MightyFunk

Okay, so I don’t know exactly what they are serv­ing at this gala-dinner event. And no, the title of this post is not intended to be racist but to point out a dichotomy between ‘expen­sive’ and a rel­a­tively ‘cheap’ food source. Chicken wings just hap­pen to come to mind. If it makes the reader happy, I sup­pose I can change ‘chicken wing din­ner’ to ‘fish fry’ even tho a fish fry would prob­a­bly cost more. But why bother me about semantics.

In a few days (or weeks) from now, an acquain­tance will be attend­ing a din­ner event with Barack Obama. The price tag? $4,000.

I’m updat­ing my research into cam­eras for cre­at­ing HDR pho­tos. As of this writ­ing, I’m putting 360-degree HDR imagery on hold. To be com­pletely frank, you will want a Nikon D300 or a Canon Mark III series cam­era in order to pro­duce ade­quate HDRs with the min­i­mal amount of work involved. You may ask why, but my rea­son­ing involves fast shut­ter speeds/frame bursts for min­i­mal blur and arti­facts, greater AEB range, and full-sized frames.

Am I the only one who finds it hyp­o­crit­i­cal that peo­ple are attack­ing Obama for his remarks on ‘com­mu­ni­cat­ing with’ some of these Bush-dubbed ‘Axis of Evil’ pow­ers, when Bush him­self turns around today and announces on the news that it’s okay for peo­ple here to send the Cuban peo­ple cell phones?

I’m all about keep­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions clear — the great­est harm comes with iso­la­tion — it keeps oth­ers from access­ing knowl­edge, edu­ca­tion, and poten­tial oppor­tu­ni­ties. It also makes the peo­ple of these other coun­tries some­times suffer.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H02h0nGBryU

There’s not much more I can add to this…

I didn’t sign up for the ASAI (Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Archi­tec­tural Illus­tra­tors) to be spam mailed. How­ever, when I got my first email from them today, I thought some­thing must have been wrong. I checked my email begrudg­ingly, and went to the link they provided.

Much to my com­plete and utter amaze­ment, leg­is­la­tors are try­ing to pass a bill called the ‘Orphan Works Bill’ that will tear down the walls of copy­righted works. For those that don’t under­stand how copy­rights work, basi­cally any form of art­work that you cre­ate is auto­mat­i­cally copy­righted under law. This pro­tects an artist to a degree from hav­ing their work stolen and resold. In a loose sense, it is a ‘lesser’ form of patent — one that doesn’t require tons of paper­work, time, and legal fees.

It’s amaz­ing to think that just about ‘any­one’ can write an arti­cle about ‘any­body’ or ‘any­thing’ on Wikipedia.

Is it just me, or does that con­cept seem faulty at best? The only advan­tage of this sys­tem is that masses of infor­ma­tion can be quickly writ­ten and updated — but that does not nec­es­sar­ily mean that the peo­ple edit­ing or admin­is­ter­ing this web­site are so-called ‘experts’ in the fields they are editing.

The Wikipedia sys­tem, although extremely pop­u­lar at the moment has the word FAIL writ­ten all over it. I argue that it is a good place for ref­er­ence, but peo­ple MUST remem­ber (and must not for­get) to take the arti­cles posted there very lightly.

I sup­pose if you spend as much time as I do behind a com­puter, it’s only a mat­ter of time before some­one does a ‘bet­ter’ job of try­ing to take your cash. You all might be famil­iar of receiv­ing emails from Nige­ria — the famous 419 scam. You know, the ones with the sick or dying uncle or par­ent and they need to trans­fer money to your account?

The Niger­ian Con-Artists and my Cadillac:

Well, in my old blog, I had a story about that where I actu­ally got into an email shout­ing match with one of those Niger­ian scam­mers who was try­ing to buy my old car, and he ended the con­ver­sa­tion by saying:

Words can’t express my admi­ra­tion for the stu­pid­ity of this brave/stupid unfor­tu­nate, god-forsaken soul. I’ll prob­a­bly burn in hell for say­ing this, but I think I stand bet­ter chances than pulling a Lawn­chair Larry…:

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) — A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hun­dreds of helium party bal­loons was miss­ing Mon­day off the south­ern coast of Brazil.

Res­cuers in heli­copters and small fish­ing boats were search­ing off the coast of Santa Cata­rina state, where pieces of bal­loons were found.

Hey — I don’t care what floats your boat. Doesn’t bother me one bit. But this is def­i­nitely newsworthy:

Greek islanders: We are the true Les­bians
Trio from Les­bos sues gay rights group, says use of L-word is insulting

By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS
Asso­ci­ated Press
Pub­lished on: 04/30/08 ATHENS, Greece — A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between gay women and the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos.

Three islanders from Les­bos — home of the ancient poet Sap­pho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word les­bian in its name.

Per­haps the most annoy­ingly use­ful thing ever cre­ated. Too bad I always get them wrong.

This one wasn’t so bad — after three sep­a­rate attempts…