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Based on the judges' comments, the following are the most important behaviors to exhibit on the TV show Sing Off if you want to win in ascending order of importance:

• Stay in tune (don't be "pitchy")
• Have heart
• Have soul
• Step out of your comfort zone
• Give it all you have/Leave it all on the stage
• Bring it

That's some solid advice. Really good feedback.

James Cameron's new movie Avatar might have the largest budget in the history of movie making that includes $150 million for marketing alone.

So what font did they choose to represent their vision and set the tone of the film? Papyrus.

Papyrus.

Wow. That's. just. awful.

It's all over the trailer too:

**UPDATE**
It looks like the font used in the movie is actually a hand-drawn custom font that just happens to look EXACTLY like Papyrus.

(that's Papyrus in red on top of the movie font)

I think this is actually worse than using Papyrus itself. With $150 million dollars, they came up with that.

It doesn't only look exactly like Papyrus, it's clearly based on it too. Look at this close up of the 'V'. The awful jagged edges of Papyrus follow the contours of the movie font perfectly.

Absolutely indefensible.

Some of you might be wondering how to dress when your landlord/next-door-neighbor calls you to ask if you can help survey a sinking building on a day when it's 21 degrees with 40 MPH wind gusts. Well, I have you covered (pun intended). This is coming from a guy who was once sweating at a GB Packer game at Lambeau in December. Here's the diagram:

Hope that helps some of you out. Thumbs up! Reporting for duty!

Another post that I'm surprised I'm just now getting around to posting.

These pictures are from dinner this summer when Viola was here.

Everyone enjoying tortellini, but Viola feels left out:

So she decides to look super cute for everyone:

But then gets bored and decides to eat the bowl:

And Monica's for using the finest plastic bags available.

I can't believe I never posted this before. Stephanie and I took this picture at the Damen El stop last summer in Chicago specifically to compare it to Bert Monroy's Damon. The first is Stephanie's photo. The second was done entirely in Photoshop and Illustrator. Amazing.

Here they are side-by-side:
  

From the artist's website:

This is my latest and most ambitious digital painting of a Chicago scene unveiled at Photoshop World in Miami on March 22, 2006.
It is a panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority.
Adobe Illustrator was used for generating the majority of the basic shapes as well as all the buildings in the Chicago skyline.
The rest was created in Photoshop.

• 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.

The original has a much wider aspect ratio. I cropped it here to fit more closely with the photo.

I'm trying to not post and xkcd comic with every post (although I'm pretty sure I could find a relevant one for each). But when they remind me of one of my favorite movie quotes of all time (as today's did), they inspire posts of their own.

First, the original quote:

And the comic:

The United States is still very much a rural country. I was surprised to find out just how rural it is though.

Of the 304,059,724 residents in the US, only 84,268,009 live in cities larger than 100,000. And the majority of those (51%) live in cities with a population under 500,000. Here's the breakdown:

Here is that information with the cities under 100k included. Each red dot represents one city.

And here are the percentages for cities over 100k:

If we add in the remaining 219,791,715 people, we see that a full 73% of people in the United States live in cities (or towns or villages etc.) with a population under 100,000.

Here they are together:

Some interesting facts that became apparent:

• 1 in 36 people in the US live in NYC
• About 10 in 36 people live in cities with populations over 100k
• But less than 5 in 36 live in cities over 500k
• 26 in 36 people live in cities/towns/villages under 100k (there are actually nine different 'types' of places according to the US Census: borough, Census Designated Place (CDP), city, comunidad, county, municipality, town, urbana, and village)

Here's a table with all the data:

How the heck did Obama ever get elected?

(Sources: Census 2000 U.S. Gazetteer Files, 2008 US Census Estimates)

This Christmas season, brought to The Sharper Image: Translucent Children!

I can't sleep. My sister sent me an email about a site I made for her last year that simply displays whether or not it's her birthday and it got me thinking about why I got interested in computer languages to begin with. The code is so simple and elegant (it happens to be JavaScript - but that doesn't really matter). This is really basic stuff, but I'd thought I'd share the source with a simple explanation. It's really satisfying to me and hopefully someone else.

These four lines get the current month, day, and year (the + 1 at the end of the month is because January is represented by a zero (0) and February is one (1) etc.

var currentTime = new Date()
var month = currentTime.getMonth() + 1
var day = currentTime.getDate()
var year = currentTime.getFullYear()

This line writes the current date... month day and year separated by forward slashes "/".

document.write(month + "/" + day + "/" + year)

These four lines get the time. And we see our first IF THEN ELSE statement (there is no else in this case - the else is what it would have been anyway). If the minutes value is less than ten (10) then we add a zero before it (e.g. 12:07 instead of 12:7). This step and the next aren't really needed to generate the "yes" or "no" seen on the site, I just thought it was nice to generate and see the actual time of day in addition to the date.

var hours = currentTime.getHours()
var minutes = currentTime.getMinutes()
if (minutes < 10){
minutes = "0" + minutes
}

Here we print the time of day (proceeded by a pipe (|) plus "am" or "pm" based on another IF THEN ELSE statement (IF hours are greater than 11, print pm, ELSE print am - of course, this could easily be reversed... IF hours are less than 12, print am, ELSE print pm).

document.write(" | " + hours + ":" + minutes + " ")
if(hours > 11){
document.write("pm")
} else {
document.write("am")
}

If the month equals 11 and the day equals 23 (i.e. the 23rd of November - her birthday), we print "yes!" in big letters (surrounded by <h1></h1> tags - which translates to "headline 1" in people language).

if(month == 11&&day == 23) {
document.write("<br /><h1>yes!</h1>")
}

Else we write "no :(" Becuase that's sad.

else {
document.write("<br /><h2>no :(</h1>")
}


Link: Is it Jessica's Birthday? - Check it out soon. You only have 21 hours left to see the "yes!".