I cannot win a decent auction on eBay to save my life. All I want (this time) is a Cisco 1720 router with a T1 DSU WIC card in it. Apparently, I can’t have one because every single time I bid I get sniped. Hate that.

I hang out on the photo.net Leica forums pretty regularly. Lots of film vs digital bickering going on, but at least it’s civil and well-written. The thing that keeps coming up is the fragility of digital files - drive crashes, CF card malfunctions and whatnot. There have been numerous first-hand stories of folks losing thousands of their valuable photos due to simple computer glitches. Now, there seems to be a growing body of evidence showing that many CD-ROMs might only last a few years.

I’m pretty good at backing things up, so I’ve got a few thousand digital images archived nicely on duplicate CD-ROMs. Now I’m a little worried that it may not be enough.

On the other hand, it’s comforting to know that, barring a fire or other natural disaster, my silver B&W film negatives will be around for a hundred years or more.

Oh, and if you have a bunch of digital images on your PC with no backups, stop reading right now and back them up - to anything - even CD-ROM. That will give you at least a couple more years to figure out what to do with them for the long term.

ReadPrint.com is a nicely done site full of public-domain literature.

I’m realizing that the only thing more frustrating than editing uncommented, goofily written code is editing Other People’s CSS. There are never any comments, and it’s nearly impossible to figure out whatever naming conventions or structural guidelines may have been intended, even though they were never followed.

We’ve replaced complicated inline markup with even more complicated abstracted markup. Heretical as the thought is, I’m beginning to wish we’d sacrifice a teeny bit of semantic clarity for a dose of maintainability.

I just got a nice, encouraging email from Richard Bram, who is a fantastic street photographer in London and is featured on In-Public.

You should check out his portfolio. It’s great stuff with a wonderful sense of humor.

Yep, you can order a thin-crust medium pepperoni pizza from Domino’s by typing something like….

$ pizza_party -p medium thin

It’s called Pizza Party

Apparently, our own Fullmo is kicking some ass today and clogging up the pipes at Fusionary.

I’ve mirrored the site here for the time being.

Gotta see it! Odd, beautiful and funny. Watch it without the subtitles - you don’t need them. I don’t consider myself an excessively visual guy, but damn if the animation didn’t just make my eyes pop. It’s a great, seamless blend of CG and traditional animation, and a really great film.

Dave Shea put together a pretty nice Roadmap to Standards which is a wonderful introduction and starting point for folks looking to start designing using web standards, but feel a little lost.

If you’ve ever wondered why cars in movies always blow up after crashing, or perhaps why they really wouldn’t blow up, then check out Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics