July 2006 Archives

I was out of town last week in Memphis, so obviously there was nothing to post while there. Work, hot, humid. Bad, bad, bad. 'nuff said.

Since returning I have been preparing my short (<30 seconds that's the rules) film for Lorelei's Blipverts mini-filmfest in San Francisco, on the announced theme of "Blue". You can see a rough cut here - be warned it's 20 megs, and you need something that can read .vob files (PowerDVD on WIndows will, for example).

After seeing the Dresden Dolls filmfest on Saturday Mellani is now all excited about doing stop motion animation, and asked "How do they do that". This is my 4 minutes of screwing around to explain how it works - highlighting the importance of careful control of the lights (a negative example). I think that is our next project - stop motion animating a feature film using stuff we find lying around (We could actually make a GOOD version of the Brave Little Toaster - with a real, fire breathing toaster!).

So, anyway, that's what I have been up to. Sorry for not posting for over a week. I am a bad, bad person.

Which would you rather be - Smart, or Happy?

The two seem to be mutually exclusive. One of my favorite books opens with the protagonist on the roof of an asylum with a sharp, sharp pencil pressed to his ear considering this problem, and threatening to make the choice right there.

Which would you pick, smart, or happy? I would start off the responses, but honestly I can't decide, since from all observable evidence having one really does mean abdicating the other. I know what I have now, and I don't know that I could be happy as a person that didn't use the word abdicating correctly in a sentence. Does that mean that I am stuck with smart, and that happy will remain a non-option?

I expect comments. Yes, I am looking at you.

Apparently, that's what you are all looking for. It's the number one search term that brings people to this web site, which is odd, given the surpising lack of p o r n o (I'm spacing it out so there won't be even more hits looking for the word) hosted here.

What I can't figure out is how they are getting here. They are all coming from Google and I have tried that search on Google and after going through about 20 pages of results I still don't see my site come up. Are people so desperate that they are searching through and clicking on MORE than 20 pages of results?

This is ithe Internet - it's not that hard to find f r e e p o r n o people.

I've just put up a new version of Bad Robot! that includes an IP white list and a user agent black list pre-populated with known evil robots. Listen carefully and you can hear the metallic tintinnabulation of robots around the world quaking in fear!

I have re-activated the link for Bad Robot! It turns out that Bad Robot! was right, I had performed a bad robot like behavior from that IP address while doing some of the research that led up to writing Bad Robot!. So, it does work correctly, and I need to implement a white list feature.