Thursday, November 10, 2005

'Good Day Sunshine' on NASA Television Yeah, this too probably qualifies as Expressionist Fab Culture. -- Editor Ex-Beatle to beam concert into space. Paul McCartney is planning to broadcast live into space from a U.S. concert. [CNET News.com] 7:33:39 PM

Fotolia Fotolia's P2P Photo Sales. Like Etsy, New York based Fotolia is a new, specialized p2p ecommerce site that combines an innovative business model with Ajax, tagging, rss and great design. Fotolia launched yesterday. Fotolia is a site where photographers can sell their images directly to consumers. They offer only royalty free images (Getty Images, for instance, offers a mix of royalty free and rights managed images). Photographers keep up to 80% of fees. Three types of rights may be purchased - web only, print only, and exclusive buyout. The exclusive buyout option results in the image being removed from the site,and no futher sales of the image are made after that. Fotolia has created an innovative pricing system to encourage use by photographers and manage the user experience. Photographers may price photos within certain ranges determined by their rank. The more sales a photographer has, the higher their rank. Prices start at zero and can be as high as $2,000 for an exclusive buyout. The site is very well designed, and they’ve integrated Ajax previews of images along with photographer tagging of images for easier searching. They have multi-language support (including blogs in four languages) and RSS for all results pages. After a 6 month limited beta, Fotolia now has 100,000 images online. Tags: fotolia, ebay, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0, gettyimages, rss, ajax, tags, tagging [TechCrunch] 7:23:07 PM

Pinball Surgery and a Couple of Drinks Down In the Basement With Bali. As the title suggests, I've been down in the basement, playing pinball and drinking Caipirinhas. Bali Hi needed some major brain surgery the other night, so while I was digging around in it's electro-mechanical guts, trying to find the problem, I took the opportunity to polish up the playfield, replace burned-out bulbs, clean the relay contacts, and resolder a bunch of wires that were barely making contact. I also installed a couple of posts in the left and right outholes to keep the ball from draining so quickly. My efforts paid off handsomely, the machine plays so beautifully now that I can turn the scorewheel over past 100,000...no problem! I also cracked open my bottle of Cachaça Ypioca and mixed up a couple of potent Caipirinhas using my brand-new muddler. I modified the recipe a bit by using Trader Vic's Rock Candy syrup instead of granulated sugar. Consequently, they came out much smoother than the ones I had in Boulder. Man, that silver ball really flew around the playfield once I applied a little lubrication! The only thing my bar is lacking at the moment is tunes, and that situation should be rectified shortly. I ordered a 5-CD changer and a pair of JBL wallmount speakers in cherry cabinets that should arrive just in time for the weekend. [Eye of the Goof] 7:12:28 PM

Additional Notes on Ethanol, Transportation Ethanol fuelling the future for public transport: experts. Cities choking in petrol and diesel fumes should follow Sweden's example and look to ethanol to fuel their buses, announced experts at a conference in Stockholm on environmentally-friendly vehicles and fuels. [Physics Org] 3:27:58 PM

Cordless - Digital Music Label Quote of the Day: The 'nimbleness' of indie record making. Though the Cordless all-digital music label will be operated by a major, it's infused with the spirit of independents. [CNET News.com] 3:13:09 PM

Oasis Acupuncture - Scottsdale, AZ Oasis Acupuncture is a family practice clinic using the ancient art and science of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs. Together they are a proven and safe medical system called Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine works with your own vital energy to facilitate your healing holistically and naturally. While efforts are made to relieve your symptoms, an equal or greater emphasis is placed on rebuilding your body's innate ability to maintain health and vitality by bringing all of the body's systems into balance. Chirstopher Vedeler, Oasis Acupunture in the news. Click here to view the ABC Channel 15, Phoenix story on back pain featuring Oasis Acupuncture. Oasis Acupuncture 8233 N. Via Paseo del Norte Suite D-35 Scottsdale, AZ 85258 480-991-3650 http://www.OasisAcupuncture.com 2:31:54 PM

Rings, Patterns, Gravitational Wakes Cassini provides compelling evidence gravitational wakes in Saturn's rings. By watching a distant star as it passed behind Saturn's outer rings, Cornell University astronomers on NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn have found the most direct evidence to date of patterns, called gravitational wakes, within the planet's outer rings. [Physics Org] 1:14:10 PM

Legends and Questions in Expressionist Fab Culture Recommended download link on Coral distribution network: http://www.bsdunix.ch.nyud.net:8090/public/rendezvous20_04.mov C'etait un Rendezvous. Now this is really fast. Via Coudal. On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive him at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris [...] Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. [The Cartoonist] 11:36:21 AM

Portraits Portrait of a 21st Century Ego. The next time you're showing someone around your house and they ask you what that amazing organic-y LED read-out-like canvas is on your wall, you can tell 'em: "That's my self-portrait; my long-chain polymer of nucleotides; my molecule of heredity; ya know: my DNA -- it's a [Street Tech] 10:38:36 AM