Wow, I just love finding cool, weird, interesting stuff like this. Justine Cooper is a photographer working at the Amercian Museum of Natural History in New York and has an exhibit up at the Kashya Hildebrand New York Gallery. Not only are these stunning photos, but they were made with a wood camera from 1910.
Check out the photos at:
Justine Cooper

Worth 1000 is sponsoring a photoshop contest with an M.C. Escher theme:
Photoshop Contest
With so many fantastic results, it's going be a hard contest to judge. Shark Pond, Where's Waldo, Escherangelo, and the Hot Air Baloon are some of my favorites.

Just in case you ever want to make a video with a lightsaber in it:
Lightsaber Effect Rotoscoping In A Premiere Filmstrip
Updated:
Check out this page for some free software to do this:
Nakes Software

Hmm... I was just going to post something comparing the two, but I guess Wal-Mart gave in before I could. And for a good reason, I recently tried both services and Netflix won hands down. They were much more organized, had better selection, and were delivered easily twice as fast as Wal-Mart. Turnaround time for Netflix (time from mailing a return to getting a new rental) was only about 2 days! They must have been getting them overnight, and shipping out a new title that same day w overnight delivery. Wal-Mart easily was 4 days if not more. Next up - Blockbuster

Wal-Mart teams with Netflix on DVD rentals

Like any1 who's seen their stock almost quadruple in the last year I read a lot of Apple computer news. And stories about Apple seem to get passed around like... well, I'll let you fill in the analogy. But there is one blog that really seems to stand alone with unique, thoroughly investigated articles - John Gruber's Daring Fireball

He recently wrote a very insightful article about why something as simple as the removal of firewire cables from iPod packages has caused such a spark in the Apple community:
Daring Fireball: Nerve Touching

CK Links:
I finally found a format that I like for my Links section! I've been working on this one for awhile, and yes it seems really simple, but it had to meet my criteria. I wanted something where I could export my links from Mozilla's Firefox browser, and through a few conversions get a nice looking page that I can update easily. The key is "update easily," since I've noticed that most of the links on my old Links page were dead. So if you find any links that don't work please let me know. There are a lot of good resources in there that I've found over the years, so enjoy!

Disney Concert Hall to Lose Some Luster
Oops, guess they never factored in the sun when they built the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles! Seems the reflected light from the building heats up the sidewalk to 140 degrees! - "enough to melt plastic and cause serious sunburn to people standing on the street." So the building that cost $274 million is going to have some of the reflective steel panels sanded down to look more like brushed steel. I was surprised to learn that the exterior is in fact steel and not titanium like many of the other Gehry signature buildings. Originally the building was to be clad in limestone, but was changed because of the cost and potential earthquake damage to limestone.

Just in case you needed a few reasons to switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to the Mozilla suite or Mozilla's Firefox browser:
101 things you can do in Mozilla

Here is another article about why Firefox is so much better than IE:
How Firefox Works

Recently I added a new section in the right hand bar called Suggested Listening. It's my own little attempt at spreading good free music that does not involve the RIAA in any way shape or form. All the music is brought to you by Archive.org which catalogues high quality live concerts from bands who don't fear the spread of free music. Just good clean music from bands that do one thing well, play music. You wont find any Ashley Simpsons here, or bands that play the same setlist every show of a tour. This in my opinion is what music is all about.

Although Archive.org really encourages the spread of lossless audio (in formats like flac & shn) I'm going to be linking to the high quality mp3s versions of the songs. Just because it's a lot easier for most people to deal with, and smaller for previewing purposes. I'll also link to the artist's page on Archive.org, so if you like what you hear, you can download (for freeI just love saying that) the rest of the show in whichever format you prefer - lossless or mp3.

I also wanted to note Arhive.org's Wayback Machine. What you ask is a Wayback Machine? Well Archive.org for years now has been cataloging the internet (or the Internets if you live in Mr. Bush's world) and allows you to search for previous versions of a webpage. Really neat if you've had your own webpage and you want to see how it looked years ago. Heck it's just plain neat, try searching for a company or your favorite band to see what their website used to look like. (Note: it does not seem to catalogue large images, so some webpages look a little empty) It's sort of scary in a way though, since it just reassures you that everything you post on the internet is saved.

Tried my first movie download service last night, Movielink, and I'm fairly impressed. It didn't take long to download - was ready to begin viewing in like 10 minutes or so (not completely downloaded, the rest would continue to download as I watched the movie) . And the quality of the picture and sound was good, could always be better :-)
Couple of things that really need to be improved though:

1) The price was on the high end - $3.95 for 24 hours. I'm not sure if I would use Movielink again, but if they cut the price in half and double the rental time I'd use it.

2) Movielink does not work w Mozilla's Firefox!! - come on who actually thinks IE is a good browser? And I would guess that Movielink's typical customer is fairly computer savvy and a good number would be smart enough to use Firefox or the Mozilla suite.

Personally I cant believe that legal movie downloads haven't taken off even more. The technology is there, this service has been around for awhile (2003?) and just look at illegal movie downloads! Living in the snowbelt of Cleveland, OH there are a lot of winter nights where I really don't feel like leaving the house to get a movie but for a couple of bucks I'd download one. Which is probably one of the biggest problems like I noted before the price and DRM (how long and where you can view it).

I think Apple really needs to jump on the bandwagon for this quick. They've got a perfect window of opportunity, with the popularity of iTunes a similar service for movies is inevitable. Perhaps we'll see it with Apple's H.264 (their new video codec, or well standard) that they just recently announced. And hey, isn't Mr. Jobs chairman and CEO of Pixar?? And didn't they just get rid of Disney for their distribution... Hmm....

The last couple of days I've been trying out the new Picasa 2 software from Google, along with the Hello program, which adds more functions to Picasa (blogging, picture sending, etc). I'm fairly impressed right now with the program, I think it will be a great piece of software for most people, but if your photo library consists of thousands of photos I would look elsewhere. Here are my initial thoughts:

Things I Like:

• Does not import the files like Apple's iPhoto. I hate this feature of iPhoto!! I would love to use iPhoto for my Dad's G5 iMac, but we've got thousands of photos each organized by job. And personally I like just using the typical file hierarchy for organization. There should be the option to not import photos into iPhoto, maybe I'd use it then.
• Does not save thumbnail info in every folder like Canon Zoombrowser. As I've mentioned in previous blogs I hate this feature, it's so annoying to have a little Zoombrowser file in every folder on your computer that has an image in it (thousands of files, that I routinely delete before burning DVD backups). Picasa I do believe saves all thumbnail data in one location, which is how it should be done.
• The collaboration with Hello software. Works nicely for publishing images to Blogger blogs. The image at the bottom of this post is an example of using Picasa and Hello to post to a blog. Very easy, however it didn't work at first for me, not sure why, but it seems to have corrected itself.
• Picasa's ability to make screen savers is very nice, but needs more transitions.
• The Create Web Page option does a decent job at creating a photo gallery. I would like to see it become more cusomizable though. Here is a test gallery I created: Picasa Test Gallery
  

Things I don't like:

• You are forced to use Picasa's organization method (by date). This is not always suitable for cataloging pictures. I wish you could turn this off and just view the pictures in the computer's actual hierarchy. I've got tens of thousands of photos on my computer all sorted depending on the type of photo / project / job, and Picasa just messes up all of this.
• Not a big fan of the way it uses tags, can be done better.
• Really a Hello problem, but when you post an image to a blog you can not title your post. Stupid not to have this feature
• Also a Hello thing, but there is not an easy way to post multiple picture, I know there is a way, but it's not easy. Hopefully it will be fixed when the software makes it out of beta.