Awesome!

I've reached that age where I now look in the mirror and wonder where the old fart that's staring back at me came from and how the hell he got into the apartment, so I can definitely relate to this wonderful series of photos from photographer Tom Hussey:

Happy Halloween!

My friend Jay has been collecting these and posting them to his Facebook account all week. I'd can't provide a proper attribution link, but I can thank him for letting me steal them.

 

Blogger Meetup!

It took nearly seven years, but I finally met fellow blogger Erik and his husbear in person tonight.

Erik and Robert are on a semi-cross country adventure to Las Vegas and they made a small detour through Denver to meet up with Ben and I.

It was fun, but much too short of a meeting. Ben and I had been talking about making a road trip next summer down to Pea Ridge so Erik could ink both of us; I think it's now a definite plan.

We Live in Amazing Times

Even if it's exorbitantly expensive at this point…

World renowned electronics manufacturer Philips has announced today that it will be exclusively launching its "Hue" web-enabled lighting system through the Apple Store starting from tomorrow. The new system from Philips offers energy saving LED lights that can replace your existing bulbs and they can then be controlled from your iPhone or iPad.

Building on its innovation capabilities, today Philips unveils hue, the world's smartest web-enabled LED home lighting system. Philips hue signals a new era in home lighting both in the way we think about and experience light in our homes. It allows you to create and control the light using your smartphone or tablet. Bringing endless possibilities to help you get creative and help you personalize your lighting to suit yours and your family's lifestyle, Philips hue is available exclusively from Apple stores from 30th October. A starter pack includes three bulbs that simply screw into your existing lamps, and a bridge that you plug into your home Wi-Fi router. Simply download the hue app to start experiencing light in a completely new way.

Once you have your system installed you can fire up the iPhone or iPad app and customize the lighting in your home to your hearts content. You can change the color of the light, control and monitor lighting of your home from anywhere in the world, set up timers and even use light as your wake up call.

The Philips Hue certainly looks like a very nice way to add some home lighting automation to your home. If you want to get hold of some, you can buy them exclusively through the Apple Store starting October 30th. They will come in a starter kit which includes three bulbs and the interface that needs to be connected to your home router; this starter kit will cost $199. Once you have the starter kit, you can add in extra bulbs at a cost of $59 per bulb. The system can currently support a maximum of 50 bulbs.

Source: Philips

But is it Art?

You know what's depressing? Discovering a 99-cent piece of software that applies an effect to photographs that I've spent the last two decades of my life perfecting with paint and brush on canvas.

A friend of mine remarked that the finished products are similar, but lack the life and sparkle of my paintings. Agreed. But still…

I guess I should really consider it a blessing in disguise; I can apply the effect to the photograph I want to work from before I start painting and then use that as a guide as to where to make the tone differentiations in the painting (the hardest part of my whole process).

Teh St00pid, It BURNS

To be filed under Religion Spoils Everything

From TUAW:

And now for your daily dose of overreaction.

Extreme Orthodox Christians in Russia have upped their complaints about Apple's iconic logo, according to CNet. This specific group of Orthodox Christians say that Apple's logo represents a "blasphemous" attack on the church since it can be seen as a representation of the Christian mythology of Satan tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.

As CNet points out, the uproar correlates to other religious/political issues happening in Russia right now — namely the jailing of punk band Pussy Riot for its protest against the Russian Orthodox Church and its (and other secularist's) assertions that the Church has the goal of creating a clerical police state.

This isn't the first time Apple's logo has been associated with Satan, and there's plenty of other crazy examples out there (jump to the 2:40 mark in this video) but this is something that Apple should conceivably be worried about. Anti-blasphemy laws are currently being proposed in Russia which, should they pass, could theoretically bar Apple from selling products with its logo on them in the country.

First Major Snow of the Season

The roads were actually pretty clear, so I probably could've driven to work today, but I knew I had to make a dry run at some point to see how long it actually took me to get to work on public transit from our new place.

Surprisingly it takes about the same length of time as from the old place. The difference is I have a very nice half mile walk to the train station instead of having to deal with a bus transfer.

Ouch.

Microsoft shoots…and misses. Again.

Gizmodo:

In the end though, this is nothing more than Microsoft's tablet. And a buggy, at times broken one, at that, whose "ecosystem" feels more like a tundra. There's no Twitter or Facebook app, and the most popular 3rd party client breaks often. The Kindle app is completely unusable. There's no image editing software. A People app is supposed to give you all the social media access you'd ever need, but It's impossible to write on someone's Facebook wall through the People app, Surface's social hub; the only workaround is to load Internet Explorer. Blech. Something as simple as loading a video requires a jumbled process of USB importing, dipping in and out of the stripped-down desktop mode, opening a Video app, importing, going back into the Video app, and then playing. What.

BGR:

Imagine booting up an iPad for the first time, seeing the OS X desktop exactly as it appears on a MacBook, and then finding out you cannot run any OS X software on the device. As odd as that scenario sounds, that is exactly the situation Microsoft is facing with the next-generation Windows OS…

BuzzFeed:

I've been waiting a long time for somebody to produce tablets and phones that are lock, stock and barrel better than what Apple's been making since the first iPhone. Every year, somebody gets closer. Surface doesn't get close enough. The thing is, Surface is supposed to be so much more than just Microsoft's iPad alternative, the Other Tablet. It may very well be one day. It has everything it needs to be that. But today it's just another tablet. And not one you should buy.