Stray Hawkeye

I’ll preface this one by saying I keep going back and forth on if it’s a really good idea, or an absolutely, profoundly terrible one.

While I was at the dentist last week, I noticed that depending on the angle, I could look at the little glasses / visor thing my dentist was wearing (I would assume to keep any splash or bits of scrapped gunk from flying into her eyes) and see a reflection of what she was looking at.  It was sort of cool to see the different perspective on my mouth than I usually see, but especially for being able to actually see exactly what it was she was doing.  Now, I didn’t check to much, because the reflection, being on her glasses thingy, was directly over her eyes, making it sort of a weird making eye contact but not really thing that just seemed awkward.

However, it made me think that since they’re wearing these glasses/visor/headset thing anyway, they could easily put a little camera on there, and a little cheap lcd screen next to the light that they use to shine in your mouth, and you could watch what it was they were doing as they did it.  Dental Cam.

It would be especially handy for showing you which spots you really need to focus on brushing more, and why.  Or what happens when you don’t floss.  Or if there is some spot that they say they’re keeping an eye on, they could show you why.  And just for the general interest of seeing what exactly it is they’ve been doing in there all these years.

Now for if this is a really good or a really bad idea I think would depend in large part on how good or bad both your teeth and your dentist are.  If your teeth and dentist are good, I think it would be utterly fascinating, and make what’s generally a fairly dull half hour of laying around an educational experience that makes you feel more in control of and connected to your own health and care, and let you actually see first hand the results of the health choices you make.

On the other hand, I could also see where if you had some seriously bad dental issues and a dentist that was less than gentle, it could also turn into your own personally customized horror film.

Yes, I know we’re several holidays past Halloween, and it’s dopey, but I still think this is funny:

Via Ovablastic

The heart is a complex thing:

Via Make

The artist (Haruki Nakamura) has a website, though it’s mostly in Japanese, so I can’t tell you much more about it, other than the consensus seems to be they’re all made out of paper of some sort.  Here are a couple more videos of the same artist’s works:

Sort of like an internet party, but with chemicals.  Dorky and a bit nsfw:

The shiba inu puppy cam is back with a new litter of fuzzy little balls of cute:

Online TV Shows by UstreamIf that doesn’t make you smile and melt a little, you need help.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, try here.

Via Cute Overload and BoingBoing. Previously featured on Stray Hawkeye with the previous litter here.

In an effort to keep this blog one step cooler than your grandmother, I made a Facebook account for Stray Hawkeye, located here (let me know if the link doesn’t work, it should be visible to everyone).  Okay, so it’s possible your grandmother is still cooler, but I’m trying here.

There’s not much on the Facebook page yet.  Like basically nothing.  However, I do have a couple ideas for it when I get some time, and I’ll point it out here when I get those set up.  More organizing a couple of events and that sort of thing than moving any actual content over there.

On the off chance you were one of the people who came across the page I had set up on Facebook for the site before, I deleted that one because a few things weren’t set up the way I wanted and it wouldn’t let me change it.  Sorry about that.  You can fan the new one now though.  And I think (not sure) that you can share photos and links and stuff on it too.  Again, let me know if you have trouble.

Also, as you may have been able to tell from my last post, I set up a YouTube channel for Stray Hawkeye as well, located here.  I know the video quality isn’t particularly great – they were all taken with the video mode on my seven or eight year old digital camera, which is old enough that having video on a camera was a pretty cool new feature.  Plus, I don’t have a lot of experience with shooting video, so basically what I’m saying is that they’re about what you’d expect on YouTube, minus the really horrible comments sections full of hatred and typos, at least so far.  I have a few ideas for some more videos, but admittedly they’re near the bottom of the priority list and will be pretty time consuming, so they might be quite a while.

This is a part of the dino saga, if it doesn’t make any sense, read these.

---

After a good night’s sleep, we got up early to go tailgating.  Okay, not that early, it was an 8:00 PM game, but the point here is we went tailgating, and Parker got things started off right.

Does anyone else ever wonder if the beer (Land Shark) was named after this really old Saturday Night Live skit, and for that matter, if they had this particular clip in mind when they got naming right for the stadium where the Dolphins play?

No? Just me? Okay, moving on with tailgating then…

A few hours of tailgating later, night falls, and we learn that Parker can apparently hold his beer substantially better than Sinclair.

Yes, Parker was also standing on the car.  Life lesson?  Never buy a used car that was a rental.  Ever.

So, it was getting closer to game time, and we decided to head into Joe Robbie/Pro Player/Dolphin/Land Shark/Sun Life Stadium, up the giant spiraling corkscrew ramp, which gives a pretty good view of the tailgating festivities.

Now you may be saying, “Kearn, those last two pictures don’t have Parker in them at all, and tailgating seemed to go by rather quickly.”  Did I mention we were tailgating, and I was drinking?  Good, now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d like to point out that arepas may be the best drunk food ever.  It’s like you took cornbread, but made it into a sort of pancake form, and then once that was cooked, you heated it up on a grill with cheese (um, a kind that’s white, I have no idea which kind) between two of these cornbread pancake things until it was all gooey and warm.  Delicious.  They serve them at Joe Robbie/Pro Player/Dolphin/Land Shark/Sun Life Stadium.  Anyway, after that delicious break, we made it into the stadium, and back to Parker.  Luckily we left ourselves plenty of time to get to our seats.

“To be in the Hawkeye section, yes.  And to be on about the 45 yard line on the Hawkeye side, absolutely.”

Now, you may notice that between those two pictures, Georgia Tech went about 40 yards on offense.  This was basically the only time this happened during the game.  This was also basically the only time Parker was watching.  Now, I tend to not be too superstitious, but this was enough to make me convince Parker to stay in my pocket for the rest of the game, thus the lack of more game pictures with him.  Once it was safe again, he came came out to watch some more.

There’s a few artists out there who make really cool 3D looking drawings with sidewalk chalk using perspective.  Here’s a sampling of them, most of which seem to be by Julian Beever or Kurt Wenner.  Julian Beever also has an online portfolio here, and Kurt Wenner has one here (though it’s unfortunately flash).  Edgar Mueller also has some really cool bigger pieces- his site is here (a little hard to navigate, but worth it), and another small sampling of his work here.  There’s also a few by Manfred Stader here. Really cool stuff all around.

Here’s a CBS interview with Julian Beever about his work that gives some more details about it all:

Yep, it all washes away.  Sort of reminds me of Peter Donnelly.

Here’s a making of video for one of Julian Beever’s works:

And a making of for one of the Edgar Mueller ones:

And here’s a youtube channel with a few more.

I wonder if there’s any time lapse videos out there of the works being slow washed and worn away?

Perhaps it’s just because I’m a big marching band geek, but this video (youtube) is about 8 shades of awesome (though grumble gumble about not being able to embed it).

Also, at 2:23 – hell yeah bass, go sousies.

Via a link on a friend’s facebook page.

I’ve decided that posting this around New Year’s is now a tradition as well:

Also, you know what I’m looking forward to about the New Year’s Eve celebrations next year?  Seeing how they’re going to make those stupid plastic eye glasses where the frames are in the shape of the year out of a 2011.  Maybe everyone will have to ring in the New Year with only one eye open and the whole celebration all around the world will be pirate themed.  Happy New Yarrrrrr!

I posted this video last year around Christmas time too, and I think I’m going to make it a tradition.  I still really like this song, and love the performance of it.  I think it fits the season and time of year well, and it’s just pleasantly calming for me in a time of year that can have a lot of stress.  So, here you go, Imogen Heap singing Just For Now:

---

Also, due to travel, holidays,  job stuff, generally taking a break, excessive bowl game watching in one last binge of college football before The Long Painful Months Without College Football, etc, etc, I’m going to be mostly AWOL from posting for the next couple weeks – somewhere between sporadic and non-existent until early to mid January, and then should resume the standard “most every weekday when I remember and can find some spare minutes” posting pattern.  Til then, just keep watching the above video in a loop.  It’ll make you feel better.

This is old, but it still makes me smile:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

The guy who make it has a website here.

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

I’ve been resisting posting the Muppets singing Bohemian Rhapsody video, as it’s been posted everywhere, so instead, here’s a link to a post on Kottke with a few other Muppet videos.

And, while we’re on Rhapsodies and silliness, here’s Victor Borge doing Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 on piano

Via Ovablastic.

A quick programming note – I know it’s not Friday, but I forgot to hit “Publish” on this one on Friday before I left for the weekend, and since I’m probably not going to do a Friday post over the holiday weekend, I’m splitting the difference and officially declaring it Free Idea Tuesday Evening, though I’m keeping the title the same, just because.  Also, I’m not numbering Free Idea Friday (for example, “Free Idea Friday 6 – A better video slider”) any more because: 1. I have a hard time keeping track of what number I’m on, and 3. I don’t think it adds anything to number them.  Cries of anguish over the change shall be heartily ignored.  Anyway, the post:

---

This one is more of a request than an idea.  So, the problem I would like to see solved is to have a better time / location slider in media players.  Most media players have at least figured out that the slider that shows how far in to a movie you are should go across the bottom, and span the entire width of the video.  This in and of itself is a huge improvement over the ones that have a fixed width slider that doesn’t expand when you resize the player.  The problem is that on really long videos (a 2 hour movie for instance) it’s still very hard to do a fine grain adjustment with the existing sliders.  For instance, if you’re 1 hour 23 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie, it’s hard to go back to 1 hour 23 minutes and 4 seconds just to catch that last word again- a single pixel is already a few seconds long so it’s extremely hard to move the mouse a single pixel with any accuracy.  So, I would like to see some mechanism to use the mouse for both fine and course gain position adjustments in the same control.

The best idea I’ve come up with (and it could probably use improvement) is to make it so the area right around the current location in the clip is warped, so that if you adjust it just a pixel or two in one direction, that pixel is only worth a second or two, but if you move it 100 pixels, it’s worth far more than 100 seconds.  That would let you make fine grain adjustments more easily while still allowing large leaps in the same interface, and showing about where you are in the clip.  More of a logarithmic scale than a linear one (I think).  I’m not sure if setting it up this way would make it more or less intuitive.  I think the warping would also have to interplay a bit with how quickly you move the slider.

So, using VLC’s slider for mock ups, the slider normally looks like this:

In my idea, when you click on the slider, it would bow out like this:

And if you move it just a little, it would only move the media a second or two, but quickly moving it past the bowed part would move it much further, at which point the new location would bow out.  To show the scale, if you added ticks, each showing an equal amount of time in the video/audio clip:

Or, to illustrate a little better, zoomed in, with 3 equal sections shown, with the assumption that each tick in the bowed section is one second, and outside the bowed section, each pixel is one second:

The length would still have to vary some depending on the length of the clip, or you could vary how large of an area is bowed out.  A little hard to explain clearly, but I think it would be fairly intuitive once you got it working.

• The Bloomberg Way – A short quote, but I’m pretty sure it proves I will never write for, or most likely, enjoy reading anything from Bloomberg News, however, I admittedly don’t know all that much about them.
• I like Wendy’s logo / brand, in no small part because of their total lack of modern update.  And as ultra cheap fast food goes, it’s not bad.
• What do you call someone who compulsively stores jars full of baby poop in a freezer for over 30 years, adding to the collection on a regular basis?  Um, a scientist.  They apparently also go for fruit bat blow jobs.  And hell, while we’re at it, growing rabbit penises in a lab.  Because really, that’s what the world needs, more rabbit penises.
• Brawndo begins it’s assent to world power.  Here’s the commercial they reference in that article:
  
  And, of course, where to buy it.