In what many people might consider an ironic end to the life of a talented artist, an X-Men illustrator passed away while wearing his Superman pajamas this Sunday evening. While I feel horrible for Dave Cockrum’s family for now having to deal with his passing, I found it highly interesting that he did so while surrounded by comic book heroes.
Wearing Superman pajamas and covered with his Batman blanket, comic book illustrator Dave Cockrum died Sunday.
The 63-year-old overhauled the X-Men comic and helped popularize the relatively obscure Marvel Comics in the 1970s. He helped turn the title into a publishing sensation and major film franchise.
Cockrum died in his favorite chair at his home in Belton, South Carolina, after a long battle with diabetes and related complications, his wife Paty Cockrum said Tuesday.
Though it is sad to see Cockrum leave our world, at least he did so while sitting in his favorite chair in his home, wearing what he loved to wear, covered by the very characters that he has always been interested in his whole life. If only everyone could be so lucky!
However, this makes me wonder. Does this mean that I will have to endure passing away while chilling in an Aeron chair while starring at an RSS reader, or some other web site, in Mozilla Firefox? How scary of a thought is that?!?!
I noticed that Matt, Alex and a host of other bloggers started to use the Snap Preview Anywhere code on their sites. It seems that some folks have employed the technique throughout their entire blog while others added the solely in specialized areas of their sites.
Taking their cue, I have opted to make use of the Snap Preview Anywhere code throughout my site. It seems to be a pretty nice addition, and may help with decision-making when opting whether to click a link or not.
So far the site does not appear to have seen any negative impacts of the use of the Snap Preview Anywhere code. Although I do not expect to see problems arise from the use of this code, you never know what may happen in the future as the service grows in unimagined ways.
Anyhow, what do you guys think? Is this a little feature that should stay or be thrown back in the closet?
The good folks are Cerulean Studios have finally published information regarding their forthcoming Trillian Astra project. The basic idea behind this anticipated update sounds great and appears to be catered towards answering many of the more popular requests that users have made over the years. Nothing could be more wonderful than that!
In case you have never used Trillian before, it is a multi-network instant messaging application for Windows. Rather than using the official AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and GTalk clients, one merely loads up Trillian and can connect to each of those network, integrating their buddy lists from all networks in to a single interface. Trillian has always been skinnable although the skinning engine has been far too complex for a normal user. This is the reason that there is not a wide variety of skins available for Trillian. Hopefully, this has been fixed.
Some of the more exciting features that I am looking forward to in Trillian Astra are the following:
Trillian Astra represents the ultimate in flexible, efficient memory usage; required memory usage for XML routines has been reduced by roughly 5MB and various other trimmings will decrease the footprint further. If pretty graphics aren’t for you, using a barebones skin drops memory usage even more.
Trillian Astra allows you to easily hand out a single account name to your friends and family so that they can find the right screen name to add to their client of choice. Trillian Astra allows your contact information to be exported to anyone who requests it (within privacy restrictions you define), making it easier than ever to describe your digital presence to your contacts.
Bypassing the sometimes unnecessary option of creating a permanent new away message, you can now type messages directly into the contact list to be immediately set across all available services.
Trillian Astra skins can now be modified on the fly, no longer requiring a restart.
Trillian Astra skins are now capable of being more integrated with your existing Windows theme by way of “theme support,” which allows you to match Trillian’s colors to those of your current configuration without creating a special skin to do so.
Trillian Astra sounds quite exciting and appears to be headed down the right path. I eagerly await any alpha, beta or publicly available releases in order to test it. Have been a long time Trillian user, and having participated in past alpha and beta test cycles, I am pretty stoked to see the good folks at Cerulean Studios finally moving forward with an exciting upgrade to their exceptional instant messaging client.
In fact, I remember working a deal with Scott Werndorfer of Cerulean Studios way back in the day, which allowed deviantART to power their skins section. Unfortunately, that deal took shape right around the onset of the great bandwidth crisis of 2001 and things ended up falling through. Nevertheless, I have always been a big fan of their work.
In case you ever had any doubts whatsoever, Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Locke has answered the age-old elusive question: is a burrito a sandwich?
The Panera Bread Co. bakery-and-cafe chain says yes. But a judge said no, ruling against Panera in its bid to prevent a Mexican restaurant from moving into the same shopping mall.
Panera has a clause in its lease that prevents the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury from renting to another sandwich shop. Panera tried to invoke that clause to stop the opening of an Qdoba Mexican Grill.
In what could be considered a case of the obvious being offered as the opinion of the court, Judge Jeffrey Locke ended up citing Webster’s Dictionary, as well as various culinary professionals, to conclude that a burrito is, indeed, not a sandwich. The ruling came down to two slices of bread versus a single tortilla.
“A sandwich is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans,” Locke wrote in a decision released last week.
Sounds pretty cut and dry to me. I can rest easily at night now that I know that taxpayer money was wasted on a court having to rule on whether a burrito is a sandwich or not.
Was this not patently obvious to the morons that run Panera? What I find interesting is that there was no mention of Panera’s blatant attempt to thwart the competition by way of some half-baked (no pun intended) lawsuit to try and push that their broadly idiotic definition of a sandwich should be the standard by which all food need to be measured.
Among them was Cambridge chef Chris Schlesinger, who said in an affidavit: “I know of no chef or culinary historian who would call a burrito a sandwich. Indeed, the notion would be absurd to any credible chef or culinary historian.”
Apparently the folks at Panera need to hire a “credible chef” or two, because they certainly do not have credible lawyers or executives running the company. It would appear as if Panera does not believe in their own products, resorting to stretching the limits on contract interpretation in order to force the competition from not even being capable of competing.
Does this sound like a company worth spending money on? If their own executives do not believe in the merits of their own food products, thus forcing to company to resort to legal wrangling instead of healthy competition, then they are not worthy of my hard earned cash.
I am so glad that this company does not conduct business in Japan because I would boycott in a heartbeat, just on principle. Any company that would rather waste time and money in a courtroom battle rather than fighting with the competition based on the merits of their own food is a company that needs to be smacked right upside the right-side of their revenue stream.
This lawsuit, once again, goes to show what a mockery of a legal system that America has today.
This Saturday at Anthony’s elementary school was their annual Autumn Concert. The sixth grade class had a number of songs that they played, with Anthony participating in four of them. Anthony’s “main event” had him playing a single bass drum in contrast to his previous attempt on a scaled down drum set. Though he was slightly nervous this time around, he did exceptionally well yet again and showed why he is the reigning champion musician of the house!
This video is part 1 of 4. Rather, it will be; I have only bothered to encode this one 5 minute clip thus far. It is slightly late and we are heading out to Naritasan Temple in the morning so expect the others to be posted by the end of the weekend at the latest. Homework is first on the plate followed by video posting.
Give Anthony a round of applause on his exceptionally wicked drum skills!
Spider-Man 3 looks to be a wild ride. This is one movie that I have been waiting to see!
The trailer, which I have been anxiously awaiting, is eerily exciting and gives the impression that the story and characters are maturing and moving forward, which is good news for the Spider-Man trilogy!
