"So I was bored at work one day," Graeme Job explains, "and wondered, what's the most useless thing I could do with my time without actually doing anything. Then it hit me. I could use T-SQL to generate... Mandelbrot."

Graeme continued, "Following is a single T-SQL SELECT statement that generates a text-representation of a Mandelbrot Set. The results are best viewed in text-mode."

Oh my sweet baby goddess. If the fact that this sort of thing makes my toes curl is wrong, I don't wanna be right. [go]

I'm having a hard time explaining why you should check this out beyond GO HERE NOW.

Pick some colours. Watch Idée Labs pull a screenful of correspondingly-tinted pictures from Flickr in response. Repeat while giggling delightedly. (Okay, you can leave the giggling bit out, if you really must. I understand you might be at work or something.) [go]

You remember the TimeCube, right? Someone must be missing it nearly as much as I, for lo -- The ThymeCube. [go]

You know that rather iconic Obama 'Hope' poster that the 'net's clogged with these days? Well, here's eighty-four different takes on it. Some funny, some deeply offensive -- which is which depends on who you're voting for, I suppose.

I think my favourite is the Star Wars one. [go]

I grinned the whole way through watching this. It's wonderful. [go]

Lucretius linked me to this last night, and I've been thinking about it ever since. You send them a pattern you've cooked up on the computer, and they send you back fabric printed with your pattern.

Fractal-patterned fabric, say. Ohgodsavemenow. This is all your fault, L.

Note: Link is to a review of the service, as it's currently in beta and the site itself is mostly just a vicious and cruel teaser-site. [go]

I think this means "Pure Concentrated Nixie Tube Awesomeness" in German, but I'm not certain.

So, yeah. A lot of German I'm very sad I can't read, and some amazing pictures. There are a lot of references to "Flip-Flop-Stufen" which make me giggle in a "watchen der blinkenlights" way. [go]

Alternate title: Too Stupid To Live. Via Invictus, someone trying to kite-surf in Tropical Storm Fay. [go]

"The founder of the legendary rock band Queen has completed his doctoral thesis in astrophysics after taking a 30-year break to play some guitar." [go]

A passenger repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated a young man aboard a Greyhound bus travelling through Manitoba overnight in what appears to be a random attack, witnesses told CBC News.

"While we were watching the door, he calmly walks up to the front with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," said [a witness]. [go]

We downloaded World of Goo for the Wii last night (1500 WiiPoints, as I recall, so ~$15), and it's lovely. Wonderful. Toe-curlingly awesome. I think I try to complete each level just to hear the little goo-balls all whisper, "OooOOOoooh!" as they reach the pipe to the next level.

Highly recommended, double-plus especially to those who sunk any time into Fantastic Contraption recently.

I figured that importing an SVG file into Photoshop would be similar to dealing with an EPS.

Naturally, I figured wrong. What the hell, Adobe? Wasn't SVG your idea in the first place?

Google knows everything, however, and pointed me at Inkscape, an open-source vector graphics editor.

Install. Open SVG. Save as EPS. Off to Photoshop. FLAWLESS VICTORY!

Love you long time, Inkscape.

Once upon a time, I had a [fingerwiggle]proper[/fingerwiggle] photoblog, powered by MT, that automagically scattered thumbnails hither and yon as I updated it.

Seeing as my picture output is only a fraction of what it once was, though, I decided to cook up my own little upload/thumbnailer tool. It works brilliantly (though I really need to get rid of the history.go(-1); how many times have I sworn to never use that terrible thing again, now?) but on weeks like this, where I've actually updated it repeatedly, I've got no way to let people know there's new things to look at without posting like this.

Posting in one column to mention another, so LJ/feedreaders will pick up on it, then expecting them to come here to read the post, click out to the main site, and poke through my photos? More than a leetle broken, yeah. I suppose the newest addition to my To-Do List can be figuring out how to make an RSS feed for my photos.

Until then, here's a direct link to the picture that spurred me to post.

When I started shaking the dust off this site, the basic concept was: left column for links, middle column for pictures, right column for site-specific/personalish content. I figured this would be easy, considering how much I like to navel-gaze the second I look LJ's direction.

If this doesn't start getting easy in practice as well as theory, I'll have to come up with an Even More Cunning Plan for this space.

Yet here I am, staring at an interface full of guide lines in Photoshop. How very 2001 of me.

I patted down the Internet in hopes that rollovers got a little less annoying during my sabbatical, and it seems they actually may have. There are two or three pages in Google devoted to CSS image rollovers like this one, but they degrade about as gracefully as CSS2 ever does. The one I'm trying, instead, claims to work in all DOM-compliant browsers -- which, at this point, pretty much covers everyone capable of finding the power switch on their own computer.

It's succinct and worked straight away. I can't ask for more, really.

It would appear that the Fabulous Boymeat and I are either children or an entire family, because that's who Boom Blox is supposed to be fun for. We picked it up a couple days ago, and have played it every evening since. It's Jenga meets Breakout meets the simple love of throwing things at other things and watching them explode.

Aiming the crosshair and moving the remote smoothly (required when pulling blocks out of a structure, Jenga-style) is thrashing our throwing arms, however. Learning to throw with our off hands was briefly and at least semi-seriously discussed this morning.

It even has a level editor/designer built right in. A++, will play until my arm falls clean off.

This shouldn't be post-worthy -- I mean, that's what seeds are supposed to do, once you've plant them -- but my thumb is more black than green. About the only things I can't kill are my mother's Mystery Green Plant(tm) and my jade plant -- which, upon checking Wikipedia for a link, I discover I've been overwatering.

Sigh. Sorry, jade plant.

A week and change ago, I planted pots of cilantro and basil, as well as two pots of 'balcony blend' flowers -- aster (dwarf queen mix), marigold (queen sophia), nasturtium (alaska mixed), and lavatera (silvercup). (Yes, I'm transcribing those right off the seed-packs. Fear my horticultural skillz.) The germination period for all of them ranged from 5 to 28 days, so every time I went out and saw nothing but soil, I reminded myself that I shouldn't consider them dead just yet.

We had rain all last evening and through the night. This morning, I went out to check on them again, and was greeted by dozens of little sprouts and pairs of tiny green leaves punching through the soil.

It makes a girl smile. Here's hoping I don't drown or shrivel them.

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The bastards are after my prized treasures charms again!

(Don't shoot me, I was told it's necessary to make a play on words like that with one's first Wii post.)

After hunting high and low, and having our hearts broken a handful of times by stores that would display Wii boxes but not actually have any in stock (HMV, I'm lookin' at YOU), we finally stumbled upon one at our favourite new-and-used videogame store.

Last night, we each picked one game to get. He picked Okami, because they didn't have Excite Truck, and we wanted to show our love for Clover Studio. I picked Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, because two of my verybestfriends are listed in the credits. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to grinning proudly when I saw their names there.

Not too much to report on them yet, other than I'm still a sucker for turn-based strategy games, and it's much harder to paint a straight line across the screen than you'd expect.

I've tweaked the plugin to include the related link in LJ crossposts, so folks can make with the clickie directly, as opposed to needing to come directly to the post.

Information on how it was done is available here, in case anyone else is trying to figure out how to add their own custom fields.

Apologies to the LJ folks who have been getting extra friendslist clutter. No more, I promise -- at least until the next issue crops up. ;)