Great little story originally published in Omni Magazine in 1991.

Omni Magazine was cool shit. Doubly cool because Bob Guccione published it baby. Got to hand it to a guy who made his fortune selling Penthouse when he takes a chance on something like Omni. After all, Penthouse is a knock off of Playboy, and Spin was a knock off of Rolling Stone; but Omni was no distaff facsimile. It definitely broke boundaries, crossing genres like politics, technology, science, pseudo-science and science fiction with equal aplomb. Though no longer with us, the wonder of the internet let’s us review the online edition through the Wayback Machine, and the world’s garage sale over at eBay offers up back issues of the magazine.

ColorMatch 5K is a cool little web page that suggests a color palette for web pages. Too bad it only works in crappy Internet Explorer. Too cool to let sleeping dogs lie, its author, Kim Jensen, created the more compatible and feature packed ColorBlender. Kudos Kim!

Let’s start a little project for the next week: An parade of some of my favorite works of art.

The inaugural painting:

Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, from 1665. Virtually unknown until 1882, this painting is on display at the Royal Painting Cabinet Mauritshuis in the Hague.

The painting is the inspiration for Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was adapted into a film starring Scarlett Johansson a couple years ago. Go ahead and read the book, it is an enjoyable read. And watch that movie too; it’s absolutely beautiful to behold.

So, some folks might have noticed the juicy little bits I’ve thrown up on the site lately; from that cool map that tracks the location of visitors to the flickr photo thing down in the sidebar; and now my ugly mug is showing up as a favicon next to the url.

How’d I do that? Easy-peasy, just a quick visit to this site. I cropped and uploaded a self portrait I took last year in New Zealand and voilá, there I am. I did a couple others too, all from pictures I like. I tried making my own favicon by hand, but I am no graphic designer. I had this idea bouncing around in my head, a crescent moon nestled up against the sun, but the result looked pretty bad. So I guess I’ll just stick to tiny headshots for the time being.

I am thinking about migrating away from Blogger too. My domain registration for namamalo.org is expiring next month, along with my hosting plan from Aplus.net. I’ve been farting around with a WordPress installation for almost a year now at
galaide.org, and I recently put up a Textpattern site too with my DreamHost hosting plan. I can’t really rationalize paying for two hosting plans. Aplus.net has been okay, but DreamHost keeps adding more and more value to my plan. Plus I paid for a couple years upfront at DreamHost instead of one year at Aplus.net. So I think I’ll be switching stuff around here, there – somewhere – in the next month or so. Odds are good that I’ll do nothing except move the whole site over to DreamHost, I’m lazy like that and I have no major beefs with Blogger right now.

I’m sure most folks have heard Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of Over The Rainbow, and here’s the story behind the recording.