I drove home through some weird weather this morning. Rain is not so strange in Spring, but the clouds were patchy with big fat drops and I could see snippets of blue sky, but also lightning flashes in the distance. In the last few minutes the storm has become a full blown thunderstorm. After my years in the Midwest I’m not sure I will ever be used to thunderstorms in the morning.

Tomorrow night I am going to the Franklin Institute to attend an event celebrating 400 years since the invention of the telescope. There is to be a documentary about the history of the telescope shown as well as one of Galileo’s original telescopes on exhibit (for the first time outside of Italy, apparently). I’m pretty excited.

And just that fast the thunderstorm has moved on.

The video for “Her Morning Elegance” by Oren Lavie is a unique example of time lapse photography being used in a music video. The song is good, the video is better. My only somewhat negative comment is that the idea that the musician must appear in the music video is false and this isn’t a bad example of why that is the case; I think it would have been a stronger work without him. There is some information about the making of the video here.

The 75^th anniversary edition of Esquire Magazine is out now and features on its cover and inside flap electronic ink technology. Of course, I had heard about some of the limitations such as it is in monochromatic gray scale, but I was expecting more considering it had been hyped for months in advance. The insets are relatively small, but they do use them to good effect “lighting” up a colored overlay. I suspect that we will be seeing much more of this sort of thing in the future.

Video of the magazine cover in action can be seen here.

Windows has set up a website documenting the “Mojave Experiment“. It is now advertising said experiment in short commercials appearing on hulu.com and perhaps elsewhere as well.

The commercials consist of an experimenter asking people what they had heard about Window’s Vista. The subject would then say it was full of problems and that they would never ever use it themselves. Then the experimenter would demonstrate an operating system. Said subjects would then rave about what they were seeing and say things like, “I want this,” and the experimenter would respond rather smugly, “This is Vista.” Then a close-up of the subjects looking appropriately surprised. The tag-line should be something like: “We’ll convert you too!”

I would expect even Microsoft to be able to manage to get their programs to run correctly in a controlled environment. So the interesting aspect of this is not the so-called experiment, but the felt need to conduct and then advertise it in the first place.

While listening to the radio in the car, I missed a figure (specifically the number of elderly persons who die of hypothermia in the United Kingdom each year) and there was twitch in my right hand — a desire to grab the mouse and scan back to the section in question.

Given that I was born in the 80s, I guess it is no surprise that I have a soft spot for old Nintendo games (Pong was Atari). So I was amused and impressed by this performance of the marching band for the University of California, Berkley.