Photo Gallery Busted! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

If so, you better have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not familiar, Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers of our time. He wrote a wonderful series of radio plays which were converted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to create Towel Day as a tribute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more precise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecommuting to work today had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. *grin*

Are you a hoopy frood, like me? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

It occured to me that I’d totally forgotten to post pictures from that (now) long ago trip to the Niabi zoo. I have finally posted a few of the images in the gallery. Unfortunately, when I was going through the pictures there were quite a few where my camera’s autofocus had grabbed onto the wrong subject. *sigh*

Heh, I forgot © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Before dinner this evening, my wife & I walked down to our local Farmer’s Market. It was a bit hotter out than I’d thought it would be, making me extra glad we’d brought along bottles of iced tea to drink. However upon returning home, we were dismayed to find our apartment to be a scene of some illegal dumping.

The Accused: Captain Jack — known aliases “Jack”, “Captain”, “Fuzz Butt”, “Stinky”, “Jacque“
The Crime: Illegal dumping (e.g. pooping on the bathmat not more than two feet from his litter box).
The Prosecuting Attorney: Me.
The Judge: Her Honorable Judge Michelle¹

Statement by the Prosection: In this apartment there are 3 living beings; myself, my wife and Captain Jack. Two of them were out of the apartment at the time of the incident. No illegal dumping had occured prior to Michelle & I leaving for the Farmer’s Market. The apartment was securely locked while we were gone and there were no signs of forced entry.

Statement by the Accused: *meow*

Verdict: Guilty as charged. The accused is to have his nose pointed at, but not quite in, the illegal dumping to show him what he did wrong. Further, the accused is to held in solitary confinement for a period of not less than 10 and not more than 30 minutes.

¹ Judge Judy ain’t got nothin’ on my wife! *grin*

Illegal Dumping © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

As mentioned previously, I’m a fan of the webcomic Gossamer Commons. Well last night, I was playing around with Inkscape¹ and decided to make a logo/symbol/icon/whatever of the actual “mark of death”. I’ve posted the results in my gallery (the full-size image looks better than the thumbnail). I’ve still got a lot to learn about using Inkscape, but it was kind of fun creating that image. I do look forward to playing with the program some more and maybe doing an image of the CoffeeBear in it (or maybe a tortoise for a friend at work, you know who you are!). :)

¹ “Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). ”

Marked for Death © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I finally got around to updating the Gallery’s CSS to better match the styling of the rest of the site; plus I added some of the more interesting photos that I took during our local 4th of July celebrations. I’ve also tweaked the About page by adding back in a sketch of the site’s mascot. I’ve got a better sketch in my pad, but I need to get that scanned so I can post it. The problem is the wife’s computer was the only one with an ISA slot for the adapter card for the ancient scanner I have and her machine recently died. Of course, even if her machine was fully running; there’d be the bigger problem of trying to get it to run under SuSE. I don’t think SuSe has ever been able to detect the card, much less the scanner itself, though the XSane project does show the scanner as one that is supported.

Site Updates © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Art of Science Competition/Gallery
• Conversations With My Wife: Star Wars
• Five subtle editorial changes at PBS

Not from Pukka, but still a funny/disturbing flash game (hence entirely appropriate for PLotW) Kitten Cannon. My high score is 1337 ft; can you do better?

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Quite some time ago, I ran across a blog called SamuraiPanda.com¹. I really liked the title but had to admit I was disappointed to not find any images of pandas in samurai armor on the site. So I ended up sketching one, scanning it and promptly forgot about all about it. Then tonight while searching my computer for a different image; I ran across that one and decided to go ahead and post it for your pleasure.

¹ No, I do not recall how I ran across it.

Samurai Panda © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

[2005–05-09 17:48 (GMT-06:00)] Update: I’ve completed updating my installation of WordPress to 1.5.1 and have turned on the new theme for WP that I’ve been working on for a while. The gallery is still styled like CoffeeBear’s old theme, but I’ll see about updating that later. I wanted to go ahead and use the new theme once I upgraded and I wanted to go ahead and update to avoid some of the massive amounts of trackback/pingback spam that I’ve been getting hit with.

Site Oddities © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Ariesna was off picking up more phat loot from relatives & friends at a bridal shower, while I balanced my checkbook. I walked over to the store to mail the bills (and grab a bit of lunch). I decided that I’d take my camera along with me today and I’ve posted two best pictures I took on that short walk in the Gallery. They’re not really all that special but still kind of nice and I really should be taking more pictures with the camera. *shrug* Not sure why I don’t, besides just being lazy. Ah well, there’s probably a lot of things I should be doing more of than I am and that’s not all that likely to be changing anytime soon.

Fresh Flowers © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.