In a purr-fect world…:
My friend Kambri just alerted me to a project she worked on called the Meow Mix House, where apparently 10 cats are living right now in complete and utter luxury. I hate to sat it, but I noticed that there are NO BLACK CATS in the house. The reason why I bring this up is because my cat Smitty often protests that most cat food commercials are racist, saying, “Yo, how come that big fluffy WHITE cat gets all the ching-ching and the bling-bling? Where my Fancy Feast at? Oh – is it CUZ I’M BLACK? It’s cuz I’m black!” I always tell him no, it’s because you’re lazy and maybe if you’d start killing some of the cockraoches around here you’d get some wet food as a reward, but he usually just sulks away and starts drinking again…
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cats like beer? my cat doesn’t….

The TV Thing:
As with all TV Things, everything could go horribly wrong. But this is the deal I’ve been waiting for, with people who understand the project and format I want to work in. And you know something’s going right when people in TV are telling you to go more experimental and take more risks. This isn’t your US network tv experience.

I’m writing the pilot at the moment. (And I should particularly thank Joss Whedon and John Rogers for their insights into the process.) More details will hopefully follow as the project progresses. Or, you know, a tearstained screed if it doesn’t.
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this sounds entirely cool

A New Internet2:
The Internet2 high-speed-networking consortium announced today that its new nationwide fiber-optic network will be built by Level 3 Communications Inc. and will be operational in about a year.

Internet2 decided earlier this year not to renew a contract with the telecommunications company Qwest to lease high-speed lines for use in Abilene, the conventional network that Internet2 now provides to colleges. The contract will be allowed to expire in 2007.

The new network, which has the working name of NewNet, would be a competitor to National LambdaRail, a national fiber-optic network operated by a consortium of research-oriented institutions. Merger talks between the two groups collapsed this spring.

NewNet would significantly expand the networking capacity available to scholars and would enable them to set up temporary, high-capacity networking links with ease. (The Chronicle)

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actually to say that it will be a competitor of lamdarail is false. Lambdarail is for experimentation and testing. I2 is the university-research internet. the difference is that occasionally you won’t be able to use lamdarail because someone will be using it for other things. I2 though is generally less research oriented these days and never seems to have experiments outside of normal operations.

Wired 14.06: START:
Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.
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this is what happens when you try to infect your computer… if you don’t try it takes less time… the zen of windows…..

Researchers teach computers to turn 2D images into 3D:
Filed under: Robots

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University appear to have solved a problem long thought impossible, teaching computers to turn static 2D images into 3D models. It was apparently a hot area for research in the 1970s but was virtually abandoned in the 80s after attempts to devise the machine learning necessary proved too demanding for the computers of the time. The key to Carnegie Mellon’s research, apart from better machines, is the ability for computers to detect visual cues (such as a car) that can be used to differentiate between vertical and horizontal surfaces — easy for us humans, but enough to turn even the most powerful computers into an incoherent mess. Apart from turning your vacation snapshots into a whole new experience, one of the big applications for this technology is obviously robotics, where it could boost their vision systems, improve navigation, and basically endow them with one more skill necessary to keep us in line after the uprising.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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this is nifty… imagine what it could do in virtual worlds for perspective management.