this letter, pictures of the damage and a brief summary of events leading up to this point. If nothing still, perhaps the mayor’s office would like some good publicity. It will only take one inspector to look at it before the fines start rolling in.