sticking in random curses in tinyurl leads to some funny results:

http://tinyurl.com/dick -> The Dick’s homepage (Cheney)
http://tinyurl.com/cunt -> Lynne Cheney’s homepage

The 3 readers of my blog may remember the first stupid sign I posted.

This one is for a new internet cafe/phone card vendor/next failed business opening up in my neighborhood. This used to be a short-lived, terribly-named flower shop called Your Florist, now turned into the next doomed business venture. This shop may be yet another front (there are a few of them in my neighborhood. I don’t think this store even has a name.

This is just a guess, but I think the people running this ain’t too bright.

In this age of cheap and easily available residential broadband access, I don’t see much profitability in an internet cafe.

In Japan, it’s another story. Internet cafes there have self-serve drink machines, with soda, coffee, and even corn soup. All of them have loads of manga and you can go there and rent a little booth to relax in. Some have TV’s, PlayStation, and even a couch. One nice one in Ikebukuro (Tokyo) even has a shower. I forget the price, but staying there overnight is something like $30! Beats getting a motel.

I know plenty of people who absolutely detest pickles, but I love them. I even drink the pickle juice. Disgusting, I know… I’ve loved pickles since as far back as I can remember, always saving the two pickle slices in McDonald’s hamburgers for last.

Growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I passed by the famous Guss’ Pickles every day on the way to school and marveled at all those wooden barrels brimming with pickles. They always looked inviting and intimidating at the same time. Inviting because I wanted to try all the different kinds. Intimidating because they just sat there, out in the open all day without refrigeration, for people to gawk at, poke, sneeze into…

Even though I love pickles, but I rarely buy them from the store. I’m quite a picky eater when it comes to certain things. I like crunchy pickles, whole. Most of the major brands in the supermarkets are made with color added and preservatives, or they’re sliced up for picnics. Many of the ones I’ve tried are sweet, too sour, or just too artificial tasting, and taking on a yellow tinge. The main problem is that most of them have just been sitting on the shelf too long and aren’t very fresh and get really mushy. One brand I do like a lot is Ba-Tempe Kosher Pickles, which I buy from time to time, made right here in Brooklyn. I learned how to make my own pickles several years ago. Now that summer’s almost here, cucumbers are back in season and plentiful. Here’s my version of kosher dills (kosher in the sense that they are made in the manner of Jewish pickles, not that they have been prepared under the supervision of a rabbi). Let’s get pickling!

My favorite cucumbers to use are kirbys. They are small and crisp. There are as many different recipes for dill pickles as there are stars in the universe, but mine is very simple. It’s just cucumbers, water, salt, dill, peppercorns, and garlic. Lots of dill and lots and lots of garlic.

I put as many kirbys as can fit inside a jar, then stuff some whole dill sprigs in it, crushing and snapping the stems to increase the surface area. I coarsely bash up some garlic chives (about 1/4 of a bulb), and put them in the jar. If the husk is still on, I don’t bother removing it. Then I add sea salt and peppercorns, and fill the jar with cold tap water until the cucumbers are submerged. That’s really about it.

I leave them out for several days in room temperature to allow for some fermentation from the bacteria present on the cucumbers. This is probably a huge health code violation, but I’m still alive. This causes some acidification and souring, and changes the color of the cucumber from hunter green to a duller olive drab. After 3-5 days, I put the concoction in the fridge.

In this photo, I’ve reused the brine from my first pickle batch. The water at this point is quite cloudy from the fermentation of garlic, cucumbers, spices, and dill.

reusing a Ba-Tempte pickle jar

More cucumbers in a large kim-chi jar

This one went straight into the fridge. No room temperature fermentation period. Refrigeration retards bacterial activity, so this is an experiment to see how differently this turns out.

Before and after

A cucumber that has been in brine for 3 wks vs a new, unpickled kirby.. a little too fermented.

here’s a recipe from About.com that uses vinegar and a hot process, quite different from mine. Ingredients also include sugar and onions.
http://video.about.com/kosherfood/Homemade-Kosher-Pickle.htm

I found this while looking for paintball pictures

This guy made a paintball mini-gun. His name is Rick Galinson and he’s a Hollywood special effects designer.

here’s page 2 of his mini-gun, with videos of the gun in action. If you ever see this on the paintball field, duck and cover, and kiss your ass goodbye, because at 50 balls per second, you’ll have no place to run.

This, on the other hand, is much less cool..

Contrary to what a lot of people think, upgrading the Playstation 3 drive does not void the warranty. In fact, it’s even illustrated in the PS3 owner’s manual, on pages 16-17, Removing / replacing the hard disk (your manual may differ). If you’ve lost the manual, you can get it from Sony’s site:

http://www.us.playstation.com/Support/PS3/Manuals

Quite painless and easy. If you’re still unsure, you can watch this instructive video from CNET.

Again, not much of an “insider secret” though, as this information is clearly already included in the manual (which people don’t read). When they say “smaller drive”, they mean 2.5″ SATA laptop drives. Amazon has them for approx. $60-$100.

I upgraded my PS3 80GB to 160GB and did a 3-way swap. My 40GB PS3 got the 80GB and the 40GB drive went into an external enclosure. When you first connect the drive to your PC, it will probably not show up in the file system. You’ll need to partition and format it.

If you’re on a Mac, go to Disk Utility to partition and format the drive. On XP, go to Computer Management in the Control Panels pane (instructions here). Format for FAT and you’ll be able to use it on both PCs, Macs, XBOX 360, PS3, and many other operating systems.

Here’s the 40GB inside a SATA external enclosure I bought from eBay (about $8).

… and here it is connected via USB to my Mac.

interestingly, it is reporting itself as Generic and not Seagate.

Do you really need a bigger PS3 hard drive?

In retrospect, no. I really didn’t need 160 GB. I had originally intended to put Ubuntu on it to play with, but ran into a lot of technical problems and abandoned the idea. Most downloadable movie trailers are 150-200 MB, and game demos are 500MB-1.5GB, so unless you are a hoarder and download everything, or copy over large numbers of AVI videos, the original PS3 hard drive will probably suffice. It’s still nice knowing I have all that room inside though, without having to worry about deleting files to make room for new content, like I frequently need to do on the XBOX360, with it’s measly 20GB HDD (not user upgradeable).

I’m hitting a few potholes as I transition from Actionscript 2.0 over to 3.0. Lots of things have been moved, renamed, or even deleted, like my good friend eval().

I often store lists of instance names or dynamic text values in arrays and used eval to loop through all the values and set variables.

container.menubar.eval(”menuitem”+i).x_scale=150;

eval() is especially handy if you had a lot of movieclips and saves a lot of time typing, as well as streamlining the code. What to do in Actionscript 3.0 now that eval() is gone?

The answer:

use GetChildByName. This was driving me crazy for a day or two and I wasn’t getting any answers on Google. Well, I figured it out and if you’re having the same problem, this’ll save you some agony.

var buttonArray:Array = new Array(”legacy”, “cocktails”, “offers”);
for (var i:int=0; i contentHolder.viewport.navbar.getChildByName("bn_" + buttonArray[i]).scaleX=1;
contentHolder.viewport.navbar.getChildByName("bn_" + buttonArray[i]).scaleY=1;
contentHolder.viewport.navbar.getChildByName("bn_" + buttonArray[i]).alpha=.5;
}

If you've got a lot of repetitive code, you can simplify it with the with keyword:


for (var i:int=0; i<buttonArray.length; i++) {
var buttonName:String = "bn_" + buttonArray[i];
with (contentHolder.viewport.navbar) {
getChildByName(buttonName).scaleX=1;
getChildByName(buttonName).scaleY=1;
getChildByName(buttonName).alpha=.5;
}
}

I also created a new variable to store the buttonName, instead of having to write out “bn_” + buttonArray[i] each time. GetChildByName is similar to Javascript’s GetElementByID.

MediaTracks contacted me again to do a horizontal version of their ad. I had done one for them about a year ago. [see below]

Here is the ad mocked up to show how it’d appear on PR Week’s site.

In the time since I did the last ad, Adobe bought Macromedia and released Flash as part of CS3. I learned some new animation tricks and applied them to this ad, which just made the effects look really wonderful. Here is the original horizontal ad I put together for them in 2007.

A video test for the LED panel at Queens Crossing mall in Flushing, New York, filmed during construction. The animated segment I worked on appears at 0:13 (Bali BBQ). The LED controller doesn’t have the proper Flash player installed, so you’re not seeing the video the way it should be. This is the way it should play.

finished 30 second clips for the LED:

Queens Crossing dining group

The rose petal drift (hand drawn) took some time to figure out the right visual effects, but I finally nailed it. Looks quite nice w/ some motion blur and other effects added to it. Some fun tween effects like the curtain.

Bali BBQ restaurant

the Bali BBQ segment as it should play. Those are actual palm leaves we photographed. I couldn’t find any stock art suitable for the animation, so we went out and bought some real leaves.

Irresistible Home Decor

A houseware and home accessories store

how ironic… check it out for yourself.

Markup Validation Service