Watching Us
August 27, 2008
Y: The Last Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
August 27, 2008
If you haven’t checked this out yet, it’s well worth the read…
Y: The Last Man
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Y: The Last Man is a comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, about the only man to survive the mysterious simultaneous death of every male mammal on Earth. The series was published in sixty issues by Vertigo, and collected in a series of 10 paperback volumes. The series’ covers were primarily by J. G. Jones and Massimo Carnevale.
Plot summary
In the series, on July 17, 2002, something (referred to as a plague) simultaneously kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome - including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. The only exceptions appear to be Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his Capuchin monkey Ampersand.
Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men, their survivors’ guilt, and the knowledge that humanity is doomed to extinction. Vaughan meticulously crafts the new society that emerges out of this chaos, from the conversion of the phallic Washington Monument into a monument to the dead men, to the genesis of the fanatical ultra-feminist Daughters of the Amazon, who believe that Mother Earth cleansed itself of the “aberration” of the Y chromosome, to male impersonators becoming valued romantically and professionally.
Over the course of their journey, Yorick and his friends discover how society has coped in the aftermath of the plague. However, many of the women they encounter have ulterior motives in regard to Yorick. Though the subject matter of the series is entirely serious, Y: The Last Man is also noted for its humor. Yorick in particular is a source of one-liners, although the other characters have their moments as well.
I’m sure you already know about how awesome Paint.NET is, so I’ll spare the explanation and just quote the blog. If, for some reason, you haven’t tried Paint.NET, and you’re on Windows (it *might* even work on another platform via Mono, I’m not entirely sure), you should really check it out. It’s a great photo/graphic editing tool and it’s free as free can be.
Anyway, here’s the update from the Paint.NET blog:
In my last post about Paint.NET v4, I said that I was going to be writing it “from scratch” — that it would be a rewrite from the ground up, in other words. I’ve since changed my mind.
You see, I got a few months into this rewrite project. I wrote a lot of code — 26,000 lines of it, in fact. However, the continually daunting task of finishing the next 150,000 lines of code and doing a reset on the 4 years of bug fixes in v3.xx made things … depressing. So, I’ve decided that I will turn back to the v3.xx codebase and work towards v4 from there.
However, don’t worry. The rewrite project, which is now called a “prototype,” was not wasted time. I was able to work on and experiment with a lot of stuff in a nicely isolated fashion, and I now have a much better idea how I can refactor these into the existing [v3.xx] codebase. This includes some things for stuff like task management, extensibility, eventing, asynchronous programming, retained mode rendering, and an improved document model. This is actually a good example of quantity beating quality: by being able to iterate on all this enormous amount of code in isolation without the burden of the existing code base, I’ve been able to fine-tune it towards perfection.
In fact, I can’t stress that one word enough: depressing. Having 150,000 lines of code worth of work to do before you can even have something that’s feature parity with your already-shipping product, and that your users will even be interested in, is not fun. Next time you hear yourself thinking, “Rewriting this would be worth it,” stop and switch over to thinking about prototyping in an isolated codebase instead of rewriting the existing codebase. I can write a lot of code really fast, and I like to think I’m very good at it, but this was just too much for me. Your code (and mine) may not be academic-proof or astronaut-quality, but that’s ok … because it already works.
…continue reading at Paint.NET v4 takes a new, good turn (ixnay on the rewrite)
This blog looks like pure awesome. Here’s an example post:
Excruciatingly awful anti-drug abuse ad from 1970
(more at Found in Mom’s Basement)
Lifehacker: Useful Firefox 3 Configuration Tweaks
August 27, 2008
Update: Here are some new tips for Firefox 3 on all platforms and some specific tips for Firefox 3 on Linux:
YouTube - Large Hadron Rap
August 27, 2008
This is awesome. They even explain how they got around YouTube’s audio dynamic range compression. This is the 1337 shit:
Rappin’ about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider!
The sound should be slightly better on this version - we’ve tried to get round YouTube’s new extreme audio dynamic range compression by layering a 20kHz sine wave over the top of the soundtrack.
Images came from:
particlephysics.ac.uk, space.com, the Institute of Physics, NASA, Symmetry, and Marvel
The talented dancers doubled as camera people, with some work by Neil Dixon. Stock footage is CERN’s.
Will Barras is responsible for the killa beats:
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~s9527813/
The rapper has a day job (we agree this is a good thing) as a science writer.
http://www.katemcalpine.com
5+ Faves Collage
August 27, 2008
How to Live: 25 Useful scripts for Flickr users
August 27, 2008
Following up the post on 10 Really Useful Flickr Greasemonkey Userscripts from the other day is this great article from howtoliveonline.com that lists 25 great Greasemonkey scripts for Flickr users:
Flickr is a nice, popular online photo sharing tool. Here is a collection of tools and scripts that will enhance your flickr experience.
Enjoy these collection and feel free to suggest any useful script or additional tool that I might have missed.Scripts to enhance Flickr browsing experience:
Tip: To install these scripts, you must get Firefox browser and Greasemonkey extension [Read a 30 sec description on GM]. Once you install the Greasemonkey, you will see a smiling monkey icon on the right-bottom corner of your browser. These scripts need to be automatically installed when you select install option.
(continue reading at 25 Useful scripts for Flickr users)
BurnAware Free
August 27, 2008
In the quest to find free and/or open-source alternatives to CD/DVD burning programs like Nero Burning Rom and Roxio CD Creator, I’ve just stumbled upon a new program to add to my list, along with ImgBurn (my current favorite) and InfraRecorder, called BurnAware Free:
According to Lifehacker.com,
BurnAware Free burns data, audio, and video CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. Since we last mentioned BurnAware, it was bought up by a software company, turned shareware, and has now made the round trip back to freeware—so if you ran into the shareware version when you tried downloading it, BurnAware Free is worth a grab. There are still shareware versions that support advanced features like simultaneous disc writing, but chances are you’ll be happy with the free version. This one could come in particularly handy if and when you actually get a Blu-ray burner on your PC. BurnAware Free is freeware, Windows only. For other great alternatives, check out previously mentioned ImgBurn or Totally Free Burner.
Looks good to me, and well worth the price. 
![pdx [portland]](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1046/3168818707_570cff7348_t.jpg "pdx [portland]")
