I had a great time seeing Max Maven last night at the Center for Inquiry West. Maven is one of the rare performing magicians who bills himself as a mentalist, a once common specialty that has vanished in recent decades. An intimidating presence in black suit and goatee, Maven is a master of the eye […]

Via Drawn!, David at Ironic Sans, demonstrates an amusing technique of embedding images, such as skylines, in the images histogram, so that when you view the levels in Photoshop, or similar software, you get a big surprise!

Here’s Yahoo!’s Ian Rogers lecturing some music industry folks about the problems that plague online music distribution. My favorite quote: …If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON […]

Somewhere there is an email wormhole that is causing me to receive emails like the following one. Hello sir/madam Hello Goodday My name is Bob Smith.I will like to know if you sell banners.If yes.I want you to get me the 30 by 60 inhcesbanner with the color white,the art work should be (HAPPY BIRHTDAY)I […]

Okay, here’s a few things I like about Mash, Yahoo’s new social toy, which rolled out in an invite only beta today. Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! (but not for the Mash team — I work at Yahoo! Music). I did make a bunch of modules for Mash, just for fun, ’cause I’m a nerd. […]

Near the end of last April, I spoke at the Gel (Good Experience Live) conference, in New York. Here is evidence, in the form of a couple of video excerpts. Here’s the first part of my presentation, in which I draw attention to the lowly screen saver and talk about my fascination with random numbers. […]

Today I’ve moved Krazydad from it’s old hosting provider, TotalChoice hosting, to DreamHost. The move has been pretty painless, but if you spot anything broken, let me know. I’ve been using DreamHost for my other website, Coverpop, for a while now, and I like it much better. For about one quarter the price of what […]

Kool Scatcat sent me this photo of actual crop circles. Apparently, in parts of the US, crops are actually grown in circles to optimize irrigation. There is a single sprinkler in the center of each one. UPDATE: Craig Kaplan wrote me the following note Jim, I wanted to pass on a couple of notes regarding […]

There are lots of websites that contain collections of crop circles, and I’ve been using a handful of them. Crop Circle Connector is a community-oriented site which contains an individual page or two for most recent circles. Visitors to the site can file “field reports”, so the site is full of anecdotal information. These anecdotes […]

If you read this blog regularly, you know that a lot of the things I make involve circles. My fascination with circles and radial symmetry has extended to kaleidoscopes, fibonacci spirals, music, card tricks, spinning wheels of lunch, and so on. You may also know that I am prone to develop short term obsessions, which […]