Why do these kinds of things always show up around Halloween? It’s gotta be the urban legends’ favorite day.

Can you imagine spending that kind of money on a commercial and then not airing it?

Found this via Dvorak.org, and figured I might as well share it with you.. because it’s time for a spooky day story…

I’m just going to copy/paste the whole thing to save me the time of explaining it. (obviously this is a slightly modified version of the original since it’s no longer an email attachment)

It’s the time of year to revisit the Ghostly Car Ad!

A creepy video is going around the net with this note attached:

READ THE STORY FIRST BEFORE YOU OPEN THE ATTACHMENT

>> Strange but interesting. This is a car advertisement from Great Britain.

>> When they finished filming the ad, the film editor noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist. They found out that a person had been killed a year earlier in that exact same spot. The ad was never put on TV because of the unexplained ghostly phenomenon.

>> Watch the front end of the car as it clears the trees in the middle of the screen and you’ll see the white mist crossing in front of the car then following it along the road….Spooky!

>> Is it a ghost, or is it simply mist? You decide.

>> If you listen to the ad, you’ll even hear the cameraman whispering in the background about it near the end of the commercial. So turn up the sound!

A little creepy but pretty cool!

Now CLICK HERE to watch the video

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..I always vote against.  ~W.C. Fields

So I voted today. All done. Gloucester County has early voting as of a a few weeks ago. At the Deptford Mall, they have a County Office (near Boscov’s). So it’s really easy to head into the mall, vote, and get out of there.

Early voting is up throughout the country, with a prediction of as much as 30% of the votes being early cast this year (as compared to 14% in 2000).

Early voting is a great way to get a chance on a vote that fits your schedule, rather than trying to make it fit into a single designated day.

You might want to look into it in your area.

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I’m driving home yesterday, and what do I spy by a Google Street View car heading down the A.C. Expressway. Now, I recognized it from the back almost immediately, because I’d read about/seen pictures of what the camera device looks like on top (slightly different versions do exist).

Right now, the Southern NJ area is totally missing Street View options, but it looks like that is about to change. As you can see from this quick regional picture, anything outside of Philadelphia/NY is totally devoid of street view data.

So what did I do? I made sure to follow the car ALL THE WAY TO PHILADELPHIA (ok, so yesterday was  the official CAPS LOCK DAY, but gimme a break). I passed it and drove on both sides of it. I noticed the computer inside, with a flat screen monitor positioned facing the driver, a Google sign on the side of the car, and California license plates. So hopefully when the images are posted, anyone using the street view will see me driving my car the whole way.

Google Street View has captured lots of unique and mundane images, raised the ire of privacy advocates, and even spawned photo scavenger hunts.

I’m not worried about the privacy issues, and to be honest, if GM catches you picking your nose as you walk down the street, you deserve to be laughed at.

Anyway, there’s my brush with technology and digital legacy.

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I got married 7 years ago. On that day, I put my wedding ring on. I haven’t taken it off, with very few exceptions (notably dropping a dresser on my hand while moving - and having the ring stop the dresser from breaking my finger against the stairs ~~ very The Abyss). Now, I’ve been without it for 3 days and I keep thumbing the empty spot and wondering what’s missing.

My ring is very similar to the picture, with black enamel between all the knots. Consequently, the enameling between the knots is kind of worn, and actually has come off in a few places.

Jean’s ring has always been a tight fit. When the kids were born, she stopped being able to wear it at all. So she’s been ‘naked’ for over 3 years.

This weekend, we went to a FSMom hayride in DE, and decided to head down early and stop in at Robbin’s Delaware Diamonds, where we got the rings, and have both of those things taken of.

We had to get hers resized from 6 to 6.5. The stretching wouldn’t have been too big a deal, except that it also breaks the enamel. So they took both of our rings and sent them off for an estimate. 1 resizing, and 2 reenameling. Could take a few weeks, but we think that the total cost may be less than $75 - money well spent.

Jean is looking forward to being able to wear her ring again more than I am to make mine look nice, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do both.

I’m thinking about hitting some singles bars this week to try out my new found freedom…

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I’m all about the tech recently, so here’s the latest show to catch my attention. Debuting last night on the Discovery Channel, is a new show called Prototype This.

The basic theme of Prototype This is that the four hosts, Terry Sandin, Zoz Brooks, Mike North, and Joe Grand take their combined skills and use each episode to conceive of and craft some entirely new design, product, or technology. The end result? A full season of prototypes that are off-the-wall, entirely practical, and everything in between.

If you have Discovery, great. If not, if you want to view some episodes on your own time, check out their website where you can watch videos and full episodes. They need to build up their Full Episode list, as right now it’s only Jon & Kate Plus 8, Prototype This and It’s Me or the Dog — but they have PT, which is obviously my point to this whole entry.

Alot of the clips will still keep you busy for hours though, as there are several exclusive clips for web viewers up there for all the Discovery, TLC and Animal Planet shows, including one of my favorites Dirty Jobs, which recently started its 5th season.

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Midnight Madness (1980)

For a while now, I’ve been planning on developing a road rally/puzzle rally for my friends and extended friends. Finally, I’m pulling it together.

There are a couple of different kinds of road rallies. They go by different names and variations, but these are the core ideas

One is known as a TSD (time/speed/distance).  In this kind of rally, a team (typically two people -a driver and a navigator) is given a set of route directions to follow, and the speeds at which they should travel the route. The route will generally consist of rural and quieter back roads. The goal of a TSD Road Rally is to travel the correct route at the correct speeds, and arrive at “checkpoints’” precisely on time. You are scored on how closely to the correct time you arrive. A Road Rally is not a race, and no rally will ever require you to drive in a reckless or illegal fashion. Arriving too early at a checkpoint hurts your score, as does arriving too late.

The second is a puzzle rally. In this case, a team is given a set of clues and puzzles which will lead them from one location to another. At each location they must answer questions to earn points and then end in a final destination.

This kind of rally can easily be explained by this clip from Midnight Madness. More details can be found at nayrium.com. Their second video link isn’t working correctly, so I’ve copied both videos here for review.

Explanation:

Example clue solving:

My plan is to combine the best of both. I’m going to have puzzles as well as driving clues.

When I was about 10 years old, my mom used to participate in, and design road rallys, that were hybrids as well. I was always too young to participate (as they wound up at bars in the end), but I’ve always wanted to do it myself.

My rally will be family friendly. The end location will be a place we can all hang out at and enjoy ourselves and eat and drink.

I’ll need to pick a weekend that is free from SCA events and (hopefully) on an odd week to make it accessible to my law enforcement friends.

This is the kind of thing where you enjoy the company of your team while you are solving. Enjoy the drive and the competition against the other teams. Then, kick back, relax, and tell stories of getting lost etc. at the restaurant.

I’m going to design and put together the whole thing and then send out some invitations. I really hope to get a good group of folks together, as these are really alot of fun, so I encourage you to invite your friends along as well. I’ll just need to get a final RSVP count of teams so I know how many packets to put together. My goal is have this ready by the end of the year, but we’ll see how that fits into the schedule.

Technorati Tags: road rally, midnight madness, puzzle, fun

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I just finished one of the best books I’ve read in the last 10 years. It’s called Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.

I would’ve enjoyed the book on its face, but it’s underlying themes really struck a chord with me.

Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile’s civil protest.

We’re living in a time where our personal freedoms are being slowly squeezed away in the name of protection. Each little thing slowly builds on the one before, creeping up on you. If you set aside the fact that the folk warning of the boiled frog is a myth, the anecdote still serves a purpose when examining our country in a post-9-11 world.

The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out.

The book does a great job of introducing the reader to modern technology items such as RFID, cryptography and pattern analysis. The narrator of the story takes the time to explain what they are and how they are used with very easy to understand examples - and that’s key to appreciating how these technologies can be used for either good or bad.

I’ve had a time in my life when I was a hacker. Not nearly as experienced or in depth as I could have been, but I understand the culture - another reason this book appealed to me.

But even today, I’m still interested in cryptography and ARGs. I’ve been on a  LARP.

You have several options for enjoying Little Brother.  Besides the traditional print copy, you might enjoy the audio version (listen to an excerpt above), or even download a version to read for free.

I can’t say enough good things about the book. I was already recommending it before I was halfway through, and now that it’s done, I wish I had more to read.

Don’t take my word for it. Read a review or two. I don’t want to make this entry much longer full of their words, but I encourage you to see the impression it has made on others, sometimes even being called a modern day 1984.

Whether it will have the same staying power 60 years from now that 1984 does, I can’t say. What I can say is that it’s an important reflection of today and where we could be tomorrow.

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Before you watch this video, it may be NSFW as I chose the uncensored version (mild language). I feel it’s important to hear people speak in their own words on important topics such as this.

These are very serious times we are living in, and everyone’s voice deserves to be heard. Your voice. In many parts of the world, you wouldn’t have a voice at all. But, as improbable as it seems, many Americans do not take their right to vote seriously, and often ignore it altogether.

If you don’t have 5 minutes to watch this piece here are some highlights:
1) You NEED to vote
2) You must be registered to vote, and there is a deadline which varies per state. Some deadlines are as soon as Oct. 4. You just can’t show up on election day and be part of it.

3) If you haven’t registered, check out http://maps.google.com/vote to get an interactive map. This will tell you, based on your address, not only where you can register, but how much longer you have to do it.

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