Life lessons from Ernest Borgnine
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
What he said.
What he said.
“Things just seem to happen to people who don’t drink Wilkins”
So says the character “Wilkins” just after his best fiend “Wontkins” once again meets his maker after proclaiming a distaste for Wilkins Coffee. Who knew Jim Henson could put together such a psychotically violent set of advertisements?
There are many more compilations of wilkins coffee ads up on youtube. They’re all worth a look. These 8 second TV commercials are the work of Jane and Jim Henson, with Jim doing both the Kermit-like voice of the character “Wilkins” and also the Waldorf-like voice of the grumpier “Wontkins”.
If these commercials ran today, they’d be very effective. I’d eschew water for Wilkins Coffee, wear the T-shirt, buy a gun1, and “convince” everyone I knew to drink Wilkins. Yeah.

I added this .brushes file to my gallery, along with a full-resolution and a quicktime export. Here’s its entry:
| 16.brushes | ||
| Jul 23 2009 | ||
| Brushes (77.56 K) | Tiff (15.8 MB) | MOV (13.2 MB) |

But in the process I sell Brushes short. The application is capable of much higher quality image exports.
| 12.brushes | |
| Jul 21 2009 | |
| Brushes (52.56 K) | Tiff (15.8 MB) |
If you’re curious what a Brushes file looks like when rendered at high resolution, or would like a Brushes file to test with the Brushes Viewer app, I’ve placed all my Brushes sketches in this gallery, formatted as in the example at right. Each sketch is available its original Brushes file and an exported 1920×2800 TIFF file.
And here’s a time-lapse movie of one the creation of those sketches, rendered out of Brushes Viewer. I’m having too much fun with this stuff.
Why this is the future? Professional video game journalism has taken off1, and professional video gaming will follow. One day its popularity will eclipse that of football2. Howard Stern and friends may laugh at some of the wackier folk on display in The King of Kong, but video games are starting to move away from the sorts of repetitious action that favor people who these days get classified socially as geeks or diagnosed by professionals as OCD, Aspergers, &c. Nerds have already ascended to create the information economy3, next they’ll take over the world of sports, and the jocks who adapt and survive will be or become a little nerdier than those of today.

So I streamed video to my media center and controlled playback over a network using a wifi touchscreen device. This is the slightly kludgy present, and a sign of things to come. You and your grandmother will all be watching movies and TV this way in a few years.
But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:
I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:
http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/
Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond2.
Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous
A funky vertical panorama shot and stitched from 3 photographs on my iPhone with the AutoStitch app. The monitor at bottom is my DIY Cintiq, which has yet to be encased and prettified.It’s fed VGA (!)1 from a USB-DVI adapter.This non-hardware-accelerated display works fine as extra space for displaying bins.
Whereas, I like short films1; and
Whereas, I like film festivals.
Now, therefore, I do hereby proclaim that I am duty bound to also like the just-announced “Zombie Short Film Festival” and I do hereby urge all filmmakers to take due note of its existence.

At the moment, Amazon’s page for the Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder doesn’t list a price, and you have to place it in your cart to find out that it’s $129.99 with free shipping. I expect this price will last Amazon’s sold out again and then subsequently their page will list the higher price of the item from one of the other vendors who sell the camera on Amazon.
I posted my impressions of the camera the last time it was on sale at this price. You can also read more about the deal on this camera at the Fatwallet Hot Deals forum, and that forum thread includes comparisons of the camera’s image quality to other solid-state camcorders as well as links to reviews.

It’s small, fits in a pocket3, and doesn’t draw a lot of attention to itself when in use4.
The camera shows up as a drive when its built-in USB connector is connected to a computer and files can be easily copied off of the camera. It also charges its internal battery over USB. I’ve also used my Vado HD as a USB flash drive to ferry large non-video files between computers. It’s a very convenient device, and at $129.99 is about $40 more than Amazon charges for the older, 2Gb, standard-definition (640×484) version of the device.
I’ve uploaded a non-spectacular but representative sample clip to vimeo. You can watch it below as an embedded flash clip, or you can download the original full-resolution clip directly from vimeo5. if you’d like to examine it more closely. There are a number of other clips shot with the Vado HD also available for perusal on Vimeo.
If you’re looking for such a thing, you know who you are. Here’s another link to the product.
post-finish cool-down from ZachFine on Vimeo.
Runners stagger around in mylar blankets after finishing the 2009 San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon.
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