mahalo.

With some interesting timing, this article came out on IBM developer works. It basically details how to implement, in Javascript, a slideshow w/ the Ken Burns effect:
Ken Burns Image Slideshow HOWTO

The Ken Burns effect is the one seen on Mac slideshow/screensavers where the images fade in an out and slowly zoom in/out.

The interesting thing about this is the timing. I was just recently playing with my own image wrapper Javascript classes and had a couple of test pages I was playing around with here and here. If a non-coder actually does look at them, it might take you a little guessing as to how to get anything to work. They really were just proofs of concepts though, so I’m not going to bother explaining all that much how to get things set up.

I like their implementation for the effects better though, as they encapsulate the effect made on each object as a separate class implementing a pretty straightforward interface, whose main function is to implement the effect in terms of what it would be like if it were “x percent” done.

It’s a pretty neat way of looking at it and I’m going to have to try it out.

A deluge of hockey clips, but this one is damn funny. I’m not sure what it was made for, but it is of Jules Winnfield (the preacherman in pulp fiction) as a hockey coach. Fictitiously recollected by Chris Chelios of the Detroit Red Wings.

“Do *I* look like a b!@#$?”
silence
“DO *I* look like a b@#$?”
silence
“Then why’re you all skating for me like b!@#$es?”

“And where I from, they call this the Inglewood Jack!!… What’d I say???”
“Inglewood Jack!”
“That’s the way!”
“Inglewood Jack!”
“Yeah!”

They’re real cool looking. This one was actually used to score a goal in an important game.

This one is just in a skills competition, but it’s flashy and pretty.

w00t. Best job in America according to Money.

Pure nerd post ahead.

This lets you watch video embedded in a web browser in linux like you can on windows mplayer plugin for mozilla. Very useful. mplayer will let you download wmvs and avis, etc and watch, but for the longest time, I couldn’t watch Sharks highlights because they were all streaming. The mplayer plug-in will actually let you do this.

Useful plugins for firefox here.

To tide us over until season 3:

And I dunno. Part of me likes this too:

Oh yes.

Isn’t this awesome? Steph and Grace brought a can of these back for me from LA. I can’t stop grinning when I think of it.

We were also talking about how the Tuesday hockey team I play on hasn’t changed its name in a while, and has a ridiculously generic name of “Team X”. Kelly had the ingeniousness of using this for the name of the team. Yes, that’s right. “Dave’s Burning Nuts” - now coming to a rink near you.

From there it was all over. I was thinking, we could totally use a picture of the can as our team logo. And then, instead of having names on the back of our jersey’s, I’d just make all the left side players wear “LEFT” and all the right side players wear “RIGHT”. The forwards would be “wing nuts” and the defense would be “d nuts”. The goalie… hadn’t thought of a good one yet, but I was thinking “NUTMINDER”. The only downside is if we ever play a team that called themselves “The Nutcrackers”.