7 posts tagged “internet”

I was having a pretty miserable day today. A vicious combination of stress, frustration, and loneliness typically will do the trick. Thank the gods that I have good friends, like ee.en, who even after he was drenched with my personal sorrows, went out of his way to send me this song. Interpret it how you like, but listening to A Postcard to Nina was exactly what I needed.

Seems like this Monday was the day for .tiff to make some random appearances around the Internets. While my cameo at the WWDC '08 Keynote  pales greatly in comparison to Mr. Sippey's stellar onstage presentation of our TypePad iPhone app, if you look carefully at timestamp 1:22:47 you can catch of glimpse of myself and Chico when we were waiting in line for the iPhone launch in NYC last year:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the blogosphere, photographer Shannon Corr snapped some mid-swing photos of myself and my roommate taking it easy at the Gamepro BBQ. While the below photo is certainly my favorite, I don't mind this one either. Huzzah!

Maybe I'm behind in certain facets of internet education, but today I learned that the internet's 'diameter' is 19.  What does that mean?  One of my classmates explained the theoretical diameter with a complicated digression of graph and network theories, but this guy makes it pretty easy to understand:

Have you ever played the game "Six Degrees Of Separation"? You start out with a person (often a movie star), and then see if you can relate them to another movie star in six or less connections. For example, how would you connect Julia Roberts to Sean Connery?

Well, Julia Roberts starred with Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman", and Richard Gere starred with Sean Connery in "First Knight". That's two degrees right there.

The internet diameter is similar. How many degrees of separation are there between any two randomly selected web pages? How many clicks does it take to get from one web page to another? Researchers have done studies and calculations to try to determine the answer to this question, and the average "distance" in clicks between any two web pages is known as the diameter of the web.

As of the turn of the millenium, the diameter of the internet was approximately 19 clicks.

There you go!  It's 19.  Now you've learned something!  Apparently, if the internet increases by 1000%, the diameter will only barely increase to maybe 20. Crazy pills!

*snort*

Now that Flickr is back up and running as usuall, you can go see the entries for their colour contest when the site was down yesterday evening.  Just search for photos tagged flickrcolourcontest and enjoy browsing the 800 or so entries!

These were my favorites

I had seen these little illustrations around the web before, and wondered how people got their own custom pixel portraits.  I finally thought to goolge it (duh.) and found the site where you can make these great little icons!  You can choose from a myriad of options for 16 different characteristics (hair, face shape, accessory), and adjust them to your pleasing.  Here are the two I made (before I told myself I needed to try and sleep)

You can access the pixel portrait site here! Go nuts.
(PS This would make an awfully fun QOTD...or...fun thing on the internet to do...of the day)

I feel as though it is my duty to share this video because of its caliiber, its probity, and especially because of its vision.  At times, it made me feel as though I wanted to cry.  Because of the artistry or because of the pain I felt while watching it, to this moment I am still unsure.  His state-of-the-art graphics and video effects are crafted with honorable effort for the late 80's. And come on, isn't there a little bit of the 'average homeboy' in all of us?

Enjoi: