Thanks!

Apparently, a Dave's Stuff reader purchased a subscription to ShutterStock today! (That referral earns me the equivalent of more than 100 photo downloads, so it is greatly appreciated.) Hope you enjoy the photos!

Laurel reminds me that I'd make even more money if I bothered to upload more pictures ...

From the folks who brought you Dave's stuff

comes Laurel's Stuff. Read all about the vacation that Dave doesn't want to hear about.

Wash your hands, children

Wash your hands, children
Originally uploaded by dstewartms.

Everyone at Microsoft got a one-ounce tube of hand sanitizer today, to encourage awareness of flu prevention. While I am not generally personally outraged by such silliness, I am generally not a huge fan of being told what to do. So beginning now, I shall not wash my hands for a month.

To Dave or Not To Dave

To Dave or Not To Dave
Originally uploaded by dstewartms.

Just a gentle reminder that folks should check my flickr site on occassion, otherwise you miss stuff like this. Consider subscribing over RSS!

We're going to Disneyworld

To celebrate my last quarter until I go back for grad school, I'm going to Disneyworld at the end of March. Oh, and Dave can come too. The thing is, Dave doesn't want to hear anything about the trip. Not where we're staying (Wilderness Lodge), not what we're eating (I got a dinner reservation at Cinderella Castle!), not which park has early entry on Monday, March 27 (answer: Animal Kingdom).

So I'm going to blog about it. Here.

Laurel is one of the most beautiful women in the world (or Alan Alda)

MyHertitage.com has this little facial recognition website that will match your face against a database of celebrities. Laurel turns out to look most like Isabella Rossellini (at least if you bother to specify that she's female; otherwise, she looks more like Alan Alda).

I look like Yves Montand, who is some dead French guy.

Has science gone too far?

See for yourself in this set of images that have gone through the Face Transformer.

Pale & Tan

Check out Laurel in Hawaii, going from pale to tan in one quick step!

Oh, man

Another shot from Gizmodo (looks like the main news is, as expected, Intel Macs) ... but this was interesting to me:

9:30 Introducing Photocasting. Podcasting for Photos.

“This is podcasting for photos. We want to all share our photos. Increasingly we’d like to share them over the internet. Wouldn’t it be great that everytime I updated an album other people would get the updates automatically?”

In iphoto, hit a button when you are in a folder of photos. It uploads the folder to .mac (password protected). Then people can subscribe to your photo album (like RSS), and the photo album in their iPhoto list will be auto-updated.

“It’s like magic”

“You take away the machinery, it’s just like magic”

Oh, Steve… Are you the Wizard of Oz? Nothing huge has been announced yet, but his presentation skills have kept people riveted. I can’t imagine anyone else talking about RSS and have 5,000 people paying attention and clapping.

Of course, this is what Project M should have been. Oh well.

What will Steve tell us to buy today?

Laurel was wondering what she'll have to buy today, as a result of the Steve Job's MacWorld keynote speech -- but so far, the only announcement was of something I will buy (maybe even today?):

From Gizmodo.com: 9:17 "We're also introducing a new accessory, a remote control and FM tuner." You can plug this into your Nano, your fifth generation iPod. A radio menu will come up (showing picture of FM frequency). $49 goes on sale today.

Spider's gotta eat, baby.

Yum.

Ten years later, 100 points smarter

I took the GRE today. Schools won't accept scores older than 5 years and I had previously taken it in 1995. These days you actually get your score immediately after taking the test. I thought I had bombed it, but it turns out I raised my score by 100 points! Of course that means nothing for the percentiles, for all I know scores could have gone up an average of *200* points since I took it last. Still, it was a pleasant surprise.

Me and JFK

Most of the recent links I've posted, I found on boingboing.net, a site that sometimes has interesting links but mostly has a bunch of tiresome techno-elitism drivel. Anyway, a recent post there talked about a stabilized version of the Zapruder film, and a few more link-clicks surfed me through some of the (probably billions of) JFK conspiracy sites out there. On one page, which the dedicated reader can find for him/herself, I scrolled to the very bottom to find this name at the end of a list of people who examined JFK: Dr. David Stewart, Parkland Hospital. Further proof of the conspiracy: I wasn't even born yet, let alone a doctor!

Laurel the lawyer

Laurel pointed out something I honestly hadn't considered (or at least hadn't chosen to remember): If you sell your CDs (or trade them for goods), that means you no longer own the right to the ripped version of the CD. So, I could trade all of our CDs for an iPod, but I'd have to erase the MP3s from my computer, meaning that I'd have no need for a 60-gig iPod anymore.

I was just bored enough during the break that if this had come up earlier, I probably would have taken the time to organize my audio file collection by original source, so I could easily see how much of my collection would be lost in this transaction, but a rough guess is maybe 75%.

Is this worth it?

This place in South Carolina will take your used CDs and give you an iPod in return. Not a bad deal. Or is it? I'd want a 60 GB one, and I easily have more than 175 CDs I could trade. But that works out to $2.28 per CD ... not sure if I could get more than that at a local record store or not.

(They claim it costs about $15 to ship the CDs, which frankly sounds low, but even if it was $25, it would be worth it to avoid the withering judgment of a record-store employee if you went in to a local shop).

One thing's for sure -- I can't remember the last time we listened to a physical CD from our collection -- they just take up a dresser drawer that we probably haven't opened since the last time we moved. I barely remember the last time I bought an actual CD rather than just getting it online. So, might as well get rid of the things.

(I just recalled -- I mentioned to a friend of mine at work that I still had one of his albums in my collection, meaning of course on my computer, although I do still have the physical CD somewhere. He asked if I would like to hear his latest, so I said, sure thing! Two days later, I got a couple of his homemade CDs in the interoffice mail. I was pretty shocked -- I never expected that he wouldn't just give me a pointer to some MP3s. As an upshot, the CDs are sitting on my desk at work, unlistened-to, whereas I probably would have put the MP3s on my nano and listened to them right away -- that extra step of ripping the CD and adding the metadata by hand, due to it being a non-commercial disc, proving too great a barrier to entry.)

"The Internet is boring"

I go through cycles where I'm so sick of browsing that I type "The Internet is boring" into a search engine just to see what comes up to prove me wrong ... I spent the next hour reading this: The Edge Annual Question. A deeper person than I might have spent days or months pondering this question and the collection of answers. But for me, the Internet can go back to being boring, now. (Of course, one may ask, if it is so boring, why not just stop using it? Well, what else is there to do?)

"Making Of"

As promised, here is Laurel's "Making Of" set.

(Windy) New Year!

Laurel and I staked out a good (but cold and windy) spot on Alki for the big 2006 celebration, with fireworks at the Space Needle. I took a bunch of shots, but unfortunately it was so windy that the camera shook on the tripod! Although not as crisp as I'd like, some are still quite interesting, so I put the set up on flickr. Laurel also did a "making of" photo shoot, so I'll post that soon, too.