SketchUp 7 Released

Elex and I have used SketchUp to model our main office-- it is fun and most features are free. The new release has dynamic components that preserver relationships that were a bitch to maintain in earlier versions (e.g. the regular spacing of objects stretched in the model). Cool.

Glued Together

In case we are not already close enough, my friends, there's Glue:

Glue (formerly BlueOrganizer), connects you with friends around things you visit! Glue works automatically as you browse popular sites about books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors, tv shows and other everyday things around the web.

The Glue Bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought!

Spatter!

Gnnnngh... another Photoshop Disaster.

Google Flexes Too

SearchMash Flash Interface
The Google-built experimental Flex interface for Google search.
(Warning: it crashed my browser)

Star Trek XI

The full trailer for the next Star Trek movie is out.

It's very pretty, but.... Well. Yeah. It's pretty.

Note to Self: Need More Flare

Many-Eyes is fun, but if I really want geek cred I need to learn how to create unique visualizations in Flare, the platform on which Many Eyes is built:

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel.

Here is a Corporations by Political Contributions visualization made in Flare.

Govt. Land Ownership Map

Click for embiggening.

Plundering the Comics

Hollywood, in there never ending quest to mine creative resources from any and all, has 75 comics being made into films. Films include live action remakes of classic anime:

• Ghost In The Shell (2010)
• Akira (2011)
• Ninja Scroll (2011)

and prequels:

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
• X-Men Origins: Magneto (2009)

and sequels:

• Iron Man 2 (2010)
• Spider-Man 4 (2011)
• Sin City 2 (2010)
• Sin City 3 (2010)

Let's hope the suck ratio isn't to high. Also, this beats remaking remakes.

Evolution of Amazon's Shopping Cart Button.

I a little surprised to find myself reading this whole article, rather than just skimming and looking at the pictures. But I reassured myself a third of the way down by saying to myself "Well, somebody wrote all of it, so I'm not the biggest freak."

It's a nice anecdote of e-commerce evolution.

FLOW CHART!

A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
(That's their title.)

Letter and Number of the Day

Jane Espenson (writer of Dinosaurs, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, and other things) gives a lot of advice at her blog on how to write for TV. Today, she posted a letter from someone who works on Sesame Street and their writing process.

I'd Have To Say...

... that this is pretty distracting:

Summers and Geithner

A lot of people voted for Obama, based on the economy. Here's a little information about two prospective Treasury Secretaries.