While I’ve been aware of the media furor over Abdel Basset al-Megrahi’s release and return to Libya, only today did I happen across something that made me sit up and take interest in the affair. Read ahead.

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Felicia Day is such a cutie. I first watched her in the excellent web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (a Joss Whedon production starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and the aforementioned) and was impressed that even amongst those two larger-than-life actors she held her own.

Prior to Dr. Horrible, Ms. Day was already Internet famous for creating and acting in the web series The Guild, which is the fairly unfunny story of Felicia and her wacky World of Warcraft guildmates. I’m sure that any WoWers reading this already know about the show, but if you’ve somehow missed out it’s worth a try.

I think the story that in my mind cements Felicia Day as being utterly awesome is the story of how she and Tycho of Penny Arcade met at PAX ’08. PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) has strangely enough turned into the largest video game convention in North America, and Felicia was on hand for reasons both work and recreational.

Her first meeting with Tycho resulted in this conversation after the fact. Having either kept up with the strip while the show rolled on, Felicia then came back around and… Well, I’ll just quote Tycho directly:

Here’s the act captured on film for posterity. Point is, any girl who’s got a sense of humour like that deserves all the geek love she can get.

One of the things that’s floated around in my mind for years but only found substance when I read it in Freakonomics is that people respond to incentives, both social and economic, as readily as markets do.

This editorial is a Lorne Gunter classic – meaning that it raises an interesting point, and then buries it under an avalanche of tired anti-liberal rhetoric. It doesn’t mean the point he brought up isn’t worth pondering, though. Last Friday, Mr. Gunter took note of the disincentives our national Employment Insurance system provides to Canadians.

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The Week‘s Brad DeLong provided an interesting history lesson on the first use of interventionist government policy in the interests of national financial stability.

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The first Google Android OS cell phone, the T-Mobile G1, is considered a best seller by anyone’s standards, with 1 million devices sold in just 61 days (a faster pace than the first iteration of the Apple iPhone). While I’ve personally been pleased with its performance during my long-term testing of the device, I’ve noticed that many people I talk to are instantly dismissive of the the G1 – considering it a flawed first effort.

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So I was doing some Web browsing before leaving for work this morning on the RedFlagDeals.com Forums, trying to find links to local art shops I could buy frames at, and came across a post asking where frames could be found for his The Rasterbator project. His inspiration were these two images:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? The Rasterbator’s website offers free software that you can download and use to “create huge, rasterized images from any picture. Add an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.”

As a big fan of the now-concluded television series Battlestar Galactica, my inspiration was this:

Here’s how my attempt worked out.

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The DIY arts and crafts website ArtsCow.com is having a great promotion right now – you can purchase one-sided personalized dog tags at only $0.99/each with free shipping. Just use checkout code 99DOGTAG (expires 11/20/2008) to effect the promotion.

I got to thinking, instead of the fairly lame portraits people have been putting on theirs, why not use a military dog tag as the design? After some quick research on the font used for this purpose I came up with a list of simple instructions:

1. Grab the TrueType font “Kredit” from 1001Fonts.com for free (local mirror).
2. Unzip the ZIP file you downloaded. Right-click KREDIT1.TTF and select “Install”. If this option is not available, navigate to your Control Panel, select Fonts, and select “Install New Font” from the menu.
3. Create a new 1500 x 900 (W x H) image in Adobe Photoshop. Yes, I know that the dimensions are reversed – don’t worry about it. We’re going to rotate the image when we’re done.
4. Lay out the personal information onto the image using the Kredit font – I recommend the font size of 120px. For an accurate representation of a real tag, refer to this page on ArmyDogTags.com. Finally, rotate the image 90 degrees clockwise. Alternatively, use this Adobe Photoshop PSD file I’ve created as a template.
5. Save image as a JPEG. Upload to ArtsCow.com. Purchase!

I’ve enclosed the sample image ArtsCow.com provided me after I followed the five steps above and uploaded the design to their site. Pretty neat, isn’t it? You can order about a dozen for your twelve closest friends and still end up spending less than twenty bucks total for a personalized gift that people will hang on to for months to come.

Written in conjunction with Christabel Jackson. Original review appears at The Panic Manual.

Toronto – With my New Year’s resolution of making 2008 my busiest year for concerts ever fresh in my mind, when I found a pair of tickets to Goldfrapp at the Danforth Music Hall offered to me at cost price, I quickly made an offer. One round trip to Royal York subway station and $90 in cash later and the rights to potentially see Alison Goldfrapp wear a horse’s tail on stage were mine.

I’ll tell you right now: The horse’s tail thing didn’t play out. Sorry. It’s history for real. It was still a good show though, and a polka-dotted muumuu made its appearance, so keep reading.

The Danforth Music Hall is a pretty ideal venue to watch a show like Goldfrapp. It’s large – slightly below the capacity of Massey Hall – but with far more comfortable permanent seats. Aside from the orchestra seating area, there’s a balcony for latecomers to use, as well as four box seats that are probably strictly for show. Seating was unassigned and first-come, first-serve, so my concert-going partner Christabel and I quickly established ourselves three quarters of the way back on the right side of the orchestra section. A well-stocked bar in the lobby ensured that drinks of every type were available, but bringing anything other than water bottles into the seating areas was restricted. I wasn’t in the mood for anything other than Dasani-branded Brampton tap water anyways. Shortly thereafter we were underway.

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I’ve mentioned this technique to a number of people I know and referred them a couple of websites for an explanation. Most of the time I need to then discuss what those explanations meant. This is my attempt to create a simplified explanation of the technique known was “exposing (to the) right”. I thought I’d share it here as well – and create a discussion of its pros and cons.

Introduction

So you’ve become a pretty competent photographer with your digital SLR camera. You know how to balance shutter speed, aperture and ISO to capture the kind of scene you want in your photos. Now it’s time to start looking for efficiencies. How can you capture more detailed, less noisy images with the equipment you already have?

One technique that’s made inroads as referred to as “exposing (to the) right”. The term is named thus because use of the technique leads to the histogram representation of the image being shifted to the right on the X axis (which is mapped to the brightness level of the photo). But to understand why we would want to expose to the right, first we need to learn a little more about how your digital SLR camera captures that image.

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An English professor gave his class an assignment. He said, “Today, we will experiment with a new form of composition called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking and anything you wish to say must be written on the paper. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.”

The following was actually turned in by two of his English students, Rebecca and Gary.

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