Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Using XiaXue as an example, allow me to present 10 simple ways to create your own cult of personality in the blogosphere:

1. Create a unique vocabulary for your posts. If you’re multilingual, cutely misspelling english words will do, or if you only speak one language, feel free to create a good amount of your own words. Just don’t overdoe it. If your writing starts to sound like anything James Joyce, you’ve probably gone too far…
2. Continuously post photos that clearly show just how hot you are, while at the same time complaining how ugly you look in the shots. The subtle contrast will rock your readers. Only post the absolute best photos, followed with the most denigrating self-criticism. People will marvel at how humble and pretty you are, and teenage boys drool…
3. Real bloggers don’t have comments. Real bloggers have additional mammaries on an elk.
4. To keep people reading your really long blog entries, don’t post actual paragraphs of narrative, as people won’t read them all the way through. Really, you just want one, maybe two short sentences to digest at a time. Your readers are like children in kindergarten–don’t assume they can read.
5. 40% of your punctuation should be an exclamation mark (!). The period (.) is outdated and small in comparison. Using more periods only dilutes the effect of the glorious exclamation mark!!!!!!!!!!!
6. When there’s something to argue about, present side A, side B, and side Q, and then mix them all together until you can’t tell which one is which and don’t know which you prefer. There’s power in what is unknown and illogical. Your readers will think you are wise as they skim over the post…
7. If people aren’t paying enough attention to you, drop a note about your newest self-created fan club, or a professional photoshoot with makeup and clothes, or even mention your great exclusive book deal. Dropping bling makes your blog 100% authentically better than everyone else’s.
8. Be really rude to your readers. The more you insult them, the more they’ll return… but only if you prefice your rant with “I don’t mean to be rude…”
9. Get hacked, a lot. Getting hacked shows how popular you are.
10. To bring a sense of reality to your blog, occasionally talk about friends or family in a wistful tone before you go back to posting hot pictures of yourself schmoozing with high society.

Try it–it really works.

There are few things that annoy me about IE 7.00.5112. First off, it’s not all that great. I just don’t feel overwhelmed when I run it, you know? I definitely had high expectation when I downloaded it, but those are all in vain. Instead, I have the following Internet Explorer 7 gripes:

1) The base color of the tabs is different than the rest of the application’s base color:

2) The tabs bar has an extra tab nubbin to open a new tab:

3) The refresh button has been placed seemingly randomly:

4) The standard windows UI layout of putting the file menu at the top has been broken. The file menu is now underneath the tabs:

5) The phishing filter makes no attempt to prevent me from reporting Microsoft.com:

Phishing Filter Feedback: Confirmation
Thank you for reporting www.microsoft.com/ as a suspected phishing site. Your feedback is important and helps us to better protect customers from phishing.

You can read more about their laughable filter here: msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/MSPhishingFilterWP.asp

6) The phishing filter thinks submitting user information via POST is bad:

7) Internet Explorer will close when you hit close, no matter how many tabs you have open. You can even watch it kill the tabs one by one on a slower machine:

8) The search is automatically Google. Why doesn’t the IE Team promote MSN? The tagline here is “Microsoft loves Google:”

9) There is a lot of wasted space on the links bar. For some reason, every link appears to have a min-width setting that makes them overly wide. So, the links bar that was half empty before in IE6 is now running off the screen:

For some other interesting takes on IE7, you can read Is Internet Explorer 7 blocking Google?, IE7 CSS Updates, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 Tips & Tricks, and The Real Reason Microsoft Won’t Support CSS2 in IE7.

This post is all about my blue eyes. I took the following macro mode photos on my P-200 and enhanced them in photoshop. I’ll post them below, with an explanation of all what changed from real photo to photoshopped masterpiece.

This is my favorite. I desaturated and lightened the area around the iris, and then layered another layer of blue ontop. Beautiful.

The top portion was blurred, smoothed, and airbrushed into an orange gradient, while the eye itself was smartblurred and airbrushed. The eyebrows and lashes were not blurred, and stray hairs were pruned away.

Here, I used photoshop to selectively layer an ultra-sharpened image and the original, which I used as a hue mask. I erased some of the skin hues to allow violets and yellows to shine through.

There’s been a lot of news about the IE7 Beta 1. First, I can’t give you anything because I’m waiting for Cornell to get back to me about my MSDN subscriber ID. Second, that hasn’t stopped IE7 from leaking:

troyus.negimaki.com/blog/index.php/2005/07/28/windows-vista-ie7-betas-leak-to-web/

Less than 24 hours after Microsoft announced the release of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 to testers and MSDN subscribers, both betas have leaked to Internet sites and newsgroups along with a crack for Windows Product Activation, according to BetaNews sources.

The official source weighs in on “how to get it” here:

blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/27/444004.aspx

The beta versions of Windows Vista and IE7 that have just released should be interesting to developers and IT professionals. For this reason, the beta is available to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants.

However, first impressions are hardly any good:

www.ctomer.com/?p=57

I’ve just given IE7 Beta1 a quick test drive and I am bitterly disappointed. While it seems that they’ve finally gotten round to fixing the problems in rendering PNGs. Only 5 years too late. It seems like they’ve done nothing to improve IE’s CSS.

webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_07.html#a000540

IE7 is in beta. Not only that, but it’s early days yet. So it’s a little bit premature to start complaining that things don’t work. I mean, why have a beta, much less one that’s made it out first to developers and press if not precisely to get their feedback pronto? Brian Goldfarb, Product Manager for the Web Tools Team and Microsoft’s liaison to WaSP pointed this out in a conversation we had today while trying to address developer concerns as they’ve been pouring in.

Let the reviews and comments roll in! Anyone of you tried it yet?

It struct me that the modern man carries around a lot of excess junk, so I created a Flickr photoset themed on the stuff that I carry with me everyday. Here are the items, side by side with a reference picture:

A $200 london fog leather men’s jacket

A $40 designer shirt

$80 for pants that create little silky waves as you walk

When feet just aren’t good enough, $60 white New Balance sneakers

At least a $200 mp3 player. At least, man.

For candid moments, a sony P-200 with 1 GB of RAM will add $450 in weight to your body.

Motorola v400, $120

Why do we, in our modern age, need to wear $1,200 worth of equipment, clothing, accessories, and electronics on our bodies? Are they status symbols? No. I use all of these tools every day. Do I need them? No! I would be just fine in cheap clothes, with no mp3 player. Why, I could sing on my way to work instead of listening to the latest Koda Kumi hit. What then is this capitalist need to buy? Why do we consume?