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9 November, 2002

The Man Who Loves Spam

Barry Dennis sat down and wrote an article titled Why I love spam (this item is about six months old, but I missed it when it was fresh). It's not a joke -- although the rented tuxedo in his photo might lead you to suspect otherwise. But read the "about the writer" blurb at the bottom, and it begins to make sense:

Barry Dennis is president of Netweb, an Internet and offline marketing and public relations agency.

You might want to check out Barry's cheesy web site. Yes, that site is actually hosted at Geocities! and it proudly displays a photo lifted from corbis.com. And to round out the professional image, he even has an AOL email address. Now it's starting to make a lot of sense.

Here's a link to a great parody, by Madhu Menon: Why I love pop-up ads!

Posted on 9 November, 2002

Wacky Faces, and More

I'm sure this Flash face maker was designed for kids -- the cartooncritters.com domain is a dead-giveaway. But it sure kept me occupied!

When you get tired of that, you can make George W. dance, or play around with this hypocycloid app.

And speaking of hypocycloids, here's a version for Excel.

Posted on 9 November, 2002

Create Your Own Book Cover

Visit any bookstore, head for the computer section, and you'll find lots of books by O'Reilly. These book all have a distinctive cover design, and (for some reason) they all feature a drawing of an animal.

Here's a site that lets you create your own O'Reilly book cover.

The image on the right is an example (click it to see a larger version).

Posted on 9 November, 2002

The Checker Shadow Illusion

Edward H. Adelson's amazing optical illusion has been making the rounds lately. I finally snagged a copy of the image, and played around a bit in PhotoShop.

The image on the left is a portion of the original image. Although the shadow-casting object is not visible, the illusion is still very strong.

I copied and pasted the "A" and "B" squares to a new image (on the right). Outside of the original context, it is clear that the two squares are exactly the same color: RGB(107,107,107).

Want to see more illusions? Click here.

Posted on 9 November, 2002