Jello Wobbling

Couldn't resist re-blogging this. In the category "all things wobbly". Too bad it has nothing to do with Mr. Biafra. (via Boing Boing)

Telephone

I have always been a great admirer of American Wiring. This is what the telephone hook-up looks like in the basement of our new home. I wonder if this was installed when the house was build in 1926. Can you imagine a DSL signal getting though that thing? Well, my posting this from the convenience of our still empty living room is proof that is does!

On a related note: I have been on the phone with Verizon quite a bit lately. And I found out that, while in their automated phone system, when you say "Person Please" you quite often get asked if you indeed want to speak to a person, and even more amazing: if you confirm you do get an actual person on the line! After being put on hold of course.

Wobblyland Music

Too busy with our new home to do any animation. Here's an animation I found on Drawn! As a kid I used to draw maps of "Wobbelonia", a country not half as weird as this Wobblyland. Apparently it is completely logical for kids that when you squeeze a tree, it makes a noise that reminds me of air being let out of a balloon while you pull and stretch the opening wide. Kind of like this silliness.

Outfoxed

I am not particularly fond of software that tries to be smart and guess what my intentions are. This usually results in weird suggestions that break the flow of things. So after contributing to the Firefox 3 download World Record attempt, I was quite annoyed with the location bar that is supposed to be "awesome": not simply auto-completing what I type but suggesting unwanted alternatives!

Of course I immediately went to the preferences in order to turn off that feature. I know they are trying to compete with Microsoft, but did they really have to bury this preference that deep? At least it is accessible. But when you turn it off, it turns off auto-complete altogether. D'oh!

So I turned it back on, and try to live with it. It is supposed to be self learning, maybe in time it will understand that I want it to just suggest a straight forward auto-complete....

Ghost People

Boing Boing today has a post on Long-exposure shots in St Petersburg, Russia turn people into ghosts, about these great photographs by Alexey Titarenko, who moved to New York the same year I moved to the area (random trivia). These images are reminiscent of one of a somewhat dormant project of mine: CityFlow. Here's the (HC) version: