In LA

The sociopolitical comic series “Get Your War On” has now spawned a series of video shorts that maintain the look of the originals shockingly well¹.

I just watched the “Thanksgiving Day” video. The jokes come fast and hard, it took me two viewings to catch them all.

The full set of 19 videos can be found here.

This is a worthy port² of the comic to video. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind gobs of profanity and political humor that leans sharply to the left.

1. Created using animation tools built originally for the film “Waking Life”, I believe. [↩]
2. Port - modify (software) for use on a different machine or platform [↩]

After some cajoling from a friend¹, I decided to enter some photo contests. There are a ton of them out there, and it can be daunting to figure out which ones to enter.

I found the following lists of such contests, which not only list the contests and their details but help to keep track of which are soon to begin and cease accepting entries:

• Photoxels contest list
• Photocompete’s “Current Photo Contests”
• ProofPositive’s list of Monthly and Ongoing Photo Contests

Know of more such lists? Add them in the comments and I’ll edit them into this post. Thanks.

1. you know who you are, Jordan [↩]

I just received the famed “black olive” foam earbud sleeves that I’ll be using with the Shure earbuds I mentioned in a previous post. It would appear that the smallest box Best Buy uses to ship items is 8″x12″x9″. So I received a box full of cushiony air pockets, with the tiny earbud sleeve package pressed right up against the top of the box. What a waste. The earbuds likely could have survived the trip just in their original packaging, or wrapped in a single strip of bubble wrap.

I didn’t realize that these earbud sleeves do not fit the i2c’s without modification (their inner tube is too narrow), but they fit my Future Sonics Atrios perfectly. I tore out the tubes and stuck a couple of ‘em on the i2c’s, and the sound is much improved over the stock silicon sleeves. When I wear this pair out, I’ll try using a small needlenose pliers to enlarge the tubes in the next pair rather than performing that more-damaging tube-ectomy.

I just overheard a colleague saying that British and American citizens have been targeted in a number of simultaneous attacks in Mumbai, India, and that there have been at least 80 people killed. I’m not going to rehash the actual news item here, because it’s already awful now and will probably be worse by the time anyone reads this post. But I do want to point out how well the web as a community is working to collect, analyze, and aggregate all the news. Much information on the attacks can be gleaned from a scan of a few websites:

• news.google.com has automatically collected a set of 458 articles at the time of this writing.
• The Wikipedia article on the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks includes photos and a rundown of all currently known information as well as links and references to articles on the attacks and on the locations and groups involved.
• Vinukumar Ranganathan is a photographer in Mumbai, shooting photos in the danger zone. He has been uploading a series of up-to-the-minute photos that can be viewed in his flickr stream. The shots of bystanders, police with automatic weapons, and the aftermath of explosions are maybe more atmospheric than informative, but it’s interesting to me to see a semi-unedited series of news photos and attempt to piece together an interpretation.

“Shure I2C-MP Stereo Earphones / Headset (iPhone Compatible)” $39.69 at Amazon.com

I previously owned a pair of Shure e2c earphones, which were very nice. When used with the foam earpieces, they isolate from ambient noise and produce a very detailed sound with a decent amount of bass. I ended up listening through them at a much lower volume than I would have with less isolating headphones.

Shure makes a set of earbuds called the i2c, which are simply their e2c earbuds with the addition of thicker cables, an inline microphone, and an iPod connector (looks like a standard 3.5″ stereo jack except it has one extra conductor for the mic). As an iPhone headset, the i2c has faced some criticism due to the fact that it lacks an inline answer/hangup button. Perhaps because of this minor inconvenience, Amazon.com has recently dropped the price of the i2c headsets from $119 to about $39.

I don’t care about the button, or the mic, since I don’t have an iPhone. For a nice pair of earbuds, that price happens to be a great deal. I placed my order last week thinking that if the iphone plug wasn’t compatible with my ipods that I’d cut it off and solder a standard miniplug in its place (ignoring the mic wire). It turns out that the iPhone connector works fine in both my 1st-gen iPod Nano and 1st-gen iPod Touch. Right and left channels nicely separate, and the sound is good. The mic connector on the plug doesn’t seem to short or otherwise interfere with the contacts for the audio outputs –your mileage may vary. It’s working for me (I suspect the connector was designed to work in both iPhone and standard mini-stereo jacks, but don’t quote me on that).

If you buy a pair of i2c’s (or any in-ear monitors really) I’d recommend tossing the silicone sleeves they ship with (with extreme prejudice) and instead using compressible foam tips so that the earbuds really make a nice seal in your ear. The sound quality will be much improved, and the bass presence and detail will increase. Shure sells orange foams that works well, many on the net tout Shure’s tapered black “olive” foam sleeves for greater comfort and cleanability, and I’ve heard good things about the Comply viscoelastic polyurethane memory foam tips.

I ‘m happy to now have a nice pair of earbuds to use for running (My Future Sonics FS1’s finally died, and I don’t want to subject my FS Atrios to the same abuse). Yay. If you’ve been thinking of replacing your iPod earbuds with something better, this here’s a very good deal (on something much much better).

The following ad appeared in the right column of the google search results page for my query “shpilkes”:

I didn’t know one could order shpilkes for delivery. Can I get some kvelling included in the order without paying additional shipping charges?

On a serious note, does this mean that the advertiser deliberately picked this particular keyword and paid to make this impression?