Jeff Milner

Amazing story about a man’s promise to his grandfather.

When I was 9, I caught my grandfather shaving in the bathroom and that is when I saw it: His Camp Number – 58877241.

Not knowing any better, I asked him why he got such a “stupid tattoo”. He told me that he really didn’t want to get it and quickly tried to cover it with a towel. I followed him asking him, “Why don’t you get it removed then?” He stop dead in the hallway and without turning around said “So I don’t forget.” We never discussed it again.

When he died last summer, I told myself that he was finally at peace. As I stood over his coffin with my wife, I reached down and took his arm in mine. I unbuttoned his sleeve and rolled it up. I looked at the number again – 58877241. My wife looked at me and asked “Why are you doing that?” All I could say was “So I don’t forget.” Right then I made my promise to him – Never again.

What is particularly fascinating about this story is the response he got from one woman about her own grandfather and his experience in the war:

They hauled him in front of a firing squad. The Captain of the Guard again demanded that the Jews among them be identified. Then one of the soldiers came forward and identified himself as a Jew. The Captain grabbed him and hauled him away and stopped the execution. The troops never saw the soldier again.

The soldier that volunteered the information that he was Jewish was named Roman Edemskoi (58877241) – the same man.

(Via MeFi)

I got a parking ticket today; how irritating. I discovered it when leaving from the figure drawing studio.

Anyway, here are my figure drawings. Please leave a comment if you like them.

I just installed another great extention for Firefox. It’s called Sage.

Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.

Previously I Heart Firefox.

On June 5, 1996 HoTMaiL was publicly announced. 3 years and 8 million users later it sold to Microsoft for $400 million.

Read about it in this interesting Wired Article.

GXM Studio is the new media company in Malaysia that I am hoping to work for while I am over there in two months. They have some pretty nifty little animations, web design, and video work. I’m very excited.

By now, you’ve likely seen the Numa Numa Dance. The New York Times reports that the dancer, Gary Brolsma, isn’t enjoying his newfound fame. “These days, Mr. Brolsma shuttles between the house and his job […] He is distraught, embarrassed.” (silly registration req’d)

(Via)

Here is a hairy headed update of my model.

I was reading a Wired News article about The Wall Street Journal becoming irrelevant because of it’s online presence or rather lack thereof. The thesis of the article was that in order for the WSJ to keep in touch with bloggers and the online community in general they need to open the doors to bloggers by allowing them to link to specific stories and remove their invasive mandatory registration requirements.

What I found particularly interesting was that Forbes.com “got rid of registration requirements when it discovered they drove away traffic.” I can’t say exactly how many times I have decided not to use a particular news source because of it’s stupid required registration but I can say that it has been less of a problem for me ever since I downloaded the Bugmenot extension for Firefox. Now I just right click on the registration pages and Firefox and BugMeNot take care of the dirty work.

So, what’s my point? Well it made me wonder if BugMeNot is actually doing a disservice to the fight against mandatory registration because it’s quite possible that sites that have them (like the New York Times and the Washington Post) have NO IDEA how many people aren’t logging with their own information like the good electronic sheep they imagine us to be. These news outlets make linking to them inconvenient, invade our privacy, and all the while they aren’t even collecting good data – they need to rethink their strategy. I’m happily surprised that Forbes has figured it out; I hope that the others clue in, making life better for everyone concerned.

For those with a lot of time on their hands or in my case a lot of homework that needs to be procrastinated then you must read this epic tale of friendship, betrayal, corruption, and deceit. This is the story of one man setting out to pull off the biggest scam MMORPG history. Or at least in Eve history. Or at least in his history. It is also quite humorous.