A Random Pattern

Weird Al Yankovic e-card for his new song and album
The pre-released song is called “Don’t Download This Song”, which, as you know, means you absolutely MUST download it. He’s got a MySpace page too…see, all the cool kids are doing it.

Gotta love well-done viral marketing. Plus fun parody songs. Especially ones that mock the sickness that is the RIAA, MPAA, DRM… ok, I’ll stop for now.

http://xkcd.com/c148.html, a web comic: so glad to see I’m not the only one with this problem.

note: be careful viewing other pages of this web-comic, some of them are very disturbing.  I’m not kidding about that.

I’ve been thinking about one of the fun little extras Steve Jobs showed off at WWDC not too long ago: The ability to replace backgrounds in iChat video chats. Here are some ideas that I’m sure someone will play around with as soon as Leopard is available:

• Wear a t-shirt that matches the background. Presto, there’s a hole in your stomach! (Don’t know if this will work, depends on how they implemented the algorithm.
• Take a screenshot with your head in the picture. Does your head now disappear?
• Create a fake background with yourself, then “walk in” on yourself while chatting with someone else.

Remember, folks, you heard it here first. Here’s the site that gave me the idea, with a rundown on Leopard:

… In addition, a sophisticated chroma key algorithm was added so that a user can do a snapshot of the background he is chatting in front of, and it will remove the background and key in a background image or video of the user’s choice. For corporate presentations, podcasts or just plain having fun, this is a great feature. …

Update:  Links to WWDC, the Leopard sneek peek iChat page, and a picture from Apple showing the new backdrop effect: