Blackmoor Vituperative

My gorgeous and talented wife Susan won the 2005 Simplicity American Sewing Guild Creativity Contest in the category “Most Interesting Wardrobe Concept”.

Susan works in a laboratory analyzing materials for asbestos. The color scheme of her six-piece wardrobe, which ranges from magenta to purple to dark blue on a black field, echoes the dispersion staining colors of Chrysotile, the most common type of asbestos. Embellishment details were inspired by the way Chrysotile fibers look under a microscope.

(from Simplicity, The American Sewing Guild Creativity Contest Winners)

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years. Easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 realises the potential of open source.

With new features, advanced XML capabilities and native support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org 2.0 gives users around the globe the tools to be engaged and productive members of their society.

Download it now. If it is not ready today in your language, it will be shortly. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is yours.

Apple has released dual core PowerPC Macs. Don’t waste your time or your money.

At one point I was seriously considering buying a Mac instead of a Dell or a Toshiba. Then I got a programming job where I was required to use a top-of-the-line PowerBook. Let me tell you, the bloom fell off the rose real quick. The more I learned about the Mac, the more frustrated I became. I eventually got proficient at doing things “the Apple way”, at which point I was maybe one-third as productive as I would be on a Windows or Linux based PC that cost half as much.

Don’t believe the propaganda: the Mac makes simple tasks difficult, and complex tasks impossible. If you want to do anything more than surf the web or play your iTunes, steer clear of the Mac.

Tom Merritt at CNet provides a pretty good primer for what Creative Commons is, and addresses some of the confusion that people might have about it.

Here’s the best movie news I have heard in a long time: Christian Bale (of American Psycho, Equilibrium, and Batman Begins) and Hugh Jackman (of X-Men, Kate & Leopold, and Van Helsing) are this close to signing on to appear in the film adaptation of The Prestige, the 1996 novel by Christopher Priest. Anything I could tell about the novel would give away the trick, so to speak: go read it. Even more good news: Christopher Nolan (of Memento and Batman Begins) is slated to direct. If the studio will stay out the way, this could be a truly great film.

PeerGuardian has been updated to version 6B. This is an important security update, because the list servers for the previous versions have been compromised. There is more to the story, which you can read at the new Phoenix Labs web site, but the bottom line is that you should update to the newest version of PeerGuardian ASAP.

Doctor Madblood Presents Satan’s Slumber Party, 2005-10-15

Madblood: “Sybil’s Sisters Strike Back”

Dr. Madblood (Jerry F. Harrell) gets wedged into a tough spot when the Sybil Of The Swamp (Jewell Willis) puts him in charge of her four striking young student sybilettes, poor man. Is the swamp witch hightailing it out of Pungo to avoid the arrival of a malevolent maestro from warmer climes of a land “down under?” Why does a tete-a-tete with the ghost of Baron von Basketcase (Craig T. Adams) lead to head games that get all blown out of proportion? With most of the household out for the night, how did Max manage to end up with *more* than the usual mayhem at the Manor? Can he endure an evening of nabbing a nameless mind-numbing nemesis?

See where it happens!

Portions of Dr. Madblood Presents are filmed at the Hermitage Foundation Museum, 7637 North Shore Road, Norfolk, VA 23505, 757-423-2052, www.hermitagefoundation.org. Take a tour and tell ’em Madblood sent you! See the doctor there, in person, on Sunday afternoon, October 30!

Don’t Miss “Dr. Madblood Presents” at 8 PM every Saturday on WSKY, SKY4 (On Cox Channel 4; DirecTV and Dish Network Channel 7296).

The movie Eegah! was one of the goofier experiments on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and it just got a little goofier. This has to be one of the funniest, most detailed online spoofs of a movie I have ever seen: eegah.com.

Yes, that’s right: I’m selling out and adding an ad banner to my blog — at least for a while. You see, after I mentioned the very cool and before-its-time show Profit, I was contacted by the distributors, who said they were trying to get the word out on the DVD, and asked if I’d put a banner on my site for a while to help. I said, “Sure!” And so, there the banner is, in all its commercial glory.

So what are you waiting for? Go buy the DVD, already!

The Burmese python is challenging the native alligator for the top of the Everglades’ food chain. In a particularly freaky skirmish of this war, two of these apex predators killed each other in a fight to the death just a few days ago.