I just upgraded to a Blu-ray player (another post is coming) so I went in and switched my Netflix account to send me BD movies instead of DVD movies. In doing so, I’ve been digging around my account more and am really not impressed by the recommendations they provide.  I’ve had an account for about two years now and the movies that Netflix thinks I’ll love… really aren’t. First I thought it was because I haven’t rated enough movies for it to get an idea of my tastes, but with a little under 900 ratings, that can’t be true any more… can it? I don’t think there has ever been an instance where Netflix recommended a movie to me and I added it to my queue. If it has happened, I could probably count the times on a single hand. I know that they’re working on the recommendation system with their Netflix Prize contest, (side note: Wired had a great article on this contest a couple months back) but don’t know if any improvements gained from this contest have made it to the site yet or not. So here’s my question: does anyone else have this issue with their Netflix queue? Does Netflix recommend nothing but gems for your viewing pleasure? If so, how many movies have you rated in your account? Let me know… maybe Netflix just doesn’t like me.

I just got a message from a friend telling me that I made it into the latest RocketBoom podcast. It happens around 22-29 seconds in the video. Ken and I just walk right by the camera at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin.

Check out my notes at the SXSW Notes site.

Another lovely balloon creation that appeals to my balloon artist side. This is a (close to) scale replecia of a German Panzer Tank… it’s huge!

Cherry Chocolate (rain) Diet Dr. Pepper viral marketing campaign = Great!

(based on the internet video Chocolate Rain)

Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper (the drink) = Yucky!

After being on life support for many many years, AOL has finally killed the web browser that started them all. AOL is pulling the plug on Netscape. There really hasn’t been much of a flutter from the browser for quite some time, and not it is officially done. AOL will be cutting off support in Feb ‘08. It has been near death for quite some time with AOL disbanding their browser division again and again over the years just to release another (sad) version of the browser. The death nells began playing when Netscape sold to AOL back in 1999. The browser had a great history and thankfully the code was open-sourced and became the wonderful Firefox browser. Even though Netscape hasn’t been a player for a long long time, and AOL basically ran it into the ground quickly after purchasing it, it’s sad to see one of the big reasons the internet took off be put to rest.

R.I.P. Netscape Navigator 1994-2008

Um… wow!

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, I thought I’d hand out my yearly list of online gift guides. This is just a handful of the guides out there on the net. These are probably more geared towards geek-gift-givers (which is how I do my shopping). If you run across another one that you think might be useful, drop me a comment, and I’ll get it added to the list.

• CNET Holiday Gift Guide
• 2007 Ars Shoopping Guide
• Uncle Mark Gift Guide and Almanac
• Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide
• Wrapables Holiday Guide
• ThinkGeek Holiday Gift Center 2007
• ExtremeTech’s Geek Gift Guide
• CoolHunting 2007 Gift Guide
• Washington Post Holiday Tech Guide
• iLounge iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide 2008
• Gifts.com
• Lootist - Specialist-Guided Product Discovery
• TreeHugger’s 2007 Gift Guide
• Cool Stuff: Your 2007 Holiday Gift Guide
• Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide, 200: For Him - For Her
• NOTCOT Holiday Gift Guide
• Kotaku’s 2007 Gift Guide of Obscene Nicety and Sublime Naughtyness
• Coolest Gadget Gift Guide
• MightyGoods 2007 Holiday Gift Guide
• USA Today Guide to Holiday Shopping
  
• DealHack Gift Guides
• MAKE Magazine Open Source Gift Guide (added 12/3/07)
• CrunchGear Holidays 2007 (added 12/3/07)
• Ars Technica 2007 Gaming Gift Guide (added12/3/07)
• 77 Design Gifts Under $77 from Core77 (added 12/4/07)
• Lifehacker Gift Guide 2007 (added 12/11/07)

As if being in marching band wasn’t geeky enough (I can say that… I was in band!). Check out Cal’s video game marching band show… it is awesome!

This brings new meaning to the term “Band Geek.”

As a balloon artist myself, I had a general idea of the balloon dog anatomy, but this chart shows everything. I’ll have to whip this out the next time a crying child comes back to me with a broken balloon animal requesting me to perform balloon surgery.

After months of observations, dissections and a 25 minute intro to clown school, I have finally successfully mapped the inter workings of the domestic balloon dog.

(Also check out Jason Freeny’s other art)

How many of these do you know? I think I recognize about 90% (and I’m looking up the ones I haven’t heard of).

This video has been making the rounds the past couple weeks. It is a demonstration of dynamic image resizing. Normally when resizing an image, you will get artifacts with making it either larger or smaller. This demo shows a method of making an image resizable by stretching the unimportant parts of an image and keeping the important parts (faces and primary objects the same). I can’t wait till this gets put into real software that I can get my hands on. I think this would work very well in fluid web layouts.

I think the video speaks for itself.

Poor Soundwave… nobody needs a Transformer that changes into a cassette player.

P.S. The Transformers movie was awesome!

I think movie reviewers are hit or miss, and there isn’t really one out there that I follow religiously. I have somewhat unique taste in movies. Enter “Which Move Reviews Should I Believe?”

Rate a handful of movies on this site, and a few movie reviewers will be recommended to you. My movie tastes line up with:

• Rotten Tomatoes : 78% (this is the site I use most often anyway)
• James Berardinelli : 74%
• Peter Travers : 70%
• Roger Ebert : 68%

Have you ever wanted to box me? Well, the wait is over, step right up to my PlayMyGame boxing match, where you can (virtually) beat the crap out of me. I even used a smug-looking face that you want to punch!

PlayMyGame.com gives you the ability to build a game of your very own. There are several games (boxing, cake fight, super me, hideout), ecards, and clips (mostly crazy dancing) to chose from. All you have to do is upload a photo of yourself, crop around your head and you’re set. Put the link to your PlayMyGame in the comments.

I’m not a huge fan of traditional radio. I don’t listen to it very often (usually listen to podcasts in the car). I guess I just don’t like the hear the same 20 songs played over and over again. With that being said, I still do want to find sources for new music. In searching for a song the other day, I ran across a site that will help me in that quest. The Hype Machine is a site that keeps tabs on music mentioned in blogs across the ‘net. It tracks them and rates them based on how many times they come up in blog conversation.

The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.

I’ve actually run across several new artists and songs via ‘the machine.’ Thank you Hype Machine for keeping me away from traditional radio.

The Cinematic Orchestra (via hype machine)

Andrew Bird (via hype machine)