I was wondering today what ever happened to the town of Half.com when I discovered a recent post at designobserver.com that answers this very question.

The backstory, in case you missed it, is that during the first dot-com boom the company Half.com (since absorbed by eBay) got the town of Halfway, Oregon to rename itself as a publicity stunt.

I gather there are mixed feelings about the way it worked out, and the town seems to have reverted to its former name for the most part.

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, but when is Talk Like a Pilot Day? “This is chrome-plated stove-pipe triple-nickel eight ball, angels eight, five in the slot, boots on and laced, I wanna bounce and blow…”

This is a lazyweb request – I’m looking for something but I don’t even know if it exists. I have about 200 photos (headshots) and I’d like to make an animation that runs through them in order of, for lack of a better term, visual similarity. I’m not talking about morphing or just fading between the images in arbitrary order. Is there software out there that, given a reference image and a set of images to select from, can choose the most similar image? Open source would be best, as there’s no budget for this, and command-line-only is fine, but I am on a Mac.

David Brin, in a piece at Salon.com entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Code”, complains:

almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast

Maybe Apple’s marketshare is so small that they equal “almost none,” but all OS X Macs come with Python and Ruby among other options. But wait, Brin seems to have heard of some of these newfangled scripting languages:

With the help of Flagrant Disregard’s “Motivator” maker and a photo from Wikipedia, I’ve produced this little poster to get you pumped up for your next big computer purchase. (Here’s a full-size version.)

Joel Spolsky (who started his career at Microsoft as a manager on the Excel team) has been writing some recent longer blog posts on a MacBook Pro in TextMate using Markdown. He describes the process in a recent entry. He calls it a “surprisingly good experience.”

He goes on to gripe about anti-aliasing quality (FWIW, that’s explained here), and beachballing from dropped wifi connections (which I’ve never experienced, maybe it’s an early Intel thing?).

Neelie Kroes, you rock.