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The Tiger Oil Memos:
From the offices of the now-defunct but at one time Houston-based Tiger Oil Company come a total of 22 enormously entertaining memos; all sent by, or on behalf of, the firm’s incredibly amusing, painfully tactless, and seemingly constantly angry CEO – Edward ‘Tiger Mike’ Davis – to his staff.
What a hoot!
Posted in Humor.
– August 9, 2010
WordPress is pretty easy to set up and administer but WordPress-powered sites aren’t particularly fast since WordPress dynamically generates pages as they’re requested. I don’t ever expect to get much traffic on this blog but just in case, I followed Matt Brown’s advice and installed the WP Super Cache plug-in to convert WP content into a set of static HTML pages. Pretty simple. And if I ever get more than a few pages views per day, my blog is all set to handle the extra load 
– August 9, 2010
A cocky line by Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun that’s been used again, and again, and again. If you feel yourself about to say it, stifle the thought.
Posted in Movies.
– August 7, 2010
This is a great idea for a blog. Get people to dig up a family picture from their childhood and recreate it. Here’s an example. Same clothes, same stuffed animals and same facial expressions.
– August 6, 2010
After several years of Treo phones and Sprint service, I finally made a change and got a new phone in early July. An iPhone 4. Our Sprint contract expired several months ago and due to spotty Sprint service in our house, we decided we wanted to switch to another service. We ordered two iPhones through AT&T but after a couple of weeks of use, my wife decided that she preferred a phone with a keyboard and replaced hers with a Palm Pre Plus.
This is my first iPhone. I’ve had an iPod touch for a year and a half so I was already comfortable with the UI. It’s nice to finally be able to carry one device that does everything that my Treo and iPod did — and more. And, at least in our experience, AT&T service has been solid. We haven’t travelled a lot in the last month but phone and 3G service has been great in Seattle and Portland. After we decided that AT&T worked fine for us, we added our son to the family plan. He got a Palm Pixi Plus. We signed up for the minimum family plan with unlimited text messaging since we use SMS pretty heavily. And mobile-to-mobile minutes are unlimited as well.
After playing with the Palm phones for a while, the Pre would definitely been my second choice for a new phone. The UI is slick and responsive. I’ve played with quite a few Android phones as well but never really warmed to the UI. Not bad but I think Palm’s WebOS is more consistent. It’s a shame that it hasn’t been more successful.
After a month of using the iPhone 4, I’m still impressed — with the bright “retina” display, the speed, the apps, the camera and the battery life. My son and I have been using the Geocaching app with the built-in GPS which makes spur-of-the-moment geocaching trips easy. And we also used it quite a bit to get around Portland last weekend. The MapQuest app is quite nice, and free too!
I got a “bumper” case when I bought the phone so I’ve never had an issues with the antenna. I prefer the flat back of the iPhone4 over the curved shape of the older iPhones and iPod touch but I sometimes can’t tell which side is which when I reach for it in my pocket.
Posted in Gadgets.
– August 5, 2010
I just moved offices at work and noticed this tag stuck to the bottom of my bookshelf:
It’s a visitor badge from IBM Westford. I had resigned from IBM a week earlier and returned as a visitor on August 4th to collect my personal belongings from my old office. I was already a Microsoft employee by that point (in fact I just got my five year service award). We were busy packing up our home for the move to Seattle. It was sad to say goodbye to friends in Boston but we’ve really enjoyed living out here. (And visitors are welcome!).
I just wish that we got back to Boston more frequently. Five years of living in such a friendly place is wearing down my East Coast nature.
– August 4, 2010
Halo re-imagined as an Atari 2600 game. Crazy. Here’s the creator’s back story and the 4K ROM image. (Via waxy.org)
Posted in Programming.
– August 3, 2010
Andy Baio said:
Finally saw Inception last night. Incredible film, but it really needed more Dennis Quaid and giant lizard-men. http://bit.ly/cc37oW
Wow, I’d completely forgotten about Dreamscape featuring a young Dennis Quaid and and a cheesy stop-motion Snakeman. It came out in 1984 and I’m fairly certain I saw it in the theater back then.
I just watched it again on Netflix. The special effects and film score didn’t age well but it’s not bad. Quaid plays a psychic who can enter people’s dreams (called dream-linking). He get entangled with a government agency that’s trying to use dream-linking to carry out assassinations.
The president is suffering from post-apocalyptic nightmares. In the first scene, he imagines his wife running away from New York City just as a mushroom cloud rises from Manhattan and the shock wave overtakes her. (Viewed in 2010, the most jarring part of this imagery isn’t the mushroom cloud or horrible green screen work, it’s seeing the World Trade Center towers in the NYC skyline). One of the president’s advisors thinks that these nightmares will cause him to sign an unfavorable nuclear disarmament treaty and so plots to have the president killed in his sleep while dreaming. Quaid is the “good guy” so you can see where this is headed.
Saw Inception? Looking for a film about messing with other people’s dreams and maybe want to revisit a cheesy hit from the 80s? Look no further than Dreamscape.
Posted in Movies.
– August 2, 2010
There’s a thread on reddit about combining the music from Inception with any video to make it more dramatic. This pairing of the Ninja cat video and music from the Inception trailer works pretty well.
– August 2, 2010
Christopher Nolan’s new film Inception has been a huge hit at the box office. I think it’s a terrific film but I won’t go on and on about it. Too much hype can set unrealistic expectations. And too much detail can spoil it as well. (If you’re looking for spoilers, or have seen the film, there are plenty of reviews online).
I’ve watched it twice (it’s worth a second viewing). The second time I also was watching the audience’s reactions, especially for the ending. Both times as the film ended several people in the audience gasped, paused and then applauded. Applause after a movie is rare (and rarer still for a big budget Hollywood film) but it’s an acknowledgement of enjoying a shared experience.
Besides the great cast, amazing visuals and twisty/clever plot, Inception has a terrific film score by Hans Zimmer. The music used at the ending (called “Time”) was stuck in my head for a couple of days afterwards “forcing” me to buy the soundtrack. It’s a terrific soundtrack but I noticed something odd — the music for the third Inception trailer doesn’t appear on the soundtrack. While it’s not unusual for music used in trailers to be different, this sounds similar to Zimmer’s score but it’s not. The music created for the trailer (called “Mind Heist“) was done by Zack Hemsey, not Zimmer. (Hemsey addresses the confusion in a blog post).
Another interesting tidbit about the score: if you’ve seen the film, remember that music performed by Edith Piaf is used as a “musical countdown” in the movie? Apparently Zimmer’s score embeds a bit of this in an interesting way. (Oh, and who did cast member Marion Cotilliard play in La vie en rose? Edith Piaf).
Posted in Movies.
– August 1, 2010
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