I came across some amazing photos of the F-117 Stealth Fighter today. They were taken at the Royal International Air Tattoo in 2002 in England.

From the site:

The F-117 is a little bigger than the initial impression you get—it’s about the same size as an F-15 Eagle. It has a whole range of tricks to make it stealthy, starting with the dark, low contrast paint scheme which makes it so difficult to see at night (or photograph during the day), it’s covered in radar-absorbent materials and its very shape is intended to deflect radar away from the radar station. Its two jet engines are quiet and produce very little smoke, and the outlets from the engines, visible at the rear of the aircraft, mix cool air with the hot exhaust to reduce the type of heat signature that a heat-seeking missile could lock on to. The unusual “butterfly” tail is designed to shield the exhausts so missiles can’t see them.

See some more cool F-117 Stealth Fighter photos at RIAT 2002. If this topic interests you, you might want to check out Richard Seaman’s index of airshow photographs.

Enjoy the neat, if at times extremely strange, special effects in The White Stripes music video Denial Twist.

New Scientist put out an article outlining 11 steps that you can take to improve your brain. I might be a little skeptical of any panacea like pills, but some of their tips seem downright inspired. From the article:

It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had—you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

11 Steps to a Better Brain.

Back in February a clever group known as Improv Everywhere decided to do an experiment to see how a bathroom attendant working in a fast food restaurant would go over. They chose one of the world’s most promonent McDonald’s—one located in the heart of Times Square and they came home with some very amusing stories.

Definitely worth a chuckle: McDonald’s Bathroom Attendant.

One great thing about coming home for the holidays is meeting up with many of my old friends. Since I had been making a habit out of not coming to Medicine Hat for Christmas the last few years I’ve really lost touch with many of them. It has been great to catch-up and discover how people have changed and what has happened to them since high school.

This afternoon I went out with my friend Linnsie, and tonight I went out with Janie and her friends. I’ve had a great day—I ran into four different guys that I used to play basketball with in high school, one of them even treated us to lunch! What a great surprise. Happy Holidays indeed.

Last week Slate’s Seth Stevenson published an article about Spike Jonze’s “Pardon Our Dust” Gap ad. There are two versions of this ad—the much cooler Jonze-approved version that I found on the internet and which never played on TV, and the totally gutless Gap-marketing-execs approved version, (linked in the Slate article) which uses a musical cut called “Don’t Stand Still” instead of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the mischievous scoring from Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” that Jonze used.

Stevenson explains that a Gap spokesperson claimed to have “tried several variations” of the ad, settling on the one they thought worked best. But it causes me to wonder, did The Gap not use Jonze’s version because they thought it was too much on its own wavelength? Perhaps it just plain scared them.

Admittedly, Jonze’s version doesn’t really deal with, much less convey excitement about, the idea of a forthcoming renovation of the Gap stores. What it does is comically express a fierce loathing of the Gap brand and, as some have suggested, a distain for all corporate chain stores everywhere.

However, Stevenson feels that “what the company needs is a piece of marketing that suggests radical changes are afoot—that the Gap brand is about to tear itself down to its foundations and be reborn” He boldly wonders, “Did Gap not see the possibilities? Were they too scared to go for broke?” The answer is that Gap executives saw exactly what the ad portrayed and consequently squashed it’s distribution. They aren’t ready for a complete brand restructuring—which this ad would have been perfect for. With that in mind please enjoy the internet leaked and Spike Jonze approved, Director’s cut Gap Ad.

A folk/rock singer named Jonathan Coulton has created a really cool music video using Creative Commons licensed Flickr Photos. It’ll put a smile on your face.

Jonathan Coulton’s Flickr.mov

Update: here is the big 17mb version Flickr.mov

One of the reasons it has taken me so long to quit using Blogger is that I have not wanted to lose all my previous posts and comments. There is an easy way to make the transition using the plugin and instructions from Andy Skelton’s Import Blogger plugin.

There are a lot of other plugins that I want to install—the possibilities are tremendous, but I’m waiting for the new version of WordPress to come out (apparently sometime this week) and then I’ll go to town and post a list of the ones I like.

Wishing you all the best! I hope you have a Merry Christmas—or whatever holiday you celebrate in your part of the world.

Here is a photo of the “not-so-white” Christmas that we’re having in Southern Alberta.

There are about a dozen people in the world who have done it—cloud surfing on a wave of air which forms around a cloud called the morning glory.

“The cloud is in the shape of an enormous tube and rolls in at first light over the coast of Queensland. It offers what some call the most exciting gliding experience in the world.”

Cloud Surfing.

I know a least a couple of movie addicts that will just love the Double Feature Finder. It’s a service that allows you to find movies in your area that start back-to-back. It appears to only work with American Zip codes, but if your in the states and love movies… enjoy!

An interesting video I came across this morning that shows magician Criss Angel, on his television show Mindfreak. He preforms an incredible magic trick in which he appears to go through a solid glass window.

Criss Angel goes through glass.

I’m off to Medicine Hat for the next week enjoying time with my family over the Christmas holidays. Please feel free to share what you’re doing to celebrate the holidays in the comments. You don’t even need a Blogger account!

One thing I just realized about converting the blog into php pages is that if I erase the old .htm pages I will lose ALL of my google PageRank and probably won’t be indexed properly in Google’s search results.

Does anyone know if there is anything that can be done about this?

Update: 25 December 2005
So what I did to fix the problem was to enable Permalinks under the WordPress options tab. This consequently fixed my problem of named archives, but somehow at the same time it broke the search tool so that it would only work when on my ‘home’ view.

I found a google cache with the answer and I’m posting it here to help clear up the problem for others.

On my site, the search works fine when you’re on my “home” view. However, when you go onto a page that I created, the search seems to fail. How can I get it so that if I’m trying to search on a page instead of my main page, it’ll search the main pages?

I think it has something to do wtih the fact that I’m now in www. myurl.com/pages/ instead of www. myurl.com so it can’t search properly. Anyone know how I can fix this? Thanks!

Posted: 2005-02-25 15:22:51 # Kafkaesqui
Member
Go into the search’s form tag (in page.php if you’re using this for your Pages template) and change the action value to:

action=”/”

or:

action=”/index.php”

I went into the searchform.php template and changed <form id="searchform" method="get" action="< ?php echo $PHP_SELF; ?>"> to <form id="searchform" method="get" action="/index.php"></form> and it worked! Hope that helps.

This is my first post from within WordPress. I have to say I really like the new interface a lot better. Moving from Blogger to WordPress also reminds me of the kind of freedom one gets when he moves out of his parents basement for the first time.

Blogger is great—when you’re just a kid-blogger but I think there comes a time when every blog publisher realizes that databased driven content is the only way to go. So thanks Blogger for everything, but I’m moving up in the world.