I just read that Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Melon professor who did the “last lecture” passed away last week. You can read the article at Carnegie Melon and watch the lecture here. It will change your perspective on life. 
“It’s like I waited my whole life or this one night. It’s gonna be me you and the dance floor. ‘Cuz we only got one night. Double your pleasure. Double your fun.” I have decided that Forever by Chris Brown is the anthem for August.
The conference(s) are finished (w00t). I get to spend the next month disconnecting the wireless APs, going through all of the email/stuff that I ignored and attempt to have some type of a summer vacation with D.G. I am guessing that we will attempt to go camping and hopefully go to T. to visit the little guy. I was supposed to be going to Japan in September but I cancelled my flight tonight. With D.G. spending three weeks in Italy and our schedules the last six weeks we haven’t had the chance to spend any time together so while I would like to go back I think I will wait until we can go together.
I finally finished encoding all of my DVDs. I have to go through my archives to see when I started but it feels like quite a while. I will probably start putting some of the TV shows on the USB drive but there is only 1TB so I don’t think everything will fit. I suppose we don’t need Stargate.
You know, I honestly hadn’t thought a lot about the Olympics until I stumbled upon images of anti-terrorism exercises by Chinese military and police. I suppose I should also point out (although I believe I mentioned it in an earlier post) I am a huge fan of “Big Picture” news. It just makes everything more interesting.
Environmental Graffiti has 30 seriously incredible abstract satellite images. The links to the additional pages are a little difficult to find with all of the comments so you can click here to see page two and three. Wow.
TimesOnline has a list of the 20 greatest movie endings (may contain spoilers). I don’t know who compiled their list but anybody who included “The Blair Witch Project” needs to have their head examined. Their #1 is acceptable though. Here is my list, in no particular order… Usual Suspects, The Mist, Smokin’ Aces (the musical score anyways), Se7en, Empire Strikes Back, Boondock Saints, Le Grand Bleu, Revolver, Fight Club (or anything else by M. Night), The Prestige, The Game, Suicide Kings, Reservoir Dogs, Magnolia, Unforgiven, Das Boot, Blade Runner (Director’s Cut with the soliloquy by Roy), Basic, The Machinist, Eastern Promises. I imagine if I looked through my DVDs I would most likely come up with a completely different list but these will do for now.
Wow. Here is a crazy video of a (very stupid) photographer being struck by lightning. I don’t know what she expected to happen standing at the top of a hill with a camera in one hand and holding a railing with the other. Brilliant.
Finally. I know most of you thought it was just my OCD but here is logical evidence as to why there is only one right way to put a toilet paper roll. Lookin’ good.
I received what was supposed to be a “shiny” new Xbox 360 in the mail last week and let’s just say that things didn’t go exactly as planned. I plugged in everything and turned it on (wanting to see how it looked with the new TV) and it ended up having the exact same symptoms as the one I sent back. I called Microsoft support and was almost instantly transferred to a a supervisor who was just as surprised as I was that they shipped a Xbox 360 that didn’t work. I will try again tomorrow when Purolator shows up and hopefully they next one works.
Walt Disney has released the short cartoon that plays before WALL-E. We haven’t seen either yet but I thought I would link it here for anyone who is interested.
Balakov has some incredible lego versions of classic photographs. You need to check out the photographs of the “setup”, it is quite impressive to see how he duplicated the scene(s).