maniacal rage

I just watched Enemy of the State for the first time since I saw it when it came out in 1998. Wow. It's amazing what kind of ridiculous crap you can spew about technology and such when no one in the world knows yet how things work. Two choice moments:

• The government computer guys are watching a "surveillance" video from the lingerie store when Will Smith's character is slipped the video player. They freeze the tape and then someone says, "Rotate 70 degrees" and the image rotates—THE STILL IMAGE ROTATES—to a new viewing angle. Once rotated, they still continue to do stuff with it, including having the computer "hypothesize" about how the bag changed shape.
• When Gene Hackman's character is describing what they can do to fight back, he says that combining a cell phone with a laptop is a powerful tool. Then he magically pulls up the ESN number of a congressman's cellphone (without wifi... hmmm) and programs it into his. "What do you get?" Apparently, you immediately start hearing what the congressman is saying into his phone. It's magic.

Honestly, it was fun to watch just for some of the ridiculous lines and situations.

I just bought a few shirts from Design By Hümans, which for some reason I had never seen before today. It's in the same vein as Threadless and such, although I found myself liking more of the designs at DBH.

The interesting thing is that after you buy shirts, you're instantly given a discount code for the next purchase. Even cooler is that it can be used by anyone else as well, which means I can tell you that for the next 10 days you can save 15% on shirts by using the code I was given: QXMPFL.

If you end up buying a shirt I also get $2 off my next purchase, which isn't too shabby. Check them out.

I've just released a maintenance build of xPad to deal with a few Leopard issues. Please download xPad, version 1.2.6. This release solves all but one visual bug, in which document title labels in the drawer become lighter after changing documents a few times. When I have a while to play with it, I hope to fix that bug as well. In the mean time, it's completely usable with this release.

And, of course, it's still free.

As with the previous two designs, I've made iPhone wallpapers from the background image of this one. You can find two versions in my collection.

In the long run I plan to add more photo-based wallpapers, but abstract imagery is so much better for me that I can't help but add new images like these.