ideometric

I’m planning to build a cafe racer over the summer. This is an animated mock up I made. I took the photo of the stock bike and painted over it in photoshop to show what I want to do to it (bigger version here).

I think the bike will cost around $1500, plus another ~$500 to pick up a cafe style seat and new exhaust, etc.

With gas prices set to tick past $5/gallon, a 40+mpg bike sounds good to me.

After browsing through random food blogs, I feel compelled to meticulously and artistically document every mundane detail of life.

Plus photography is like instant gratification. Drawing or painting takes forever. This is like click click click - maybe a little processing in Photoshop - and bam, finished. Atleast that’s the plan… so now I’m saving for a D40.

Some random girl in China uploaded a 4 minute video clip of herself ranting at the victims of the earthquake. I guess her name and address have already been publicized. It sounds like the makings of another e-vigilante story (see Korean dog poop lady for another example). Video with English subs below.

BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhua) — When a video clip surfaced on YouTube showing Zhang Ya cursing Wenchuan earthquake victims with lots of profane words, a small earthquake was triggered in China’s Internet community.

Millions of Chinese Internet users posted furious condemnation messages, accusing the 21-year-old girl of “no humanity,” “insulting the victims” and calling her “scum”.

In the near-5-minute video, Zhang, a native of Shenyang, capital of the northeastern Liaoning Province, showed that she was annoyed with the three day period of national mourning during which she could neither watch her favorite television programs nor play any games online. Shockingly, the girl chose to vent her anger through throwing nasty words upon the victims of the Sichuan quake, whose number has now topped 55,000.

Source: Xinhua
(The article is interesting too, it talks about the role of the net and grass-roots self-organizing in response to the earthquake).

But here’s the video…

Cold War era ekranoplans. Gotta love the Soviets.Check out 8:30 in, where they decide that adding missiles would be a good idea. Naturally.

Apparently one of my videos from Korea on Youtube is being used for some Japanese/Korean bashing over on this bulletin board. Something about height / legs? I’d love a translation.

TWEMCO is some kind of Japanese clock company that still makes old fashioned analog flip clocks. The design is classic, I love it. I was going to buy one but then I saw the $140 price tag…

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Ambinder says that Barack Obama’s fifty state voting drive is more than a voting drive: “On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC.”

One incredibly interesting question is to what extent the organizing tools Obama has put to good use thus far in the campaign can be made to work as tools of governance that put pressure on congress and so forth.

Analysts expect Take-Two to rake in more than $1 billion in GTA IV [Grand Theft Auto] revenue by selling roughly 18 million copies through 2009

Source