Bleak, haunting photography

But who is Howl?

C/Net reports ("The skeletons on your hard drive") that consumers are not doing enough to wipe their old data from hard drives they pass onto other people, donate or sell. Computer security professionals were able to read data successfully from 7/10 used or refurbished hard drives they bought online. Some advocate writing over sectors seven times in order to be certain that a hard drive is entirely clean of the previous owner's data.

With all this fuel talk, Mad Max seems to be in vogue, at least for this reenactor troupe in San Antonio. It seems a group of Road Warrior fans stirred up the police when they surrounded a truck dressed as the scavenging marauders from the 1980s movies armed with fake and not-so-fake weapons while on the way to a Mad Max movie retrospective. Read about it here >>. In my search for graphics I found this cool picture of a reenactor's truck in the Ukraine that looks just like the fuel truck in the second movie. I loved the second movie (called the "Road Warrior" here, but Mad Max 2 everywhere else). It didn't strike me as strange until later why they would expend so much gas in a conflict over the lack of gas. Also in car news, GM posted a huge loss today and refused to give guidance for next year. They blame their health care costs for their employees while their marketshare has gone down from the 90s to only a quarter of the North American market.

And the logical progression of the marketplace continues as digital tools giant Adobe eats Macromedia. For a long time Macromedia was making a go at challenging Adobe. But each party became standards at different things. Adobe is the undisputed leader among desktop graphics and design apps with Photoshop, Illustrator and the .pdf standard while Macromedia has been taking the lead in Internet design apps with Flash and Dreamweaver. I use all of these. The acquisition of Macromedia means that I will most likely be using an all Adobe suite in the near future. This will be bad if it means I will be using GoLive instead of Dreamweaver. However, it may also mean that Flash gets a decent vector design tool. Anyway, what's next? Apple acquiring Adobe?

The Boston Globe sheepishly retracted an article written by a freelancer on the annual harp seal hunt off the east coast who hadn't bothered to check whether the hunt had actually occured. Bad news for her: weather had delayed the hunt but the article was published on time with lurid descriptions of hundreds of seals butchered. Read about it here >>

Gas here reached 101 cents a litre for the first time I remember. It was the most expensive full tank I've ever had to fill in my Mz3. When I first started driving, it cost maybe $17 to fill up my Toyota Corolla. At least I don't commute to work in my car. With the current rise I wonder when it will begin to impact U.S. consumer confidence. My latest calc btw: 11.88L/100km or 19.8mpg.

Three videos. The first one is actual research video of the aforementioned headless flies controlled by lasers. It is a large .mov and it actually is quite creepy. It reminds me of the Quatermass and the Pit (also known as Five Million Years to Earth) video they get from playing back the Martian camera. The second is a popular internet video I reencoded for Clipstream Video in email playback. It is the highlights from some impossible-looking basketball stunts for a shoe company. The third, another Clipstream Video is of an acapella group who are performing a medley of classic video game tunes.

This sounds like mad science and who knows I am not qualified to say whether researchers at Yale are actually furthering human knowledge by chopping the heads off of fruit flies and learning to control them using lasers. Anyway, the link is worth it for the headline alone. Read it here >>. Read the Yale press release here>>

For the past four weeks I've been taking the laziest course ever, the intro course for the technical communications certificate via Internet. The system is called WebCT and is basically a web interface for discussion groups, uploading/downloading, making presentations and reading pdf material online. It's not bad. What I find interesting is how unmotivated I get in actually doing course work when there is no set class time or colleagues to meet face-to-face.

An interesting New Yorker article on how Chinese and Japanese currency buyers are trying to prop up the U.S. dollar. Why? Because U.S. consumers have to buy Chinese and Japanese consumer goods. Read it here >>

A very good weekend was capped by a wonderful driving experience. I was coming home belly full from my parents after dinner and I drove most of the way back into downtown Vancouver alongside a blue Miata not quite racing but not quite at the speed limit either (wink). It was twilight and the traffic was very light. On the CD I was playing U2's version of the Cole Porter song "Night and Day" from the Red, Hot and Blue benefit CD. The towers of downtown Vancouver were framed by golden light edging low lying clouds and dark blue mountains above and the golden shimmering water from False Creek below. A great song, a great memory.

I am generative

Today's news is dominated by leeches. I don't know why but I started out by being grossed out by this story about a Hong Kong woman who had been harbouring a leech stuck up her nose for weeks after she had washed her face in a stream. Then I did a search looking for photos and found this strange scientific page that has the provocative title: "the leech system is generative" accompanied by a graph and a photo of a swimming leech. Enjoy. Speaking of leeches, it seems like our Liberal federal government is in danger of falling because of a major funding scandal. The story has been brewing for months but finally testimony has been made public that appears to show that the Quebec branch of the Liberal federal party has been diverting federal advertising funds to agencies owned by friends of the party who have then been funelling money back into the Liberal party. But is that system generative?

I was onsite at the annual general meeting of VanCity, Canada's largest credit union, for a webcast using my company's Clipstream Live software. A long and involved prep phase resulted in quite a good demonstration of our technology. Overall, I was impressed with the entire production that the VanCity people put on from promotional video, other A/V, lighting and inspirational speeches. It had the aura of a revival.

Obviously the most faithful adaptation of a comic source ever, director Robert Rodriguez has fashioned a brazen and brutal meta adaptation of the grimy hard boiled pulp stories that gave rise to film noir and inspired Frank Miller.

Bleeding in black and white

What Rodriguez has done is almost shot for panel reproduced Miller's composition in his graphic novels (The Yellow Bastard, The Big Fat Kill, The Hard Goodbye) and most if not all of the sparse, gritty dialogue. It is visual brilliance and for that alone deserves a look.

The content is really a matter of taste. The hard boiled genre was toned down for the best known of the film noir movies (which were regulated by the Hays Code) and safe to say Rodriguez is making the most of the R rating today. Limbs being hacked off, castrations, implied rapes, casual nudity, women being slapped around, priests killed; fair warning to the queasy. The stories themselves are simple stories of vengenace and desperation. You can't help but come out of the theatre feeling a bit dirty from the violence and depravity but also cleansed by the stark nature of the conflicts. In a city full of Sin, 'good' is relative.

There are two great performances here among some good supporting ones: Mickey Rourke as the beast Marv - his face almost entirely remodelled to look right for the role; Bruce Willis as Hartigan, who brings most of the humanity into the film. The DVD will be a must to get for any behind-the-scenes information. Rodriguez shot in HD video. His production staff must have had quite the effort to match lighting for the black and white and the Miller composition. Color grading, integrated CG, blue screen; all of that should be covered in the DVD (as well as in the next issue of Cinefex).

Last week I was hurrying around trying to get some printing done for Destiny's show at the Techvibes Massive conference on Wednesday. I managed to get shells printed out for Destiny on which we had imprints for a double product sheet. My main accomplishment was to get an 8.5 by 3ft vinyl banner printed which I'm reasonably proud of. See it in this photo. It is surprisingly inexpensive (around $300). The week before I made a poster for my girlfriend's Yoga teaching services and today I made printable wedding directions (see them here).

Terry Schiavo (and my living will)
The past month the news of that woman in the vegetative state whose parents, husband, the courts, media and even the President fought over ended when the courts put an end to attempts to keep her alive by artificial feeding tube. (The NY Times has an excellent editorial on this.) I haven't read enough to know whether or not she was truly brain dead or not but in lieu of my last will and testament, I want to make it known that even if my mind was active, if I couldn't do anything except blink or smile weakly or otherwise not be able to communicate, I want someone to pull my plug. Staring at the same point in the ceiling while I collect bed sores is not living.

Latest fuel calc
As of yesterday: 23.94miles/gallon | 11.8 litres /100 km. I switched to a different calculator which also does it in US gallons.