luis is a co-founder and social software architect at Infinite.ly. he likes building small web toys a whole lot. More ...

quick links to the good stuff

• 25 First Dates 25 May 2009
• True Crime: Confessions of a Criminal Mastermind 17 Feb 2009
• Finding Your Soul Mate: A Statistical Analysis 27 Jan 2009
• Sex and Schrodinger's Cat 07 January 2009
• An Extended Rant on Heroes 26 September 2008
• Zero Barrier 05 May 2008
• Sweatshop Blogging Economics 08 April 2008
• The Doomsday Singularity 25 February 2008
• Piracy and Its Impact on Philippine Music 21 January 2008
• The Manila Pen-etration by the Hotelier Antonio Trillanes 29 November 2007
• Journey of a Thousand Heroes 17 December 2006
• Shake, Rattle & LOL 30 December 2005

@helloluis on Twitter

elsewhere online

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Last.FM
• Del.icio.us
• Flickr
• Plurk
• Multiply
• Stumbleupon

• 30

  Liv Tyler

  14 Oct 2004

  Part of my job at highfiber is updating the site on a daily basis with new high-quality photos of popular celebrities, along with a few news bites and some requisite commentary. A lot of pictures don’t make the cut though (for various reasons, such as not having enough flesh, or the celebrity in question being featured too many times already), but rather than just letting them flounder in my personal imagebank, I’ve decided to upload them here.

  So today we’ve got a handful of Liv Tyler photos, the first one from Givenchy, and the other three from sources unknown. You’ll have to bear with me on the cruddy thumbnails. They’re generated by scripts I wrote so I’m powerless to improve the quality by much.

  As always, click on the thumbs to see the (extremely large) full-size images.

  

  Posted in Photography | 30 Comments »

• 0

  Will Code HTML For Food

  14 Oct 2004

  I always said PHP was the way to go.

  (spotted at anticlown)

  Posted in Photography | No Comments »

• 0

  HP Media Center PCs

  13 Oct 2004

  

  HP unveiled it Digital Entertainment Center z500 yesterday (one of three new Windows XP Media Center-centric devices from this manufacturer), and boy, hmm. Well.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting with the 2005 generation of Media Center PCs, but somehow, a Betamax player wasn’t it. (Wow, look at the resemblance!) At a suggested retail price of US$1500 - $2000, you’d think HP’d be able to throw in a bit of “cool” here and there, instead of you know, going all 80’s on us.

  I think that ultimately, the reason why I am so unimpressed by the whole Media Center concept is because I cannot imagine why I would want to a) watch two TV shows at the same time, b) record said TV show, or c) store it for archival purposes. I mean, generally, TV sucks. Why in the world would I want to dedicate a whole machine to keeping that shit around? When I have nothing better to do other than watch TV, I consider that a Bad Night. And on the off-chance that there were a show that was that good, I could just pull it off the P2P at my convenience, instead of waiting around for our local network to air it. It’d be of better quality and smaller file size, not to mention the fact that it’d be completely platform-independent.

  Posted in Hardware | No Comments »

• 2

  Matt Pond PA

  12 Oct 2004

  I’m listening to Matt Pond PA’s 5-song “I Thought You Were Sleeping” EP as I write this. I kinda got it on a whim at emusic.com a few minutes ago. My 90-song download limit hadn’t been touched all month because I’d been so busy, and I got worried I wouldn’t be able to use them all up before the turnover date.

  Anyway, I got lucky with this purchase. Maybe it’s the mood I’m in this evening. My brain has been over-cranked all day from wrestling with a programming problem in the latest boring hulk of a project from my current employers, and listening to old Bill Hicks sketches in the background hasn’t exactly been placing me in a shiny, happy type mood.

  I don’t know anything about Matt Pond PA, so this review is largely useless. I do know that this small handful of songs is just sublime though. I could play songs like “Put Your Hair Down” and “Measure 5″ over and over again for days, I bet.

  Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

• 1

  Don’t even think about reaching for that dildo

  11 Oct 2004

  

  Posted in Artwork | 1 Comment »

• 5

  Jasmine Trias and McDonald’s

  10 Oct 2004

  The upcoming Jasmine Trias concert has sent the city’s marketing engines into a feeding frenzy again, with Smart and McDonald’s both throwing their respective weights behind the American Idol star.

  I haven’t seen what kind of campaigns the telecom giant is coming up with, but the evil scientists at the world’s fattest fastfood chain have decided to commemorate the event with a Jasmine Trio value meal (I’m sure you’ve all seen this by now). For an unknown (meaning, I wasn’t interested enough to find out) price, you get fries, a Royal-Tru Strawberry Float and an exclusive Jasmine Trias “Love Ko ‘To” CD. Oh boy!

  The McDonald’s I was at, while I was marveling at this Soylent Green-esque campaign, was playing said CD over and over again, so I didn’t find myself particularly drawn to obtaining my own copy, thank you very much, but I suppose fans would just eat this shit up. (Yeah, and they might even listen to the CD too.)

  It gets better: when you buy the combo, you get to join a McDonald’s Limbo Rumble, which is basically just a game of Limbo Rock, except instead of winning a cool prize, you get a Happy Meal toy (which was, as far as I could tell, non-Jasmine-related).

  As I read all this, I overheard two branch managers arguing about the limbo mechanics in a nearby booth. One of them had a striped yellow and red pole (which I deduced to be the limbo stick) and was holding it up at various heights. The game rules clearly stated that a contestant had to successfully pass under the stick four times in order to win, although the exact height of each level hadn’t been described.

  So these two fuckheads couldn’t figure out what the starting height should be, and were worried shitless about making it too easy and having to give away all their fucking toys. I left before they finally figured it out, but I thought it was pretty obvious that finding an exact height was impossible; the possible contestants were simply too varied.

  The solution, of course, was to get the height of each contestant before letting them play, then multiply that by a constant (say, 0.8). For example, if I was 67 inches tall, they would set the stick initially at 54 inches, then lower it by another arbitrary value every time I managed to limbo my way through. They’d probably also need additional modifiers for age and sex, because a 10-year-old girl is probably going to be a lot more limber than a 50-year-old man (hehe, i wonder how many of those they’ll get), but I guess those are just details.

  But I digress.

  Jasmine Trias, October 16! I’m so excited I think I’m gonna puke.

  Posted in Music | 5 Comments »

• 0

  Y Control

  9 Oct 2004

  I just saw the director’s cut of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Y Control” video today over at NME, which is a typically surreal Spike Jonze outing wherein children play with dead dogs, have their hands cut off and their intestines unravelled.

  I didn’t used to be a very big Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan (their early work was a bit too derivative of Sleater-Kinney to be taken seriously), but the stuff off of the Fever to Tell album, especially “Maps” and “Rich”, are huge strides forward.

  Check out the video here (registration required).

  Posted in Music | No Comments »

• 0

  Interpol’s Antics

  8 Oct 2004

  Did I mention that Interpol is my favorite-band-of-the-last-5-years? Well, they are.

  When their 2nd album, Antics, was leaked back in July, I was so excited to hear new stuff from them, and downloaded it immediately. I shouldn’t have, I know, and I was a bit disappointed by what I got. The production felt fuzzy and raw; the “prerelease” version didn’t have the sharpness that I loved so much on their debut.

  When the album came out officially this September, I got myself another copy, and was amazed by how different everything sounded. You could hear the difference immediately on “Next Exit,” the very first track (and my favorite song, so far); Paul Bank’s voice cuts through the instrumentation like a knife. “Slow Hands” (an old song released during the time between the debut and “Antics”), “Not Even Jail” and “Narc” are also really good tracks.

  Throughout the album, you can hear small hints that the band is sloughing off its old sound, and trying on some new threads. The driving, relentless beat is still there, but you’d never hear climactic tracks like “Not Even Jail” on the old stuff.

  I only have one small quibble about this second album, and it’s that there’s no obvious successor to “Say Hello to the Angels,” which was my favorite track on the old album (killer intro on that one … I just love how the main riff slices through the guitar drone at the start, a little bit like Muse’s “Plug in Baby”).

  Overall, a great second album. It’s not ground-breaking, but it does go a long way toward reassuring fans that Interpol will be making great music for a long time to come.

  Posted in Music | No Comments »

• 1

  Of Monobrows

  5 Oct 2004

  Celebrating “the unity of your brows,” monobrow.com is a great place to learn about this freakish deformity, meet similarly-deformed mono bro’s and play games with the word “mono” in them.

  Link via screenhead.

  Posted in Randomness | 1 Comment »

• 2

  Tungsten T5

  4 Oct 2004

  PalmOne will be releasing the new Tungsten T5 this November, but you can check out first impressions here and here.

  I guess the most notable thing about it is that has 256mb of built-in Flash memory, meaning it doesn’t lose data when your batteries run out. (The only reason I’m mentioning this is because my ipaq 2210 ran out of batteries twice over the past month; I hardly use it anymore and I keep forgetting to plug it into an outlet every now and then.)

  It’s also got a 400+Mhz CPU, making it plenty fast for the Tungsten line, although it’s still 200Mhz short of the HP hx4700. Come to think of it, the hx4700 has another thing that the T5 doesn’t, i.e., built-in Wi-Fi. The T5’s $400 price tag is sorta the borderline between mid-range and high-end handhelds, so having Wi-Fi built-in would have made it a real killer. As it stands now, it’s just another new pda.

  Posted in Hardware | 2 Comments »

« Previous Entries   Next Entries »