'Cross The Breeze

Renaissance superheroes?

May 29, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

There were no superheroes during the renaissance period. Why? Apparently there were no supervillains so they were not needed. That would explain the lack of superheroes in fine art. It's time to fix that. Well that is according to Worth1000.com where they are running this Photoshop contest on superheroes. It's a pretty cool idea and some of the results are very good.

The rules of the contest are thus:
Take any piece of fine art and incorporate a superhero (or supervillain), as in the awesome themepost. As always, quality is a must. We'll remove poor entries no matter how much we like you. You'll have 48 hours for this contest, so make your submissions count.

If you like the idea, take a look at the contest website for all entries, it's worth it. I think I like this one most of all, maybe not the most complicated, but I like the simplicity of the image.

art, other things

For Sale: DeLorean

May 29, 2006 by Kris Hoet 6 Comments

Just picked up this newsitem from Engadget. The DeLorean from Back to the Future is for sale. I remember that back then I found this one of the coolest cars ever!

"Where we're going we don't need roads"

[Via Engadget]

fun, gadgets, movies

Website as graphs

May 28, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I just found out about this cool way to visualize websites. I must say that not only the end result, but also the way it builds the image is pretty fun to watch. What is does really is translate the tags of the HTML into colored dots. The colors are used for the tags in the following way:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here's the result for 'Cross The Breeze, you can find more results at the website of the guy who created it or at Flickr (tagged: websitesasgraphs). Nifty results for instance for BoingBoing.net, almost fireworks.

Or just try it for yourself here.

[Via Google Blogoscoped]

internet

La Scuderia

May 27, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Just before I was about to close my PC, I quickly checked my RSS feeds for a last time and well what do you know, … Schumacher has just been punished for his mistake during qualifying at the Monaco F1 Grand Prix. Man, that's just bad news! So much for a great Grand Prix tomorrow…

news, racing

Things that make me smile

May 27, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

This one does for instance, I can imagine this totally made Tina's day… Lovely.

fun, other things

Hotlist (2)

May 27, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

It has been a long time since I last got into these top 10's but here there are some nice onces again. First of all Guy Kawasaki and his top 10 lies, some of which you also might have read in Seth's book. Another top 10 is about the web. With all these web 2.0 services launched at us one after the other, you wouldn't think there are still that many opportunities left. The truth however proves differently, because most services/applications are more of the same and there are clearly underserved web 2.0 markets, dixit Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web.

PC World reports on the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time, and you will certainly recognise the pain when you worked with some of those products. Compare with CNet's Top 10 worst products of the last decade and you'll find some interesting similarities. Getting curious to find out what Microsoft Bob was all about… Enough about the past though, the top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future might even give you an first view of some of the stuff that will feature on the 'worst product' lists in 10 years.

electronics, gadgets, hotlist, internet, marketing

Read it before Hollywood does

May 27, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

The good thing about The Da Vinci Code is that a lot of people did read it before the movie got created. The movie which – read the reviews – is quite bad actually. The Association of librarians of the Czech Republic ran a funny campaign that relates to this subject in order to get people to read more books. Some say it’s an old campaign already, I hadn’t seen it before but must say I think it’s quite good.

More examples to be found at AdArena.

books, movies

Blogging with Word 2007 beta

May 25, 2006 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

Got to try this. After having some issues with the first beta of Office 12, I just installed the beta 2 and it all seems to be running just fine. Although I need to get used to it, the ribbon looks really great, and the fact that Outlook integrated tasks with the follow up flags is something I was waiting for a long time already.

But one of the features that intrigued me most was the blog option in Word, which I’m trying to write this post. By the time you’re reading this on my blog, it means this features works just fine. I did notice it’s text only so far, and Microsoft mentioned that the timestamp is wrong but hopefully this gets fixed by when Office gets out of beta. They do promise to get more support to WordPress and some other blog services in the coming months.

internet, microsoft, software

Invasion of the Robots

May 23, 2006 by Kris Hoet 3 Comments

This contest went live a couple of days ago but I didn't have time yet to write about it until tonight. Microsoft is challenging developers worldwide to create conversational robots, or BOTs, for MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. The most original and useful robots collect 40.000$ in total prizes, more info at contest website.

If you are a developer but you don't have a clue what these BOTs are all about, I'll list some of the already existing BOTs right here so you can play around with them for a bit and this might get you some creative ideas. So add those to your MSN or Windows Live Messenger buddy list and get in a conversation. Unless mentioned differently, they're all English BOTs.

Existing BOTs:

TechEd06@hotmail.com (NEW)
encarta@conversagent.com
volkskrant@nieuwskraker.nl (Dutch)
blabla@chatman.nl (Dutch)
espbilly@msn.com
indeedjobs@hotmail.com
yellowpagesqa@hotmail.com
smarterchild@hotmail.com
msnguiftguide@hotmail.com

Have fun! And thanks David for pointing out the new Tech Ed bot on your blog.

fun, gadgets, internet, marketing, msn, windows live

Cannes Lions

May 23, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

With the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival coming our way I just wanted to share this creative with you all that our agency Absoluut created back in 2003. They basically didn't go to the Cannes Festival that year and they did send out this postcard to all of there clients, featuring the two owners in Kanne (pronounced the same way of course), which is a small village in Belgium. So it says "Greetings from Kanne" and has images on 'it's nightlife', 'the marina', 'her croisette', … It's maybe a bit difficult to really understand since it's in Dutch, but I just needed to share this since I just loved it.