I have always found time-lapse photograph interesting.  I have wanted to try it for myself but never took the time to research methods to achieve a clean looking time-lapse.  You typically see sun rise / sets as the subject but with the opening of the 5^th avenue Apple store in New York City I ran across a different subject for time lapse.  The first 24 hours of the festivities are displayed in a clip on the store’s site. During the movie two marriage proposals took place.

Bert Monroy is an amazing artist. Check out his image of the Damen CTA stop. This painting looks so real it appears as a photo at first glance. Here are the stats

• The image size is 40 inches by 120 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes.
• It took eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create.
• The painting is comprised of close to fifty individual Photoshop files.
• Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 15,000 layers.
• Over 500 alpha channels were used for various effects.
• Over 250,000 paths make up the multitude of shapes throughout the scene.

Yes, 5 my eye. Cinco de mayo started out quite enjoyable. Cat and I visited friends with a cute newborn. Some friends came over and we enjoyed many fine mojitos. Next we joined some of the wife’s friends for a pleasant dinner at Carnivale. This place is a sight to see; extremely vibrant and alive with Latin flare. The food was fantastic; the wife had braised pork shoulder with plantains and I had pan-seared halibut. The evening wound down to a nice simmer and we found our way to the door around midnight. Next thing I know I am awake at 4:30am with hives on my legs, my throat itching and feeling constricted and my eye looking like this. Must have been a food allergy. Strange thing is everything I consumed that evening I have had before. Benadryl saved the day and by tonight, Sunday night, my eye is finally back to normal.

This is a neat flash-based website which selectively highlights the great architecture of the windy city. Via the imprint, this site was a class project of some sort from the University of Memphis.

Chicago is famous for its architecture - especially for its high buildings. It is where the first modern skyscraper was built and where Mies van der Rohe lead into a new age of architecture.

Also, a 2006 Webby Award nominee.

Straight from pitchfork and the bands official website:

It’s official, the Smashing Pumpkins are currently writing songs for their upcoming album, their first since 2000. No release date has yet been set, but the band plans to begin recording this summer.

I was very disappointed when they broke up and the hideous Swan project released a sub par album. This is really great news as I believe the Smashing Pumpkins produced some of the best studio music ever.

Ah – Miller Lite I have truly enjoyed you for a number of years.  I have even stuck by you through your ugly NASCAR style logo phase.  The advent of a self-cooling can which is also environmentally friendly is truly a wonder.  But I must tell you that containing only 10.5 fl oz of beer in a 16 fl oz can and charging a large premium is going to rapidly erode the novelty.  I think the 99 cent bag of ice will serve me well in those hot summer months.

Poking around Digg tonight I found an old post on Salon that is somewhat interesting.

The Machiavelli personality test has a range of 0-100
Your Machiavelli score is: 84
You are a high Mach, you endorse Machiavelli’s opinions.Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but there’s a significant minority at either extreme.

Onto the third variation of this site design. I scrapped the last layout and started anew with a single column layout of K2. Only issue is Internet Explorer really sucks ass. Why would Microsoft not make a standards compliant web browser? The new site has some really cool features, e.g. rolling archives, but the look terrible in IE and I really don’t feel like recoding the CSS for that delinquent browser. To get you read for the switch here is a little vid for some amusement.

I was searching Google Images to find pictures of a Ferrari F430; an automobile that a colleague purchased this week (in cash).  While browsing beautiful images of the Italian redhead I stumbled across a site which actually brought tears to my eyes.  This is so sad to see so many destroyed exotic autos.

Nothing disappoints me more than having a long, tough week followed by a coronavirus (pronounced kuh-RO-nuh-vie-russ) infection, common cold, just in time for the weekend.  The wife was out of town, the weather was beautiful and I was incapacitated on the couch watching The Masters.  Which would not have been a terrible experience except for the 4:15 rain delay on Saturday which forced me to watch Jack Nicolas win the ’86 Masters about 5 times.  Another observation that really annoyed me; the fact that only two sponsors paid for commercials during the broadcasting of the finest golf tournament – IBM and ExxonMobile.  Maybe I am just more sensitive to repeated commercials now that I primarily watch TV via recorded DVR programs but I seriously watched at least 50 IBM commercials – that sucked by the way – no creativity to be found.

The inevitable failure of the UMD movie format, seen clearly from the declining levels of movie studio and retail support, is yet another costly lesson for the entertainment industry in the pointlessness of proprietary physical media #

The PSP really is best left to be a portable gaming device.

This is a very creative video of many “mid-jump” pictures linked together. It has a very Matrix feel to it in the fight scene encountered half way through. This must have taken forever to piece together. Lately, I have been enjoying the plethora or new content hitting the Google Video, You Tube and Meta Cafe sites; hours on entertainment.

Does this happen to anyone else? When I sit at my home computer for a rather short amount of time, say 1 hour, my shoulders around my neck start to get really tense and painful. Must be this kitchen chair I sit it. A real chair with some comfort is in order.

Furniture order is delayed again. They must have had to raise more cattle to tan that hide that will be stretched across. We are hopeful for an end of April delivery but I am not holding my breath – anymore.

Home ownership can be tough. Being a new home owner – or should I say I am new to home ownership; the home is definitely not new – can be difficult at times. Over the week I completed a project that I had procrastinated with long enough. I was quite satisfied with my workmanship of installing new baseboards (shoe molding for you old timers) in our walk-in closet. I learned that I will never use a hand saw and mitre box again instead opting to rent a radial arm saw to make my angular cuts. I simply used an excess of caulking to obscure my faulty chops and hide the fasteners. After this I fixed the under-cabinet lighting that had shorted by replacing the 12v transformer. With these two projects completed the place was looking pretty good until this morning.

I opened the coat closet door to retrieve my rain coat when the door fell off. Literally fell off the hinges. It appears as if the screws secured in the door frame stripped their threads leaving the door to swing off the hinges. Home ownership – if you think you are near complete with a renovation think again.

A friend of mine needs your support. Matt Downey and I attended the same high school where I was a year younger. He was branded the joker; always making the crowd laugh and bringing a smile to everyone’s face. A very popular individual indeed. Unfortunately, Matt has been diagnosed with a brain tumor for a second time. The first go at this was in 2001 where the mass was determined benign. This recurrence does not come with such an outlook being diagnosed by pathology as malignant. Here is a link to Matt’s Patient Journal. I firmly believe the more people that think / meditate / pray, whatever it is that you do, the higher the probability of a positive outcome.