Saw this stuff for the first time last night at the grocery store — “Spicy Szechwan Kraft Dinner”:
(For readers in the United States, what gets sold as “Kraft Macaroni and Cheese” where you’re from is sold as “Kraft Dinner” in Canada.)
I can’t imagine it being any good, but I feel compelled to give it a try, just once. Maybe at my next grocery run.
This scan from the August 1985 issue of Ebony features their prediction of what Michael Jackson would’ve looked like in the year 2000 (which, back then, seemed like a time in the far-off future):
“At 40,” the caption reads, “he will have aged gracefully and will have a handsome, more mature look.” Tacky 80s-era clothing aside, it’s a good look for him. Very Lando Calrissian.
Keep in mind that this photo was altered in the time before Photoshop, when you had to do it with knives, brushes, paints and a very steady hand.
It’s easy to laugh at the prediction in hindsight, but this was the mid-80s, before the accident while shooting the Pepsi commercial and well before celebrity extreme meltdowns were more commonplace.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.
Jon Udell – the developer, information architect, author who wrote about social software before we started calling it that, blogger and Senior Tech Evangelist at Microsoft – will be in Toronto next week and he’ll be at a couple of events that I’m attending.
On Tuesday, John will be at the 21st edition of DemoCamp, the show-and-tell event for people in the Toronto tech community, where entrepreneurial developers, designers, marketers and businesspeople get together to talk about what they’re working on, exchange ideas and get to know each other. We’re about using the power of technology and creativity to make Toronto (and the world) a better place to live, work and play. And yes, Yours Truly will help host the event.
Watch this blog for more details about next week’s DemoCamp, including the demos and Ignite presentations that will be featured that night.
On Wednesday, John will be at Science 2.0, a conference exploring the ways in which computers and the internet are changing the way science is done. Speakers and presentations at Science 2.0 include:
John will have a talk at Science 2.0 in which he’ll cover the elmcity project, a community calendaring system running on the Azure platform and how it “tackles the challenge of social information management and aims to democratize the computational way of thinking that enables us to wire the web.”
I’ll be taking notes at both events and will post them on this blog.
Here’s some amusing Photoshoppery featuring the current Snickers ad campaign. Click the photo to see it in its full-size glory:
Photo courtesy of Adam Conover.
Photo courtesy of Will from Dork Shelf.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
One quick announcement: I’m going to be at a couple of Coffee and Code events this week:
Be there!
The picture below is a very clumsy approximation of what my vision is going to be like for the next little while:
(And no, that’s not my Karmann Ghia. I wish it was, but it ain’t.)
That thing bobbing around the right side of the photo above – the black clump that looks like a bunch of knotted-up string or a very small rotten banana – is my rendition of the floater currently bobbing about in my right eye. The motion isn’t as jerky as the animation shows; it’s much smoother, like a dead ant in a jar of baby oil that occasionally gets shaken about.
The floater appeared last Wednesday. It slowly travelled from right to left and I swatted at it. That’s when I realized that it was actually a little object in my eye.
I’ve got a strong family history of retinal detachment. That’s when the retina – the paper-thin sensor at the back of your eyeball that catches light and turns it into electrical signals to be interpreted by your brain – comes loose. It’s common among nearsighted people, whose eyeballs are stretched so that the lens focuses light in front of the retina instead on on it:
If you’re nearsighted, it typically gets worse as you get older and your eyeball stretches. This stretching pulls the retina taut, making it more susceptible to tears or holes, which let the vitreous (the clear goo in your eyeball) seep underneath, causing your retina to peel away like wallpaper in a sauna.
To complicate matters, the vitreous also shrinks as you get older, and it pulls on the retina as it does so.
Floaters are a sign of possible retinal detachment, so I was a little concerned.
My original plan was to go to St. Joseph’s Health Centre, which is nearby and where they know me – my Mom’s the chief of cardiology there, and my brother-in-law also a cardiologist there. I figured it was best to go to a place where I had a little clout.
My brother-in-law suggested that I go to Toronto Western Hospital instead, since they are a big opthalmology hospital and would probably have an opthalmologist on call. The Ginger Ninja and I headed there, and sat in emergency, waiting to go through the Harry Potter Sorting Hat of triage.
Luckily for me, my mother and sister (she’s a doctor too) decided to come to the hospital. My sister prevailed on the emergency doctor (a PGY1 or “Piggy 1”, barely a couple of weeks into her first year of residence), who was going to send me home and have me come back in the morning. Our family has a history of retinal detachments progressing quite quickly, so the sooner my eye got looked at, the better.
While we waiting in the emergency examining room, I could hear a couple of family arguments in the adjoining areas. Emergency rooms often bring out the Jerry Springer guests in people.
In the end, the opthalmological resident, Dr. Mandell, gave me a full exam – including poking at my eye with a metal stick – and found a couple of small holes in my retina.
“They’re tiny holes, but we can use a laser to seal them so that your vitreous doesn’t leak under them, which will eventually cause a detachment. The vitreous is tugging at your retina a little; I can tell from the tenting.”
I resisted the urge to go all Beavis and Butt-Head and say “Huh-huh-huh, you said ‘tenting’.”
It was after the clinic’s hours, so we had to wait for a security guy to open the locked room where the laser lenses were stored. While Dr. Mandell was going about trying to get his hands on the lenses, Wendy took this photo of me on her phone:
The laser was computer-controlled, and guess what it ran:
“Win2K? I’ve got some Windows 7 discs,” I joked with Wendy. “Maybe I can upgrade him before he comes back.”
The procedure involved my holding my head very still in the headrest. Dr. Mandell held a lens covered with goop to my eyeball, through which he focused a laser to do the retinal spot-welding.
“Keep your head still,” he said. “You don’t want the laser to hit the wrong thing.”
“No, I don’t,” I said in agreement.
All I saw was about ten seconds of a bright flashing green light. Then another ten seconds. Then another ten seconds, after which he said “All done.”
There’s only one thing the laser couldn’t fix:
I was told that it would eventually dissolve…”in weeks, perhaps months.”
It’s only slightly annoying when I’m looking at things that are an arm’s length away or farther. When I focus on objects at those distances, the floater becomes a blurred-out grey region and isn’t too hard to deal with. Reading, using the computer and driving aren’t really affected by it.
However, when I focus on objects close by, the floater comes sharply into focus and it seems as though I’m viewing the world through the aforementioned jar of baby oil with a dead ant floating in it. I noticed this when looking through my camera’s viewfinder. Any career aspirations to become a sniper, astronomer, diamond merchant or anything that requires me to look through a viewing lens will have to be put on hold.
Since I’m going to be stuck with this thing for a while, I might as well have some fun with it. I should give it a name. And that’s where you come in. I’m taking suggestions for names in the comments, and whoever comes up with the best name will get at $25 ThinkGeek or Amazon gift certificate from Yours Truly.
And no, “Floaty” is not a good name. Get creative!