I stumbled on “Crusade: What the Hell Happened? vol.1″ (released last August) while packing, and wondered what happened to book 2. Apparently I’m not the only one wondering that, because it turns out that the website just posted an update last week, saying:
Volume 2 is still a work-in-progress. We will send out a news alert the moment it is released.
Now there’s timing!
Katie baked this chai spice apple pie in honor of Pi Day. We ate it for dessert after shepherd’s pie for dinner.
Microsoft has jumped on the ditch-IE6 bandwagon with IE6Countdown.com, following in the footsteps of such campaigns as Browse Happy, End 6, and Save the Developers.
Of course, since it’s a Microsoft-sponsored campaign, it’s only promoting upgrades, rather than promoting an upgrade-or-switch message.
Static HTML points out why you might want to put your effort into some other campaign instead. Because IE6 Countdown is only an upgrade campaign, and IE6 users are all on Windows XP or below (Vista ships with IE7), they can only ever upgrade as far as IE8. Given the huge gap between IE8 and IE9 in terms of standards support, HTML5, CSS3, and so forth, IE8 will soon become the new millstone around the web’s neck.
So instead of plugging IE, consider plugging your own favorite browser, be it Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Or perhaps plug another switch campaign. After all, there are quite a few alternative web browsers out there!
Comic strips and art:
Sci-fi and fantasy:
Coolness!
Tech stuff:
Amazon has started taking pre-orders for The Lord of the Rings (Extended) on Blu-Ray! I didn’t bother with the theatrical editions, partly because we didn’t have an HD-TV at the time, and partly because we both prefer the extended editions (even if they do take 11 hours to get through the whole trilogy).
I jumped at this one, though. Having recently watched Fellowship of the Ring on a big-screen TV on DVD, I could see places where the higher definition would really help. Battle sequences especially.
It’s worth considering that I still haven’t pre-ordered the Star Wars saga on Blu-Ray.
I use navigation on my Android phone to pick out the best route to work each morning. The problem is, it bases time estimates on traffic conditions now — not traffic conditions as they’ll be when I get to each point along the route. I’ve gotten used to the morning drive taking at least 15 minutes* longer and the evening drive taking around 10 minutes less than predicted, but a little more precision would be helpful.
Obviously, Google isn’t psychic. They can’t predict where and when car crashes will happen. But they do have historical traffic data. If you go to Google Maps on the web and display traffic, you can switch between live data and an average for a given time and day of the week.
It would be fantastic if Google used that data to predict how much slower (or faster) traffic will be moving at each point along each projected route, and use that for the time estimates. It would be nice for the “Are we there yet?” factor, but it would be incredibly useful for route planning!
*Sometimes more. This morning, it predicted a 55-minute trip. It took me an hour and 35 minutes.
Believe it or not, this is looking *away* from the sun. Sun rays are (at this distance, anyway) basically parallel, and a trick of perspective makes it look like they converge toward the sun or, in this direction, toward the point exactly opposite, like looking down a long hallway.
Ever since I read that these were possible under the right circumstances, I’ve been hoping to spot them and (if possible) photograph them. I saw some once while looking toward the mountains a year or two ago, but they were too faint to photograph. Naturally, when I finally saw them again, I was driving, and didn’t have time to stop and aim. Amazingly enough, one of the photos I took just pointing the camera out the window actually caught the rays!
Contrast enhanced to make the rays more visible. You can also check out the unmodified version.
