Monthly Archives: August 2006

Bring me her brains!

Followup to the previous post

I made some more animations of Carolyn’s MRI scans, and Clint expertly strung them together and set them to music!

Watch the video above, or click this YouTube link

Journey into the soft machine

Carolyn recently had an MRI done, and Clint posted the photos onto their Flickr account. The pictures are all stills from a “media viewer” that comes with a CD given to Carolyn after the procedure. After seeing some of the stills, I realized that they had a lot of potential to be animated (they were not animated in the media viewer). So I generated an animated GIF and converted it to a movie. Clint posted it on YouTube. Have a gander:

The sequence fascinates me. Yet gives me the heebie-jeebies. Props to Carolyn for her bravery in posting her brain on the web!

See more info here.

Collectibles market

Noteworthy news from Frank:

A spam I just got had the subject “herpes autograph”.

I don’t know what those spammers are trying to sell, but, man, that’d make an AWESOME band name.

Robot poet

The development team I am a part of is scattered across the country. We chat in an IRC channel to keep in touch about our progress, questions, issues, schedules, and whatever else comes to mind. In the IRC channel there is an IRC bot named inky that is used to store occasionally useful snippets of information, such as phone numbers, development server logins, and so forth. But one of its fun features it that it is able to generate random haikus based on phrases that are taught to it by participants in the IRC channel. Here are some highlights:

pelvis and booty
it’s a crazy chicken world
you boinked the undead

what a flippin tool.
I had a bunch of those too
really bites my crank

hey, that fragment sucked
goddamn bill gates and excel
in death’s dream kingdom

she wore blue velvet
never pet a burning dog
rhinoceros? where?

sounds deafen the ear
i’m just thorns without the rose
my skin holds me in

Ah, how it reminds me the good ol’ days when I worked on GOOSE with Jerry.

Day of Nature

There was a strong nature-oriented theme this morning. On the way back from dropping Iris off at school, I stopped at Greenbrier Nurseries to pick up a few houseplants, because we need to bring a plant to the school for Iris to take care of to help teach her about responsibility. After snagging the plants, I drove home and saw a box turtle in the middle of the main road of our neighborhood.

box turtle

Kathryn and I have a habit of stopping whenever we see a turtle in the road while driving. I guess we just can’t bear the thought of flattened turtle meat in the road. And I guess we’re always scouting for easy karma points. So, I pull over and walk over to pick up the turtle, which was headed towards the steep upward embankment on the side of the road. I couldn’t put it on that side, since it would probably just turn around and get back on the road to wait again for other good karma-seekers to snatch it from the jaws of vehicular doom. So I walked it to the other side of the road to place it in the tall grass. The turtle hissed at me as I transported it, as if to say, “You bastard! I spent all morning trying to get to the OTHER side! Who do you think you are???”

Then, when I got home, I saw the dead mouse that Kathryn warned me about on the phone as I was returning home.

dead mouse

Apparantly one of the cats decided to take a drink after killing the mouse, regarding the liquid refreshment as a higher priority to leaving the dead rodent in its mouth. Or the cat, in its sadistic nature, decided to see for its amusement how well a dead or dying rodent can float. Or it was the much less likely scenario of the mouse deciding to do itself in by leaping voluntarily to its watery demise. Thinking along these lines has already convinced me that I need to get out more.

Now is the time on Sprockets when we X-Ray your luggage

monkeyThe absolute best words to come out of airport security officials are related to “monkey helper” guidelines posted at the bottom of this Transportation Security Administration page:

“TSOs have been trained to not touch the monkey during the screening process.”

Dieter would be offended. “Vould you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him! Liebe meine abst-monkey.”

Thanks to jwz for the find.

Incidentally, why is it that the only items under the “makeup and personal items” category on this page that are disallowed from checked luggage are “lip gels such as Carmex or Blistex”? Every other cosmetic item is allowed on checked luggage besides Blistex! What is so special about lip ointment??

lipporist

So it’s OK to check knives and not Blistex? Say what????

He nice, the Borat.

I had no idea Borat was in town! He came to a rodeo in Salem last year to piss off the crowd, and the scene has made it into the new Borat movie. You can see parts of the scene in the new theatrical trailer for the movie.

Rodeo in Salem gets unexpected song rendition

“I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards,” he said, according to Brett Sharp of Star Country WSLC, who was also on stage that night as a media sponsor of the rodeo.

An uneasy murmur ran through the crowd.

“And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq,” he continued, according to Robynn Jaymes, who co-hosts a morning radio show with Sharp and was also among the stunned observers.

The crowd’s reaction was loud enough for John Saunders, the civic center’s assistant director, to hear from the front office. “It was a restless kind of booing,” Saunders said.

Full story