Our tree is finally happily all decorated.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday times.

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In my continuing quest to play with visualizing time, I came up with a new visualization for my timer application. It's a simple morphing visualization. I'm impressed how organic the results appear.

Perhaps I'll even play with making this a Silverlight plug-in so it can be run online.

This weekend we watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. In a desperate attempt to keep my brain from escaping, I spent most of the movie writing a simple little Spirograph Screen Saver. It's not the most interesting thing in the world, but it kept me sane during the movie.

Here's another useless screen saver for your enjoyment. Well, actually, since my screen savers are written with a target audience of one in mind, you might not enjoy it that much, but I find it strangely pleasing.

Seattle freeways are going to install so called smart signs. You know what sign I'd like to see? It'd be a plain-old dumb sign at the bottom of the Kennydale Hill:

Speed Limit 60
This will require you to press down on the gas pedal to maintain your current speed. It might even require downshifting.

I'm really tired of the traffic jams that this hill causes because people fail to notice they're slowing down to around 40 mph.

Got to enjoy Star Wars in Concert yesterday with family. It was quite a treat to enjoy the symphony orchestra, and the touches they added to make it entertaining to the masses worked out well. And seeing Anthony Daniels was fun, I'm always impressed at how much he's embraced the C3PO role.

In a discussion of the future of Blu-ray, one of the minor things being mentioned is how they plan to get rid of load times: By doing the loading during the time when you're being forced to watch previews. In other words, the concept of splash screen is coming to Blu-ray discs, but just in the form of trailers.

Maybe I missed something, but why does setting up a menu, even in a limited device like a set-top player, require any effort? DVDs may have had their fare share of things I couldn't skip, but at least they never made me wait to connect to the internet, download updates, and then compile menus, all so the menus could dance around and find new ways to annoy me.

Because of this YouTube video, my next trip will be to Germany. I don't think I have a choice.

What is the Dissenting Pebble?