Short post this time, as it's somewhat late and I should be in bed.
I made a new wallpaper, and threw it in the 2D Stills section. It's a robot! (long-term visitors might even recognise him).

If you want a different size to fit to your desktop, just ask (it's a vector, so any size works).

Also, this ninja game is quite fun, and very addictive...

I went to a movie night last night, which was fun. But I had a 9am start this morning, and being stupidly tired is not at all fun...
I tried sleeping when I got home, but that just made me feel really weird - that is fairly disoriented and somewhat insane (yes, I actually felt that I was crazy - it's a weird feeling).

So I decided to just lay in bed, listen to music and read. The reading was supplementary material for the subject "Interactive System Design". The subject content itself has been slightly above mediocore (learning HTML yet again, and doing some Java GUI stuff), but the material in the readings is absolutely fascinating to me. This stuff is all about memory, perception, and vision. It's quite astounding the number of ways in which our vision is inconsistent - perceived depth affected by colour, lack of colour distingtion in our peripheral vision, lack of night-vision in our fovea - all this stuff is inexplicably fascinating to me.

I have known for a while about our blind spot - where our optical nerves bunch up together and escape through a hole in our eye in order to get to the brain. What I didn't know was that this is apparently due to a seemingly wrong step in evolution. Crustaceans have a similar optical system to ours, yet their optical nerves are all attached to the rear of the retina, so they can just connect straight to the brain without needing to escape the eyeball...

An unfortunate fact about vision is that as we get older, our lens often loses elasticity, making it hard to focus. This can be remedied with glasses, so I'm not too worried by it personally. But another thing that happens is your lenses turn yellowish, reducing sensitivity to blue light (as if you were wearing yellow glasses all the time). That fact personally scares me a little, because I'm a big fan of the blue. Seriously, is blue not the most awesome colour ever? I guess I'd better look at a lot of super-cool blue stuff while I can still enjoy it...

One final thought I had is in relation to music. I've been working hard to categorise my music with iRank, but that can only go so far. The music you want to hear depends heavily on the mood you're in, which is a very difficult thing to try and enumerate. I imagine that if it were possible (and more importantly feasable) to non-invasively monitor brainwaves to determine mood and subconscious reactions to the current song, then it should be possible to statistically link up songs you react well to in a particular mood, and give you an awesome listening experience. Of course a huge database would be required, which would potentially require you to listen to all of your songs at least once in each possible mood. That's a bit of a stretch, so I'm not sure how feasable it would be even if it were possible. It's also a lot of work simply to automate a personal DJ. But it's an interesting challenge nonetheless, and I guess I cant help pondering it since music has become an important part of my life in recent years (since I developed my own musical tase, I guess ;)).

It's funny how much emotion we associate with certain songs and bands, and yet we're almost totally unable and unwilling to provide the computer with any measure of personal meta-data regarding songs (how you feel about a song). Simply giving each song a rating out of 5 is a difficult task for many, especially given how wildy our appreciation of a particular song can fluctuate with both internal mood and external situation.

OK, It's time for me to blog a few special links, because they are all aweseome:

• Quake III has been GPL'd! - I plan to explore the source sometime soon.
• Gmail Preview Bubbles - This greasemonkey script is beyond awesome, it really shows off what's possible (0.5 Beta required).
• Download Statusbar (Firefox Plugin) - This handy statusbar eliminates the need for the download manager most of the time, and it's so space-efficient!
• Rejected (12MB .avi) - This animation is incredibly old, I know. But it's good, so bugger off. I still wince a little at the scenes with blood, but it's definitely a keeper.
  - Other animations by Don Hertzfeldt are also very good, but they're harder to find links for.

And now, some text:
The number of visitors to this site has been dropping off rapidly in the past week or so, which is a bit of a shame. I've ben working on another vector piece, but I can't really seem to get into it like I used to, which is another shame. Perhaps I've run out of arty-ness and all that, which would be yet another shame...

I'm tempted to buy a mac right now, which would probably be very dumb given the whole x86 move that's coming shortly. It's a pretty stupid time to buy my way onto the dead-end PPC path, but I feel I need something to get me inspired again, and macs are fiendishly cool.

Let's play a role-playing game, shall we?

You can be Dave Matthews (well, his entire band to be precise). When putting out your CD, you jump on Microsoft's DRM bandwagon and cripple the CD such that the only thing you can copy from it is protected WMAs.

You then post instructions on your website on how to bypass your own DRM protection (burn a CD, and then rip the audio from that) for those who want to listen to your songs on an iPod. You then go on to say that this is all Apple's fault for not supporting crippled WMA.

I'm not saying that Apple's AAC is any better than WMA, but you can hardly blame Apple for not wanting to encourage people to use a format wholly controlled by Microsoft. If you want your music to work for everyone then perhaps you should consider making a regular fucking CD, instead of using a proprietary format owned by the largest monopoly in the software world...

</rant>

Ahh, this link is just too good to pass up: Fun With HTTP Headers. It's quite astounding the number of uses people have found for HTTP headers. I use the term "uses" loosely, though, as very few of the examples shown would actually be of any use unless you happen to be reading the header content (and even then, their usefulness is debatable).

But nonetheless, people insist on adding custom headers just in case they might at sometime be useful to someone, somewhere.

My absolute favourite example would have to be from the game site Tux Games:

X-Subliminal: You want to buy as many games as you can afford

- Oh no, my browser keeps making me click all the "BUY" links O_O

It seems I haven't posted for quite some time now. There's probably a few reasons for that, but the most obvious is that I don't seem to have all that much to say. So here's a random story that I observed today.

While driving to uni today there was a fairly standard-looking truck in front of me. It stopped at a red light (as many do) near the beginning of the trip into the city. The driver got out, wandered round to the other side of the truck and got in the passenger side. I figured there was someone else inside who was now driving the truck, which seemed a fair assumption since the truck shortly began moving in a fairly controlled manner.

Later on, I was still behind the same truck. We'd just got off the freeway and were stuck in traffic. The same man (the one who was originally driving) got out of the passenger side, walked around the back of the truck, climbed over the barrier on the side of the road and dissapeared into the bushes. And that was it, the truck drove off and the man was not seen again.

Quite odd indeed. Also irrelevant to anything and everything, but I don't seem to have much else to say lately... Well, I guess there's the depressing issue that the new Intel Macs may well be headed towards Trusted Computing, and then the bizzare reluctance of Apple to actually put two physical buttons onto a mouse. But aside from apple, nothing else seems to have been going on. Oh, there's also Vista, but I'm so uninterested by that I wonder if I really am a geek...

Note: Matt, this means you have to get an RSS reader (others should also get an RSS reader if they do not already have one, but especially Matt). My weapon of choice is Bloglines, although I don't use the normal web interface - I wrote my own Javascript/AJAX interface using the API. It seems to leak memory out the proverbial, but I'm convinced that's Firefox's fault since there's nothing much I can seem to do about it.

Edit: Why is it that (at the time of writing at least) all the google ads on the side of this page are suddenly geared towards increasing your IQ? I'm somewhat confused by the statement that "Increase IQ" is for sale, but I guess the bottom line is that Google percieves you, my loyal readers, to be dumb. Sorry about that :/