Saw this Flash-based 3d xml viewer on kottke.org. Fun to look at, but like so many 3d visualizations of tree data, I don't know how useful it really is.

The Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus is much cooler.   .:

at: 7:23 PM

The comic artist David Rees is back with commentary on Enron. Rees was on WBUR's The Connection yesterday with a couple other artists for a very slacker discussion about the significance of political cartoons. Rees was all like, I'm just some guy; I did these while working my temp job...

If by any chance you missed Rees's hi-larious strips about the war in Afghanistan, Get your war on, you have got to check it out.   .:

at: 2:07 PM

A month or two back a few of us in the office created a game we called, GoogleHits, where in we sought out popular journalistic phrases of the day with high Google hit counts. Example - "cautiously optimistic" yields 44,300 hits. We didn't really make formal rules, but the idea is to use exact phrase search (eg. put it in quotes), and you get more style points for longer phrases with big hits (eg. "terrorist mastermind osama bin laden" yields only 10,700 but 5 words gets more style points). It was amusing for a while.

It turns out a guy named Gary Stock invented Google whacking, which is basically the exact opposite of our GoogleHit game. The idea is to pick a two word combination (not necessarily a phrase) that yields just 1 hit in google. There are detailed rules for calculating your score - check out his web site - Googlewhacking: The Search for The One True Googlewhack. A quick google check of "google whack" yields 2750 hits...   .:

at: 10:30 AM

Modern medicine, combined with inexpensive computing is so cool.

This is a picture of our daughter at approximately, minus 12 weeks old (28 weeks of gestation). The image is a 3d surface rendered from a time series of ultrasound data - all whipped up in real time on the PC in the ob's office.

Hint for reading the image: that is her right hand draped across her face, and her left hand behind her head. Click to view a larger image. Aww.   .:

at: 4:52 PM

I certainly don't agree with everything David Coursey writes, but today's column advising AOL to sit down, and shut up is a welcome voice of reason.

Speaking of AOL - have you received the latest AOL CD in a big black DVD-style case in the mail yet? What a waste. I sent mine back to them, "Refused, Return to sender", after cutting a notch out of the disc to render it useless.   .:

at: 9:45 AM

Happy New Year!
After a long hiatus, the Coffee Czar web log is back. My last entry is an embarrassing 9 months old. Ah well, I was busy. But here's to a New Year, new things, and a new, new optimism. I'm committing to posting at two or three times a week. Feel free to call me on it if I renege.

I'm an uncle again! Today marks the birthday of my brand-new niece, April Rose. She came in around 3:27am EDT at 7lbs 2oz. and nearly 19 inches.

Just to keep you coming back, here are a few of my favorite photography oriented sites: the venerable Philip Greenspun's Photo.net, the remarkably up-to-date Digital Photography Review, and my local favorite, the Photographic Center Northwest, which is where I learned to develop and print black and white photos.   .:

at: 6:52 PM