All about mystery

Microsoft Quietly Closes Software Licensing and Protection Service

ASUS' Eee PC S101 gets hands-on treatment, release details

- 4 hours and 36 minutes ago

pFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/laptops/" rel="tag"Laptops/a/pdiv align="center"a href="http://chinese.engadget.com/2008/10/07/eeepc-s101-hands-on/"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" src="http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/10/10-7-08-asus_s101-hands-on.jpg" alt="" //abr //div Anxious to get your claws around an Eee PC that looks -- amazingly -- nothing like an Eee PC? Feast your eyes on the a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/03/asus-makes-eee-pc-s101-official-904ha-images-leak-out/"S101/a, which was recently toyed with by our brethren over at a href="http://chinese.engadget.com/"Engadget Chinese/a. We must say, this here piece of machinery looks mighty fine save for that not-at-all appealing brown coat, but we suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. As for launch dates (pricing is still a mystery), we're hearing that the Asia-Pacific realm could see it as early as tomorrow, while Europe will get it in around a fortnight and North America sometime later this month. Oh, and if you're in that latter region, you better bite early -- just 1,000 of 'em will be made available here initially.h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://chinese.engadget.com/2008/10/07/eeepc-s101-hands-on/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/07/asus-eee-pc-s101-gets-hands-on-treatment-release-details/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1335019/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/07/asus-eee-pc-s101-gets-hands-on-treatment-release-details/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feeds.engadget.com/~a/weblogsinc/engadget?a=kNSoKl"img src="http://feeds.engadget.com/~a/weblogsinc/engadget?i=kNSoKl" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.engadget.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=yLAJm"img src="http://feeds.engadget.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=yLAJm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.engadget.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=fPOtm"img src="http://feeds.engadget.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=fPOtm" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/413795609" height="1" width="1"/

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Apple’s rumored ‘Brick’ a radical new notebook?

Les guests de « XIII » ressuscitent la série à coups de « Mystery »

Have You Seen the Flickr Panda’s Technicolor Yawn?

Mashable!

- 14 hours and 49 minutes ago

I’m trying to to come up with a decent way to introduce this - there really isn’t a sane way to approach this because the latest feature from Flickr, while fairly mundane in function, is borderline insane.

The service allows you to see new images as they come into the site and have been popularly rated as interesting (those on the FriendFeed night shift shouldn’t confuse this functionality with Tad’s Flickr Toy that shows the raw feed as they come in).

The bizarre part comes in with how they presented the information. The pictures show up on a rainbow trail spewing forth from a panda’s mouth. Â

On the original picture the background is derived from, the algorithm and method of selection of the photos is more accurately explained:

“Explore” is basically Flickr’s front page, an introductory collection of ever-changing photos to show people the kinds of things inside the site. Each day Explore displays 500 images, but those images are constantly changing, as new photos are uploaded throughout the day.

To some people, Explore is the ultimate beauty contest. It’s the pinnacle of Flickr, the achievement of achievements. They fret and conspire and worry, and actually get angry and frustrated, when their perfectly fine photos, never “get into” Explore.

Except it’s basically random. No matter how artificially “interesting” you try to make your photos (Explore photos are selected via Flickr’s “Interestingness Algorithm”, affectionately known as the “Magic Donkey”), Explore is still only 500+ images each day. And each day on Flickr, there are more thanÂ five thousandÂ photos uploaded each minute. That’sÂ each minute.

As for the Panda barf? A complete mystery that remains unexplained.

Any theories?

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Flickr Adds Better Upload Tools
Flickr Downtime Continues
PleaseDressMe T-Shirt Giveaway Winners Announced
Flickr Goes International: 7 New Languages
Flickr Live Feeds Now Included in Yahoo Image Search
Flickr Facebook App is Now Available
Flick Banned in China?

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t shirts,yawn,collections,mundane,mashable

Have You Seen the Flickr Panda’s Technicolor Yawn?

Mashable!

- 14 hours and 49 minutes ago

I’m trying to to come up with a decent way to introduce this - there really isn’t a sane way to approach this because the latest feature from Flickr, while fairly mundane in function, is borderline insane.

The service allows you to see new images as they come into the site and have been popularly rated as interesting (those on the FriendFeed night shift shouldn’t confuse this functionality with Tad’s Flickr Toy that shows the raw feed as they come in).

The bizarre part comes in with how they presented the information. The pictures show up on a rainbow trail spewing forth from a panda’s mouth. Â

On the original picture the background is derived from, the algorithm and method of selection of the photos is more accurately explained:

“Explore” is basically Flickr’s front page, an introductory collection of ever-changing photos to show people the kinds of things inside the site. Each day Explore displays 500 images, but those images are constantly changing, as new photos are uploaded throughout the day.

To some people, Explore is the ultimate beauty contest. It’s the pinnacle of Flickr, the achievement of achievements. They fret and conspire and worry, and actually get angry and frustrated, when their perfectly fine photos, never “get into” Explore.

Except it’s basically random. No matter how artificially “interesting” you try to make your photos (Explore photos are selected via Flickr’s “Interestingness Algorithm”, affectionately known as the “Magic Donkey”), Explore is still only 500+ images each day. And each day on Flickr, there are more thanÂ five thousandÂ photos uploaded each minute. That’sÂ each minute.

As for the Panda barf? A complete mystery that remains unexplained.

Any theories?

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Flickr Adds Better Upload Tools
Flickr Downtime Continues
PleaseDressMe T-Shirt Giveaway Winners Announced
Flickr Goes International: 7 New Languages
Flickr Live Feeds Now Included in Yahoo Image Search
Flickr Facebook App is Now Available
Flick Banned in China?

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Icelandic Thriller 'Jar City' Getting an American Remake

Cinematical

- 18 hours and 15 minutes ago

Iceland has a more robust film industry than you might expect from a small island nation of only 320,000 people, but still, it ain't exactly Hollywood. So when an Icelandic film gains worldwide attention, it's newsworthy.

Such is the case with Jar City, an excellent mystery thriller that Cinematical's Kim Voynar raved about last year at Telluride. It's the highest-grossing film in the country's history, from one of its most successful (and prolific directors), and it won a top prize at the 2007 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

And now it gets the ultimate honor: an American remake! (There may have been sarcasm in the word "honor.") According to The Hollywood Reporter, Overture Films has bought the remake rights and will employ the original writer/director, Baltasar Kormákur, as a producer. No word yet on who will direct the U.S. version, but a writer has been attached: Michael Ross, who wrote Turistas and who THR says is also penning the Near Dark remake.

The Icelandic setting will be changed, of course, to its logical American counterpart: Louisiana. No, really. I'm curious to see how the story transfers, since some of its details relate to the insularity of those small Icelandic communities. Also, I loved that the detective in the original was a total badass despite looking like a nerdy college professor. (That's him in the picture.) I hope they keep that element for the remake. William H. Macy would be perfect.

As far as I can determine, this is the first time an Icelandic film has officially gotten an American remake. If anyone knows differently, let me know. Otherwise, I'm marking this as a historic first for our friends in the North Atlantic.

Filed under: Foreign Language, Deals, Telluride, Mystery & Suspense, Cinematical Indie

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Travel -clip fomr THE DEVIL'S CHAIR - On DVD 10/7/08

Silent Hill: Homecoming

THE DEVIL'S CHAIR trailer- On DVD 10/7/08

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Dancing on fire

The Doc Searls Weblog

- 1 days and 2 hours ago

It’s hard to feel shitty when the Steve Miller Band is playing Jet Airliner in the middle of your head. Or smart, either — at least in my case.

Jeebus, all these decades I’ve been thinking the chorus was

Big old jet had a light on
Don’t carry me too far away
Oh oh oh big old jet had a light on
‘Cuz it’s here that I’ve got to stay.

Turns out “had a light on” is “airliner”. Well, duh. Of course. That’s the freaking title. But phonetically, Steve is singing “biggo jed adda line oh”. I say this with confidence because I just replayed it about ten times to make sure. That’s the audible, as they say in football.

Who knows what the hell Steve’s saying, anyway? Well, some of us do, and to explain, we have the Internet. For example, The Joker begins,

Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah
Some call me the gangster of love
Some people call me maurice
Cause I speak of the pompitous of love

Or is that pomitus? Hell, The Pompatus of Love is a whole movie devoted to the question. The Straight Dope sez that “pompatus” (that’s how it sounds) actually goes way back:

Speculation about “pompatus” was a recurring motif in the script for The Pompatus of Love. While the movie was in postproduction Cryer heard about “The Letter.” During a TV interview he said that the song had been written and sung by a member of the Medallions named Vernon Green. Green, still very much alive, was dozing in front of the tube when the mention of his name caught his attention. He immediately contacted Cryer.

Green had never heard “The Joker.” Cryer says that when he played it for Green “he laughed his ass off.” Green’s story:

“You have to remember, I was a very lonely guy at the time. I was only 14 years old, I had just run away from home, and I walked with crutches,” Green told Cryer. He scraped by singing songs on the streets of Watts.

One song was “The Letter,” Green’s attempt to conjure up his dream woman. The mystery words, J.K. ascertained after talking with Green, were “puppetutes” and “pizmotality.” (Green wasn’t much for writing things down, so the spellings are approximate.)

“Pizmotality described words of such secrecy that they could only be spoken to the one you loved,” Green told Cryer. And puppetutes? “A term I coined to mean a secret paper-doll fantasy figure [thus puppet], who would be my everything and bear my children.” Not real PC, but look, it was 1954.

Anyway, I’ve had a bad cold the last few days, and right now I’m sitting on the couch with a fever, feeling like shit, while a vacuum cleaner roars in the next room. But I’ve got these Etymotic ER6i earphones jacked deep into my head, muting the noise and substituting ol’ Steve, singing about getting on “that 707″ — a plane nobody outside of Iran still flies. And it’s getting me high, just from the driving energy of the song.

Beats thinking about death, which comes easy when you’re 61 with a fever, a gut, and a history of exercise that consists mostly of getting dressed. But music helps. Music is the best evidence of immortality that we have.

Music is life. And vice versa. Listening to three-decade old Steve Miller on good earphones is life transfusion.

So is listening to an even older song: The Doors’ When the Music’s Over, from Strange Days, a brilliant, beautiful piece of work. To me Strange Days ranks among a handful of perfect albums, first song to last.

Which is When the Music’s Over, of course.

When the music is your special friend,
dance on fire as it intends.
Music is your only friend,
until the end.

Strange Days came out in late ‘67. I bought it in the summer of ‘68 after Ken Rathyen, a guy on my ice cream route (he was a lifeguard at PV Beach in Pompton Plains, NJ) told me to get it. “Every song is a gem,” he said. He was right. (Kenny, if you’re out there, Yo!)

That fall I shared an apartment in an old house on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro, near Tate Street. Next door was a big Victorian, already boarded up. On Halloween night, a bunch of turned off all the lights and listened to Strange Days. After When the Music’s Over was over, we were deep in a creepy Halloween mood, and decided it would be fun to break into the “haunted house” next door. So we got a flashlight out, sneaked over, and found a way in.

There was no furniture, just empty rooms, with a coating of dust on everything… except for the footprints on the stairs. They were barefoot and small for an adult. We followed them up to the second floor, where they stopped. No other footprints went down.

Feeling creeped out, we pressed on, exploring this big old house. Still, other than the footprints, there was nothing.

Then we found the door to the attic. It was narrow, and opened to a narrow staircase. At the top was a camped room where there were a few items of furniture and some boxes. In one box was a diary by a girl who had lived there. She reported daily on what she saw out the window at the front of the attic, looking down on Spring Garden Street. She also gave weekly summaries of her favorite TV show, Whirlybirds, which last ran in 1960.

One name that appeared often in the diary was Jan Speas, who lived next door. I wondered if this was the same Jan Speas who taught creative writing at Guilford College, where I was a Senior at the time. (Jan, whose maiden name was Jan Cox and wrote as Jan Cox Speas, was best known as a writer of historical romances.)

So we took the diary with us, and I brought it to Jan. Yes, Jan said, she remembered the girl well. They were good friends, and the diary was touching because the girl had later died.

Three years later Jan died too, of an unexpected heart attack. She was 46.

In August, 2004, Ed Cone’s Piedmont Bloggers Conference was held in the same exact spot as the condemned houses: the one I lived in, the haunted Victorian next door, and Jan Speas’ house on the other side of that one. I wrote about it here, and told the same creepy story here (but it doesn’t come up now, which is why I’m repeating myself).

But I’m still here. Dancing on fire. And getting back to real work, now that the vacuum cleaner is off.

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The mystery of freaky phobias

Test de Mystery Mansion : un mystère vite éclairci.

Eddie Van Halen Is Engaged

shipbuilding

Neil Gaiman's Journal

- 1 days and 12 hours ago

posted by Neil Remember when Euan Kerr came out to interview me and help with the beehives?

The interview is now up. There's an embeddable player that I'm going to try and embed here...

-- and you can read the article, find the player and see some photos of me in a bee-suit (and a really lovely bee photo) at
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/10/03/gaiman/

So the breakfast this morning in Oakland, talking to retailers, was a delight -- I wished afterwards it had been taped or filmed -- and the Booksmith Event was really fun and fine. Great acoustics and a lovely venue. (Kepler's had a giant white spider come down from the rafters to listen, during the Q&A, though.)

Hi Neil, I just got home from the reading in San Francisco this evening (afternoon?). I was the Jack who asked why you have a vendetta against people named Jack. I was being snide, but thanks for answering anyways, and I'm glad it got a laugh.

I realized during the Q&A that I had another, perhaps more substantive question to ask you, and even though I was tempted to jump up in my seat and blurt it out, I figured it would be more gentlemanly to wait and send it to you via e-mail, so here goes:

I remember you saying on your blog that there was an American version and a British version of The Graveyard Book. I imagine that it's much like the Harry Potter books, with certain Britishisms and cultural indicators switched around to be easier to understand for American audiences. Or is it the other way around? I guess the question is, did you write a "British" version of the book and make it "American," or vice versa? Are there dramatic differences between them? Is one closer to your own heart?

Thanks,
Jack Baur

Neither, really. I wrote a book, and said in the manuscript when I wanted words changed for the different sides of the Atlantic (for example: crib and cot, nappy and diaper) and when I wanted them the same (which was most of the time). There's a sentence about the naming of ghouls in the UK version and not in the US version (because the US editor thought it was obvious, and the UK editor didn't).

...

Lots of messages from people telling me they're having difficulty finding copies of The Graveyard Book, even in shops that have it for sale -- apparently some Barnes and Nobles and Borders (and some other bookshops) haven't put it on the New Arrivals shelves but have just shelved a few copies in the children's area, or somewhere else (eg."An FYI on the new book's availability in the chain stores. I checked at the Borders in downtown Scottsdale and they couldn't even find the four copies they supposedly had in stock. According to their info, The Graveyard Book is being shelved in the Mystery/Suspense Independent Reader section.") If any Borders or Barnes and Noble people can shed any light on this, I'd love to know more.

...

I came across this and thought you might be interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRYXNk-qZAs

erick

I am. Cannot wait to see it.

What is stopmotion animation? I'm promoting Coraline to my teacher friends and have no idea what this is. I'm sure it's related to animation but what is it?

Bests,
Patricia

It's animation where you make something and then move it a little between exposures to create the illusion of movement. There's an article about Coraline at http://news.toonzone.net/article.php?ID=26423 which may explain more. (And an interview with Henry Selick here.)

Liebe Neil,

I was looking around online and saw these two prints on a website from the wonderful Todd Klein, and was just going to ask about them....

http://kleinletters.com/BuyStuffTop.html

Are these posters actually signed by you and Alan, and are they both original prints? It almost seems like $20 for each is too good to be true.

They're originals and signed by us, yes. According to this excellent interview with Todd, he has about 100 of the Alan print left, and about 200 of mine...

......

This made me happy, and changed my mind about something...

Mr. Gaiman

I am writing you as a fan, something I must admit I rarely ever do as it feels a bit to me like I'm bothering you.

I do however feel the need to write you, to thank you for two things, the first is for your story telling. Not simply your writing of books, but your reading them as well. I love listening to a well told story, and you have an ability to keep my normally wandering mind enthralled for hours.

The second reason I write is because I watched Stardust the other night, and in the extras packaged with the DVD you spoke about feeling a bit guilty because something that was a simple idea in your head became the work of many many craftsmen.

Well sir, I write you to tell you, that you have absolutely no reason to feel even a slight hint of guilt. I am a carpenter, and while I have never had a chance to work on a movie based on one your books, I have worked others. I have built storefronts, carriages, castles, and Japanese bridges. I have made world war two bunkers, and the offices and layers every kind of hero, villain, or overworked office drone imaginable. And let me tell you, I would never want to do anything else.

If you weren't around to dream up flying pirate ships, people like me would be stuck building conservative and proper things, like little rectangles to hold books. Not that there is anything wrong with rectangles to hold books, but like every man who has ever been a 7 year old boy, I'd rather be building a flying pirate ship.

On behalf of carpenters everywhere you keep thinking 'em up, and we'll keep trying to build them.

..........
And on Monday I'm reading the first half of Chapter Seven in Los Angeles -- actually in Santa Monica. Details at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/10/neil-gaiman-rea.html Labels: completely abandons the idea of writing lots of labels and goes to bed instead, Graveyard Book tour

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drone,mondays,sevens,wandering,dreams

Apple Juice Mystery