So, this is what I'm thinking…

A new form of art I re-acquainted myself with is the improved IOGraph. This tracks your mouse movements and pauses on the screen. Get it now from IOGraphica.

Some cool images I happened upon at Flickr

The 2010 Select series 2 was released last week, called “Prestige”. I’m disappointed, on the whole. I mean, it wouldn’t take too much effort or skill with photoshop to sexy these up a bit. Even if the background splotches were more random and unique, they’d look so much nicer. Still, worth the $2.50 I paid for the set of 12.

… and was female because then I could have bought myself one of these nifty R2-D2 shirts! But alas, I’m a Double XL in a male body.

Something which has bugged me for ages… Not to the point of grabbing a couple loaded pistols and going on a random shooting rampage, but it does keep me awake at night sometimes. You know how Subway, that fantastic architect of finely crafted sandwiches and wraps, has their cheese pre-cut into triangles? And you know how they always arrange the cheese so that the slices are overlapping? I’ll let this diagram explain:

Well, it seems that Subway finally gave into my demands and are changing for the better! No longer will there be any mouthfuls of sandwich with great gobs of cheese, followed by no cheese at all. How did I tolerate this for so long? Subway will now be an enjoyable experience of cheese perfection for the entire length of the sandwich:

It’s the biggest change since they stopped cutting out a scoop of bread, and started just cutting the bread in half. Remember that? I never liked that method, either.

See, it’s little details like this which make a dining experience so much more than jamming food down your craw, don’t you think? I mean, knowing that you face the prospect of being overwhelmed by too much dairy in one mouthful isn’t something that you should need to worry about. Srsly.

So, I say “Bravo, Subway!” Thanks for letting common sense prevail over complete insanity. My life is now a little more tolerable. Speaking of insanity, there’s a guy in my building who orders his Subway sandwiches with cheese, but asks the staff to hand the cheese over to him rather than put it on the sandwich. I’ve seen him do this a number of times, and I can’t figure out why. It’s not that he doesn’t like cheese, because he’ll always have all four slices eaten by the time he gets to the register to pay.

Now, if Subway would only go back to issuing those stamps so I could buy whole rolls off ebay.

We need some of these around Perth.

(via Shane Lavalette)

If you’re still using MS Internet explorer, why? Do yourself a favour and start using Google Chrome. Why? Let me tell you:

Google Chrome is an almost complete ground up web browser design, making much better usage of memory management:

With the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process – a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application. Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process, then leveraging the built-in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won’t necessarily take down the entire browser – the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

Google Chrome is very fast:

On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web–either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

Google Chrome is very secure:

Google’s Chrome was the only browser left standing—and in fact, was completely untested. None of the researchers at the competition even tried to attack Chrome… Google’s sandboxing shouldn’t be impenetrable, but it is sufficient to make the standard harmless exploit payload—starting up Windows calculator—harder to do.

MSIE just doesn’t have what it takes to run Google Wave:

Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5’s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology.

But if you are stuck with uncompromising IT staff or your own ignorance, then you can install the Google Chrome Frame into MSIE for a Wave experience by logging into Wave.

There’s only 66 sets of these made every year, given as prizes in the Teamcoach website competition. In previous years the structure of the competition has been a little different, with 44 or 22 sets made per year.  They don’t come up on ebay very often, so they’re quite rare and generally expensive. If you come first, second or third in the weekly Teamcoach competition, you can win a complete set of Teamcoach Prize Cards. Occasionally (like once or twice a year) you’ll see a complete set on sale on ebay, but more often than not the seller will break them up into team sets. I’ve seen Carlton and Collingwood sets sell for more than $250. Yes, that’s a six, nine or twelve card set depending on the year. The latest full 2010 Prize Set on ebay sold for $600. A 2010 Richmond set sold for $103. I got this Fremantle set for $16 plus change so I’m pretty stoked. I should probably start playing this game.

Being a Fremantle fan sometimes has advantages.

Mostly the same as last year and 2008, the Chipz are back. 9 regular Chipz per team with onfield headshots, plus 3 foil metalic ones with posed shots. Included this year are five 3D Live Chipz, which I assume you hold up in front of your web cam and an image pops up out of them much like other augmented reality apps.

The Chipz also have some stats which go along with some game you can play with them.

I always like the Teamcoach sets. I’ve never actually played the game at the website, but I’ve collected them each year. I’ve not payed more than $15 per team set, including the Prize sets. The common sets are usually around $3 off ebay. Fremantle are generally cheaper than any other team. Because they suck. There I said it. As usual, action shot on the front with a generic back.