Awesome geek tattoos

These totally awesome comic book and geeky tattoos make me want so badly to overcome my fear and get inked myself. Wired has a wicked gallery of comic-inspired tattoos from ComicCon.

Gallery, via BoingBoing

(Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Creepy virtual actor looks real

The lady in this video looks like a real person, but she's not. She's a digital replica of the actress Emily O'Brien created by Image Metrics and Paul Debevec at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. She is also creepy as hell!

The Emily Project, via BoingBoing

Apple announces MobileMe subscription extensions

Following my previous post about the poor performance of MobileMe, users today received an email from Apple Support offering a 60 day period of free the service, in the light of the disastrous launch and the numerous problems encountered.

The Support article is understated in the admission that the launch was hasty and bug-ridden. Apple claims "[t]he transition from .Mac to MobileMe was rockier than we had hoped" and that MobileMe is "still not up to our standards", and announced an extension to any free trial period users may be taking advantage of.

This is the danger with early adoption, and it is great to see Apple acknowledging the issues, and promising to work them out. However, I hold out very little hope that the computer manufacturer will actually address the concerns of users. Apple has a long history of ignoring the glaringly obvious (MMS and video recording for the iPhone spring to mind, not to mention a character counter for SMS length).

MobileMe users wait with baited breath to see if Apple can redeem themselves, but any free time extension offer does little to ease the pain of having already sunk money into the crippled service.

Stupid IT Measures

In the media industry, I think the notion of blocking any websites is completely ludicrous. Any source of information is arguably a crucial piece of research needed at any point of the day by the folks charged with staying abreast of current affairs.

Which is why I find the blocking of one of my favourite atheist blogs, Friendly Athesit by Hemant Mehta, totally freakin' lame.

"Cult/occult"? Would a website about Catholicism or Christianity be blocked for the same reason? A quick Google search says no.

Conveniently, I had already seen the comic that Hemant was linking to, as I have a handy dandy RSS feed of xkcd already. I don't know a great deal about how they compile a list of websites to be blocked, but it appears to be ultimately futile, infuriatingly unfair, and a breathtakingly stupid study in trundling, archaic mediocrity.

Good thing I got this out before Blogger was blocked for the reason "IWSS Security Event, Content classification: OH SNAP".