Ryan Morlok’s Blog

This video takes me back to when I was a kid.  If you don’t watch the video, it shows a magic trick in which you appear to bend a fork but actually don’t.  I had video that taught me magic tricks as a kid and I showed this particular trick to my next door neighbor Andrew.  Problem was, I didn’t show him the final part fast enough (where the fork isn’t actually bent).  Being the competitive kids we were, he quickly grabbed his own spoon and bent it for real.  I think my mom still has that spoon that we partially were able to bend back to the right shape.

Outlook is a professional-grade messaging tool, right?  So one might be able to imagine where with the thousands of contacts people accumulate, they might get into a situation where they enter a person’s data into two separate contacts.  Now, one might think that there would be an option to merge two contacts into one (I mean, the Microsoft CRM has that feature, Plaxo has that feature, heck event the not “professional” OS X Address Book has that feature built in).

But no.

There are plugins that can help you eliminate duplicates contacts, but nothing that I can find built into Outlook 2007 natively.  Oh, to dream…

… if it was hockey.  While we’re on the topic of hockey, here are some great commercials from the late 90’s.  I think there was also a golf one, so if you know where I can get a link, please post it in the comments.

• Bowling
• Billiards

A while back, I had posted about being unable to find the Minnesota Wild’s state of hockey anthem on the website or anywhere else on the Internet.  Well, after some smart-ass remarks from goalie, I did some more looking and it seems they’ve posted some information about it on the Wild website here.  Unfortunately, they’re charging $5 for a cd for the song.  It seems like one of those things that maybe they should release to the community. I respect their copyright, but it would be nice if they would just give it back to the state.

I think I’ve sent this around to people via email, but never blogged it.  Here is a version of the first Star Wars movie, done entirely in character art.  This project deserves some props if for nothing else than the sheer amount of effort.  Or insanity.

(what reminded me of this was this digg article about the original Star Wars trilogy done in animated gif)

Found this interesting video on College Humor by way of Digg. Not your usual College Humor fodder; this describes a method for re-targetting images by removing the least relevant part. Very interesting.

UPDATE: The creator of this technology has joined Adobe.  Good for him (and for the people who will get to use his technology).  I really wish it wasn’t Adobe, though, their software is crappy.

Here are a couple great College Humor movie parodies that I’ve run into over the last few weeks:

• Minesweeper
• Facebook Off

In order to keep the number of posts to this blog manageable (read: sarcasm) I’ve launched a new blog related to software development.  That should keep this free of the boring useful information that get’s between the random links I find on Digg.

A couple weekends ago Katy and I attended our first Schadeweiler camping trip. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tradition, it’s an annual camping trip put on by my friends from high school (Matt SCHADEr & Brian schuWEILER, get it?). We had a lot of fun. Did some fishing, water sports and cooking out. I was able to get out on water skis for my normal 1 time per year. Some selected pictures from my collection are below, or for near-professional quality, see Marshall’s pictures.

While I’m on the topic of posting links to free software, here is a listing of a bunch of free graphics/design program. Everything from Illustrator alternatives to 3D modeling software. I forget if I found this on Digg or Lifehacker a few days ago.