It’s an ugly way to start my week: opening up my personal email account and seeing 300+ messages…290 of which are spam bounce-backs from some jackass spammer using my personal domain as a reply-to address. And it just happened a couple of weeks ago! Hopefully it will be as short-lived this time as it was then. And I really hope all the alpha-geeks in the world would get together and solve the problem of email domain-hijacking once and for all (and spam for that matter).
Sites Back Up…Again
Ok, we’re back up and ready to rock – although things are a bit slow at the moment because we’re copying over large chunks of data. I’ll be posting the Dragon contest later today as planned – but it won’t be until the late afternoon/early evening. Watch Digital Home Thoughtsmebeli for it!
Sites Down…Again
Yeah, ye old Thoughts Media sites are down – we were in the midst of moving to a new server, and something went a bit wrong. Doesn’t it always? I hate going to bed knowing that my sites aren’t up and there’s nothing I can do about it. It sucks. Hopefully by the time I wake up tomorrow, they’ll be back up. I swear, it’s a miracle that Google hasn’t punished us for all our down-time…guess their crawlers are more patient than I am.
The Movie Trailers You Wished Were Real
I’m not bad when it comes to editing video, but I truly admire people that have the sense of timing and intuition to make truly superb movie trailers – you know that ones where you end up finding out that the movie trailer was better than the movie itself? These are three movie trailers that take the movies in a completely different direction…much to the delight of anyone watching them. This is funny stuff! [Language Warning]
(That last one would have been even funnier if the announcer’s voice was more appropriate for a movie trailer…)
Live-Action GI Joe Movie: Should I Be Elated or Scared?
Like most men that were kids in the ’80s (yeah, I’m over 30 now), I have fond memories Transformers, GI Joe, and other franchises that are now flooding the modern movie market. For the most part, that’s a good thing – I really enjoyed the Transformers movie, even if I think Michael Bay should have been punched in the head for a few of the decisions he made. At any rate, as you might have guessed from the photo above, GI Joe is coming to the big screen…and I’m not sure I should be scared or excited. Will they slaughter my childhood memories with a campy, cheesy movie that will suck? Or will they retain some of the coolness and make it an enjoyable romp? Well see – but one things for sure, GI Joe: The Movie in cartoon form still kicks ass! I just watched it a couple of months ago… 😀
Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t figure it out, that’s Ray Park playing Snake Eyes – the same guy who played Darth Maul. I think Ray Park is great, but someone needs to teach him a new stance – that’s a total Darth Maul rip-off. 😉
The HP $160,000+ “Dragon” Giveaway
All the details are found here, but if you have a Digg account, please do me a favour and Digg this entry. I really want to see this thing explode!
Thank You Akismet!
I don’t think I can thank the people at Akismet enough for their amazing comment-spam-blocking technology that they give out to most people for free (sites without ads). Every couple of days I get around 500 spam comments that are completely blocked by Akismet – I’d say no more than three spam comments a week slip through to my moderation queue, meaning that for the most part, Akismet’s system is completely administration-free. That’s truly amazing stuff – thank you Akismet!
More Green-Screen Scanning Fun
I continue to have fun with getting nicely isolated objects that would have previously been hard to extract without using the green-screen scanning method. Even coins are turning out quite nice…now I just need to finish editing all the rest of my Japan photos.
Thoughts Media Server Taken Down…By Me
Note to self: do not, repeat, do not run strenuous MySQL queries on the database that runs all of your sites in the middle of the day. That’s just plain dumb. 🙁
Nuclear Power: Bring It On
I was on my friend Vincent’s blog and he linked to a post on another blog that I found quite interesting and worth passing along. The topic? Nuclear power, and the blog post author has a cheeky exchange with himself about the “evils” of nuclear power. Turns out that from 1970 to 1992 there were 32 total deaths related to nuclear power. Deaths related to coal? 6400. Hydroelectric? 4000. Natural gas? 1200 deaths. Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Nuclear power has a perception problem, and changing people’s perceptions about something is a long and difficult task. Someone has to start doing it though, because nuclear power is the future of electricity generation. Yeah, solar and wind power are nice and all, but they can’t scale properly because they need space (wind) and have high distributed costs (solar panels on every house would be expensive). I’m no environmental expert, but when I look at rising food costs that (apparently) are partially due to farmers selling their crops to be used in bio-fuel, I see a big red flag: it makes no sense to save money on fuel but pay more for food. As a planet we need to rely even more on electricity, and we need to use nuclear power to generate that electricity cheaply and cleanly. Read the article for lots of great reasons why.