Trivia that matter
While checking to see where my visitors come from, I discovered that some arrived here 18,207 days ago, almost fifty years in the past. This is curious, since I have been online for maybe twenty-five years and launched my first website a bit more than twenty years ago. I’m too lazy to do the arithmetic, but I have a hunch these early visits occurred on January 1, 1970.
The ball went from being a simple bouncing ball to a bouncing ball that exploded into the sky.
We could see the bouncing star and its ball of light that seemed to follow its path.
It was an incredible sight, and the best thing I did was get myself in the back corner. Then we could film our friends and family watching.
If I had been on the phone with my wife, she would have called me at home to tell me exactly what just happened.
At the end of everything, this world gave us the opportunity to experience being an astronaut on board the Space Shuttle. I couldn’t have been more grateful for the opportunity and thankful to every single human being that saved our world. That we are able to share the story of the space shuttle crew, one of the world’s most successful and innovative organizations, with you, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first Shuttle Space Shuttle program, is a truly wonderful thing. Thank you to our crew of astronauts and their families, who did so much for our country.
And now, I can say this: I will return to the shuttle. You were the only ones that would miss me there. If we ever return, we have to go through them all again.
* * *
Um, okay. Let’s try it again, this time with armadillos:
The Pittsburg [Kansas] Morning After demonstrates how to crop a photo for online use.
If you want to drive me away from your website, pop-ups are among your best strategies. Invoking Facebook makes them even more effective.
Irrelevant update: balletomanes might appreciate today’s Wondermark. Or perhaps not.
To people who run websites:
Here’s an interactive celestial panorama, courtesy of NASA and ESO. You can see both visible light and gamma ray views of the skies. Check out the gamma ray constellations, which are rather different from their traditional conterparts.
If you’d like to annoy nearby people with funny noises, you can play WebSID, an online emulation of the SID chip in old Commodore computers. It works with your’s computer’s qwerty keyboard.
I’ve had some sort of presence on the world wide waste of time for about twenty years now, starting with a website on Geocities.com.2 Fifteen years ago today I launched my first solo weblog, after participating briefly in a group blog. I eventually abandoned it when the blogging software was abandoned by its originators, but not before starting a replacement on another host. There were further abandon-and-replace cycles over the years, but I’ve always had a weblog going since 2003. Nothing remains of the first weblog except the items in the “ancient texts” in the sidebar at right, but everything since then is preserved in the archives.3 I wrote a brief history of my blogging five years ago for the tenth anniversary, and there’s little to add to that.
Is running a weblog continuously for fifteen years a great achievement? Hardly. Just post something every once in a while, and you can call yourself a “blogger.” Keep doing it for years and years, and the word count will build steadily to a superficially impressive magnitude.
Maintaining one worth reading regularly is another matter. There are many bloggers out there who have written far more, and better, than me (though probably very few have as eccentric a range of interests). And then there’s Charles G. Hill, who makes all the others seem like beginners.
What I’m mindful of today are the many memorable bloggers who faded away or disappeared. Remember The Hatemonger’s Quarterly? The last post from the crack young staff is almost nine years old. How about Strange Herring? It’s gone, probably forever, and all my links to Anthony Sacramone’s wisecracks are dead.4 The Shrine of the Holy Whapping still exists but hasn’t been updated in years, as is the case with Quenta Nârwenion. I rarely suffer from nostalgia — I don’t have much to be nostalgic for — but I do miss these, and the many others who are no longer active.5
If you’re in the mood to procrastinate, you’re in luck. I’ve uploaded a few pictures to Jigsaw Planet and have embedded the puzzles in my photography weblog. I’ll be adding more. Click on the “ghost” button at the bottom left of the puzzle frame for a preview of the finished puzzle.
… yet the weatherman thinks I’m from France.
So you can’t afford to go abseiling down Marum crater on Ambrym in Vanuatu? You can still go sightseeing at the lava lake there, courtesy of Google Street View.
What is the logic behind the pricing?
Playing on a bit further to show as many different tiles as possible:
Missing are Spiderman (512) and the Hulk (1024).
This particular game is here, should you want to try it yourself. The keys to success are to keep the expensive, hard-to-match tiles all on one edge, with the highest scores in the corners where they won’t impede the action, and to pick a game that’s pleasant to look at. I rather like the 32 tile, despite the girl’s odd proportions and posture.
Don’t click here if you have work to do.
(Via Pergelator.)
Update: Beware — Fillyjonk notes that there is a Pony version, too.
I ran one of my photographs through the Deep Dream Generator,6 over and over again, eventually yielding the above image. Can you identify what the subject was? (Click to enbiggen.)
Here’s an intermediate stage:
and the original:
A few more:
Life is annoyingly busy, and I will have less time than usual for maintaining my websites until the middle of December. Expect even less activity here than usual. There might occasionally be posts of miscellaneous nonsense, such as what follows, but probably not much more.
*****
Flickr recently introduced a “camera roll” feature that displays thumbnails of your pictures arranged either by the date taken or according to its “magic view,” which sorts them into subject-based categories. The algorithms for the latter need a little refinement.
What exactly does “much cooler” mean?
I uploaded a picture taken several pairs of glasses ago to How Old Do I Look? The MS robot is not very accurate, but give it credit for originality: throughout my life I’ve been told that I look young for my age, not a decade or two older.
(Via Steven.)
For further glimpses of everyday life in Japan, see the Brickmuppet.
