Just recently found out about this short film done by Dove (hat tip: Tim O’Reilly). First word out of my mouth: “Wow”. The application of massive amounts of makeup for a photo shoot and post photo-retouching are things we all know about and they certainly should come as no surprise, but how interesting that Dove should choose to tackle it head-on. Because really, how complicit have they been in its practice over the years - never mind still are (you still need to apply massive amounts of makeup for whatever kind of ad your doing).

I applaud Dove’s attempts to try to set things right with The Dove Self-Esteem Fund, but it’s a fine line they walk because they’re right in the middle of the problems they highlight. I look forward to see how this progresses.

Caught another short film on YouTube, and on the fund’s website. Check them out!

Got a bit of bad news today - Arthur C. Clarke has died. I was never much of a fan of Isaac Asimov, but Clarke really spoke to me as a young, geeky kid. He had a terrific imagination and a gift for storytelling. He’s also the source of one of my all-time favorite quotes on technology (one of his Three Laws):

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Thanks, Sir Arthur, and rest in peace.

As previously mentioned, I had trouble getting my head around the concept of Twitter. While I’m still of the same general opinion (Do I really need to know you’re craving anchovies?), I’ve since come around a bit.

While I don’t contribute much (although I suppose I’ve been ramping up as of late), I find it extremely interesting to follow what others send out into the ether. There’s certainly a fair share of boring stuff to sift through, but the gems tend to be quite interesting (for instance, watching John Gruber collecting info before posting to Daring Fireball). It appears as though I can count on one hand the number of people I actually know on Twitter (most of whom don’t seem to be using it as of late), so there’s a vaguely voyeuristic feeling of following the people I don’t personally know. Curiously, of those, the most prolific are in the web design and Mac development crowds.

On a side note, it seems as though there’s a bit of a waning of interest in online personas among the people I personally know (exception: LinkedIn). Methinks it might be just another effect of getting older. All the social networking sites that promised so much ~4 years ago (Friendster, Orkut, etc.) haven’t delivered a compelling reason to stay active on them - from my demographic’s point of view, I suppose, as Brazil seemingly has taken over Orkut. (Disclosure: I’ve deleted my Orkut account out of frustration from getting friend requests in Portuguese and I’m not sure why I haven’t done the same with Friendster, other than “out of sight, out of mind”.) The second wave, MySpace and Facebook, don’t offer much of a compelling argument to join for me - they’re overcrowded with the generation after my own and still don’t deliver a compelling selling point. I remain perplexed when people older than me by at least a decade have official representation on MySpace (1970’s-era rockstars who probably exist in a void of ignorance on behalf of the general membership).

Personal blogs have been withering on the vine as well (yes - I freely point out my own). I know my own reasoning had everything to do with shrinking free time, not out of disinterest. I’ve since purchased a new domain and have ideas for facelifting this blog before moving it to the new domain. I’ve started the 365 project (despite it being on hiatus currently) and continue to come across things that I’d like to share.

I guess where I’m meandering off to with this post is that I do want to follow through on my original plans, but I think I’ll probably augment it with Twitter - I haven’t raided the WordPress plug-ins lately, but I would certainly guess there’s one that will pipe your “tweets” straight to your blog (this will kill the “Random Bits” category of this blog due to the redundancy). I’ve got some free time on my hands now, so I’m hoping to press forward with these changes soon. Stay tuned!

OK, so Peggle might not be enough for you? Try Iconfactory’s Frenzic. A very fast-paced puzzle game with pieces reminiscent of Trivial Pursuit wedges.

Instapaper is a very handy site to have at hand, especially if you’ve got an iPhone (as you can see from above, it’s a very lightweight design). Basically, you create an account, install a droplet in your browsers and as you come across interesting sites you use the droplet to add a link to the site to your account. You then have instant access to a “newspaper” of articles you already want to read whenever you find yourself with time on your hands (such as on public transit with your iPhone). I’ve also found it extremely useful when you find an article or a site at work, you can effortlessly save it for when you get home. (Via Gruber)

OK, when you’re done wasting time with Peggle and want to be productive, CSSEdit is a great tool for web design. The auto-complete prompts that come up as you type CSS are such a great timesaver.

Amazing time-waster warning: Peggle (iPod, Windows). Once you get past the cartoony fantasy part, this is a very addictive game - pinball on steroids. Great fun!

Going and visiting my parents - and all the good Mom home-cooking that comes along with it! (Above is a pic of my parents’ kitchen table).

Well, that was a disaster - tried updating the WP install, but it just went sideways somehow. Dealing with the actual WP update was fine (although tedious going back and forth), but ripping out the database and reinstalling from last Sunday’s backup was a real pain. Fortunately, I managed to undo everything from the update and got back to square one with only one comment casualty. Not sure when I’m going to try this again…

Apologies for the delay in the usual 8:30am posting of the awesome bit today. Yesterday was Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday (Super-Fat Tuesday?) - well, it also turned out to be Layoff Tuesday too, as I’m no longer working for Antec. They’re reorganizing the Marketing department and decided that they no longer wanted to do the reseller channel program I was developing.

So where does this leave me? Well, hopefully not as bad as feared. I’ve been starting to look anyways. Not much to report right now, but if you know of anybody who’s looking for Marketing folks, lemme know!

In the meantime, as you might imagine, priorities have shifted a little with all this. I’ll try to keep up on the project, but I might slip now and again. Hope you understand.

Sorry for the delay in today’s bit - Advanced Audi/VW is the garage we’ve been taking my Passat and now the R32 to. They’re a little on the pricey side as an independent, but they’re totally worth it - extremely knowledgeable, friendly and honest. If you drive German and are looking for a good mechanic in the Bay Area, you can’t go wrong.

Ah, the beauty of timestamping in WordPress. Fantastic feature - really helped me when I was playing catch-up on this project. I’ve been wanting to keep a week’s worth of posts queued up and ready to go on a rolling basis, but sometimes it’s been a bit of a challenge to do that (for instance, I’ve burned through the week-long queue I had going).

No picture this time around - continuing to take in how relatively painless the run up to the ‘rents this past weekend was. About 2.5 hours up, a little less coming home. I guessed that the drive home during the Super Bowl was going to be pretty painless, but I was surprised there wasn’t a mass migration from the Bay Area up to Tahoe to take advantage of all the fresh snow. Looks like I’ve got a plan for next year’s Super Bowl weekend!

In keeping with the “awesome software utilities” theme, I happened to be reminded of this next awesome bit - AppleJack, an opensource tool that helps you run the gamut of troubleshooting from Single User Mode in OS X (I was of course reminded since my PowerBook hiccuped on me today - nothing serious, knock on wood, but still).

Unfortunately, I also found out today that it hasn’t been updated to run on 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard) yet. Managed to use another tool, but things would have run a bit smoother with AppleJack. For those of you who haven’t updated OS X yet, take advantage!

I’ve been meaning to put xScope by ARTIS Software and Iconfactory on this list for a while. It’s a great little application that helps you measure items on your screen - absolutely ideal when doing web design. I used it for the first design of this blog way back when and all my web noodlings since.

The timing actually has worked out pretty great, as v2.0 was just released on Wednesday - if you do any kind of visual design on the Mac, I can’t recommend this tool highly enough! The new “Dimensions” feature (pictured above) is worth the price of admission alone.