Here’s how my brain works:

1. Paula sends me an instant message asking my schedule tonight
2. I tell her I have to finish some slides
3. Paula tells me she’s going to take a short nap, so don’t call when I’m coming home, just e-mail
4. I say okay, then I think: “e-mail”
5. Then I think: Homestar Runner saying “e-mail”
6. Then I think: I want to look at a thing in a bag
7. Then I watch this:

The thing in the bag, “it’s friggin’ awesome!”

After bemoaning the fact that my wife’s little D40x does a better job capturing pictures than my D100 I immediately starting thinking about how I could go about getting a new camera body. I am, however, cheap and certainly don’t have a couple spare Grover Cleveland’s to throw in Nikon’s tip jar. Fortunately, there’s a solution: just be a better photographer.

My first step: take Scott Bourne’s advice to heart. Scott has published a list of 10 ways to improve your photography without buying gear. Scott’s suggestions were inspired by David duChemin, but David’s tips cost $5 (I refer you to paragraph one for information on my fiscal leanings).

My second step: start taking pictures. I know it’s the only way to get better, and yet I still don’t do it. From now on, more pictures, I promise (I promise myself, that is, most of you really don’t need any more pictures to look at).

Blur of fur
My greyhound spazing out at with .5s shutter speed and rear curtain flash

Yes, there are people out there who will click on ads, on occasion I’m one of them. Today I was intrigued by an ad’s description, saying something about a crazy man’s landscape... so I clicked and was taken to Foreverscape.

Imagine what you’d get if you handed Salvador Dali a pen and an endless roll of paper... then you started feeding him acid. What starts out as a fairly ordinary scene slowly melts into a stream of consciousness rolling dreamscape, with meteor showers, train wrecks and fishing astronauts.

The landscape (by Vance Feldman) is embedded in the page and will automatically scroll by. Just head on over to Foreverscape for the visual treat. Be sure turn down the lights, put on “The Dark Side of the Moon”... and don’t forget to wrap a towel around your head to keep the mess to a minimum.

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Update: I wasn’t sure who the foreverscape artist was, but via comment and e-mail Vance hooked me up with links to his site. Thanks Vance!

Maybe I just need to find the right cat. Perhaps this guy:

Like this: at the top of UPI’s “Top News Photos” section today were pictures from inside and outside the general assembly... where it looks like everyone is dancing.

Incidentally... is Kadhafi engaging in a little stealth disco?

Want a vanity font to go with your vanity plates and vanity domains? You can do it without having to learn post script or hiring a typography expert. Just hop on over to http://www.fontcapture.com.

The process is simple: print out their form, write out the alphabet, scan the form back in and upload to their server. Your font is available pretty much instantly. Best part: it’s free (we’ve already established I’m cheap).

How long does it take you to write 127 letters?

It’s dirt cheap and spike-through-the-head easy. It’s not, however, failsafe. Here’s some stuff to keep in mind:

• If you have crappy handwriting, this isn’t going to make it look any better
• You’ll probably be much happier with the results if you use your favorite image editor to line up letters vertically and horizontally
• Consistent width on the letters will also pay dividends (my “y”s are skewed, making the spacing look bad)

If you take the time to line up all your letters your font will be much nicer

It honestly is easy, I made the first draft of my font in less than 10 minutes. If you want a quality font, however, you will want to tweak the letter size and alignment to make them consistent and aligned. For me that was another 30 minute investment.

And, no... this ain’t one of them crappy bit-mapped fonts. The clever folks at fontcapture.com turn your handwriting into a true type font, so you can blow it up to 120 points if you want:

Clickey for biggie

To be clear, you should not scan letters from your friends and create a font to impersonate them. That would be wrong Steve.

Well, nothing to do with jewelry per se, but I did replace my own watch batteries tonight.

Over the past year my watches have been slowly dropping off, about one per month. A few weeks back my last running watch finally ran out of will. I had a drawer of 10-15 watches, all without juice and being a cheap bastard I couldn’t bring myself to take them to a jeweler and pay $10 and up per watch to have 40 cent batteries put in them.

Lucky for me there’s this cool thing called the Interwebs. A watch back removal tool from eBay and a pile of batteries from watchbatteries.com and I’m back to being on time again!

I learned two things:

1. You can save money replacing your own watch batteries
2. If there are tiny screws between you and the battery, let a jeweler do it

You can either treat your fans as a necessary evil, or you can embrace them. The Japanese band Sour went one step further and made their fans the stars of their latest music video.

The concept: ask your fans to do specific actions in front of their web cams, then assemble the individual actions into a complex dance involving people from around the world.

The result:

SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.