Ah, another publication of sorts, but this time in a field I never expected to have any…
In July, I received a mail from Schmap regarding one of my pictures on Flickr. They wanted to include it in their upcoming edition of their guide to Cologne, and placed me on their shortlist. I played around with HDR at that time, and, frankly, I find my other pictures of the Cologne cathedral more appealing. But the colorful window looks natural, while the other images seem a bit artificial. Which is (at least for me) one of the charms of HDR.
Anyway, I accepted their offer. No payment, but hey, I don’t photograph for a living and had nothing to loose… I was shortlisted, and that tickled my pride.
Now it’s official: the Schmap guide for Colone DOES include my picture. And I think the entire idea behind Schmap is pretty good. You can have maps, guides, tips, images - even on the iPhone/iPod. Very neat, check it out.
Oh, and here are the links to the Cologne cathedral, for the PC, and the iPhone version.
Have you ever wondered what you would look like in the world of Springfield? Well, wonder no more. Thanks to “Simpsonize Me“, you can now find out how you look in yellow.
To clarify this now: the site is not some personality test, that checks which character you are. There are other sites for this (on a related note, my Firefly character is Simon Tam; who whould have thought).
Admittedly, this page has probably been blogged a hundred time or more. Sometime I am just too slow to catch up.
All you have to do, is upload a photo (frontal shot in color) to the site, answer a few questions, and then tweak the result.
Ok, honestly, you could save yourself the photo upload. I guess the base for every person is the same, and there are a limited number of aspects you can change (hair, eyebrows, ears, and so on).
I also had to resort to some create image manipulation. Or not so creative. The site simply does not let you choose the beard color. At least I have not found that option.
In the end, you can end up with pretty… uh… interesting results. Well, at least my simpsonized characters has some resemblance to me. So go check it out, and have a laugh.
News from Joss Whedon, the creative head behind several Buffy episodes, Firefly (”the most cancelled show on TV”), and Serenity - a movie I could watch over and over again… especially the River fight scenes… but I digress.
Joss brings us “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog“. Starring Neil Patrick Harris (a.k.a. Doogie Howser) as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion (yes, Malcolm Reynolds) as Captain Rey… er… Hammer, and Felicia Day (Buffy’s Vi) as Penny.
The story (without telling too much) is typically Whedon, so to speak. Dr. Horrible wants to enter the League of evil superheroes, led by Bad Horse — there, you have it. To fulfil his plans, he has to beat his arch nemesis Captain Hammer, who also happens to have caught the eye of Penny. Now Penny is the secret love interest of Dr. Horrible, giving him even more reason to hate (and kill) Captain Hammer.
As the title suggests, there is some singing involved. The music is not too cheesy, and, sorry, not too catchy. But the acting and direction is great. And you can be sure there is a twist at the end.
The first three episodes will be available for free, although the download will be taken down soon. Of course the acts are only available in the US. Pscha! Anyway, enjoy it while it lasts.
Hm, ok, so I did not manage to post as many updates as I wanted. But I did upgrade my Wordpress version. Hooray…
On another note, a colleague at work pointed me to a pretty nifty plugin for Firefox, IE and Safari (what, no Opera? Grmpf!): PicLens.
This nice helper makes image browsing much more fun, and it looks really spectacular. When you search Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, … for images, the results are displayed as a 3D wall. Now you can scroll along this wall, zoom in/out, all with a flick of the mouse.
You could also integrate a server-side implementation into your webpage or blog - there even is a Wordpress plugin. Unfortunately, PHP 5 is required. Which my webspace does not have. Yet.
So, my suggestion is: head over to PicLens, install the plugin, and give it a whirl.
Ok, it has been awhile since the last update. I will blame that on the current job activities. Since I do not really have anything major to report (I have, however, an idea in the back of my head), it gives me chance to test stuff.
For example, this post has been written with Flock, the "social" browser. Meaning it integrates support for a number of Web 2.0 sites, e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. So you can keep track of what your network is doing without having to click through a dozen pages.
Painfully missing though is the integration of Xing - curiously, MySpace is also not present. But no loss there. At least for me.
The first impression is positive. I tried to test a few extensions, but the Flock site is currently revamped. Anyways, if creating posts really works, and the blog integration holds up to the promises (drag&drop media and links to blog them), Flock might just stay for a bit longer on my harddrive.
