Web Design and Life

Google’s payment system is online, and only available to sellers and purchasers in the USA. BLECH

This part sounds cool though:

For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. For example, if you spent $1,000 on AdWords last month, this month you can process $10,000 in sales at no cost. The more you spend to promote your business through AdWords, the more you save on transaction processing fees with Google Checkout.

I’m going through the Webmaster World thread on it right now since I can’t use it myself. It sounds promising and will hopefully be available internationally soon.

Family member won tickets ($60 each!), wasn’t interested in the show, gave tickets to me.

How to be a Rock Star

I don’t think I’d pay $60 for the tickets, but I must say it was a very good show.

I’ve heard the music before and I believe it is much better live and loud!. It is experimental rock with a heavy dose of percussion: 1 keyboard, 1 guitar, 2 drumkits in the background along with whatever PVC concoctions the Blue Men are playing. You will want to dance - if you can take your eyes off the blue dudes.

The Blue Men don’t talk, but they move like cartoon characters. Motions and emotions are exaggerated. They are usually pretty calm, but occasionally they jump, dance, or spray each other with fire extinguishers. Their facial expressions are all about curiousity and surprise. I did not expect any acts of the show to include them dragging audience members on stage, but that was in there too.

I’ll leave details of the finale a surprise, but will say it is surreal, and I hope it is all recycled afterwards.

The lyrebird does a great impression of a chainsaw.

The Table Free Zen Cart Templates is available for download now.

I decided to get rid of all the uncategorized posts one day, but then WordPress started throwing 404 errors when I looked at the category. I’ve rebuilt the category in PHPMyAdmin, and this is the first post in it. Lets see what happens…

Yeah, it’s like tuh-mater, but without the ‘tuh’

I saw it again with Thalia. Did Rainbow get a new sound system?

Body Language

The trailers do a poor job of showing what I thought was the most impressive part of the movie. Cars jump, wave their tires around like hands, lean, bend, tilt, shake and stretch/squash just a tiny bit. Mater drools oil and and wags his tow hook around like a puppy. Lizzy the Model T can’t stop shaking. Lightning crouches to grip the dirt better as he goes around a slippery corner. Tractors wiggle their rear view mirrors in their sleep. The cars did a better job acting out their roles then any human could have - a credit to the skill of the animators. On top of that is the lifelike eye and mouth movements, but everyone expects that from Pixar. Finding Nemo and The Incredibles were great, but the amount of character brought to these usually inanimate chunks of metal and rubber makes me look like a robot.

Scenery

I love mountains. I wake up when I’m around mountains. Laurentien, Rocky, Kootenay all have the same effect. I just feel good when surrounded by chunks of rock billions of times the volume of myself - even when I’m not skiing on them. I got the same sensation throughout the movie, from the first climb out of the city with Mack to the flyovers of Ornament Valley with Mater. The ‘drive with Sally’ scene had some of the most beautiful mountain scenery I have ever seen, CG, film, or in person and it looked real enough to walk through. The music and camera angles didn’t hurt either.

Attention to detail is visible throughout. I feel like throwing in a quote.

As with McQueen’s blinking eyes, some of the filmmaking touches are scarcely noticeable. When McQueen first arrives in Radiator Springs, the city looks washed out, rusty and gray, devoid of warm tints and hues. As Radiator Springs starts to grow on McQueen, its shades intensify, its hues brighten until, at the conclusion of a key road trip for McQueen and Sally, the landscape explodes in color.

For a flashback sequence, co-production designer William Cone studied how 1950s color film deteriorates, so that the flashback looks like an old home movie, washed out, overly pink.

The Journal News

In conclusion, go see Cars and try not to smile for 2 hours.