Axodys

How wild is this? I first heard about that “haunted painting” being sold on eBay over a year ago I think. I thought it was a fairly freaky painting at the time, but hadn’t thought about it since. Then I glanced at today’s Spokesman Review and saw that same oddly disturbing picture displayed prominently on the front page next to an article telling the real story behind it. It turns out that the painting is titled “Hands Resist Him” and was painted by a Spokane graphic artist named Bill Stoneham 30 years ago. He sold it to a California art gallery back in 1973 and hadn’t heard about it since.

At least until August 2001, when the owner of the Perceptions Gallery in Grand Rapids, Mich., e-mailed Stoneham. The gallery had bought the painting from the California couple on eBay for $1,200, and the owner had tracked him down from a label on the back of the painting. He advised Stoneham to check out the various Web pages.

Stoneham was spooked, all right, but not for the same reasons.

“Suddenly, there’s a blown-up image of my face from the painting,” he said. “Now, that was a creepy feeling.”

He was, in fact, the little boy in the painting, which he had painted from an old, faded family photo of himself with a little neighbor girl.

Between work and the recent time change I’m feeling pretty tired at the moment. Nothing like getting your body to fall back before it’s ready I guess.

Goal for tomorrow: work on convincing yourself that you are in fact being productive and making a dent in the work order log. Sigh.

I just realized that today represents the first day in the month of October that I’ve posted on consecutive days. What is up with that?

I’ve been doing too much reading lately and not enough writing. Of course that all changes this Friday.

I really dig Honda’s new “Element”:http://element.honda.com/. It’s a pretty nifty little combination of pickup truck and SUV. I guess it’s supposed to go on sale in December and was first announced back in August; somehow I failed to learn about its existance until yesterday. Weird. Definitely seems like a vehicle that could be a hit with the 20-30 crowd.

I’m kind of looking into replacing my 15 year old Accord, but I’m not sure what I want to do. It’s still cruising along okay, but it’s probably about time to move on. I don’t really want to spend a whole lot of money on it any more, but I definitely need new snow tires now that winter is coming. Decisions, decisions.

imageJaguar is going to come in very handy in the next couple months as I work on creating MacOS X 10.2 install images for our lab Macs here at work. It’s a shell script that automates the process of creating an install image for use with Apple Software Restore. [Thanks Mark!]

Also: How to Create a restorable disk image of Mac OS X.

Hopefully I’ll be able to start using this stuff later in the week as I continue gearing up for widespread installation in the building over Christmas Break.

Net NewsWire Lite 1.0.2.b2 has a most significant change: Reduces bandwidth consumption by supporting ETag and Last-Modified headers as detailed on this page.

Oddly enough I was actually already familiar with this idea thanks to some delving into the http protocol I did a few years back while playing around with creating a Mac Livejournal client I called LizardJuice. I never got around to polishing everything up and releasing it, but I did learn a few things while working on it which was the main thing anyway..

I did a stupid thing while unloading my car tonight. I not only managed to step backwards, trip over our lawnmower and then fall down backwards on top of it, I also succeeded in dropping one of my bags directly onto my right shin. Though scraped and slightly achey now the swelling doesn’t actually seem too bad. And more importantly through some small miracle my powerbook (which I was carrying over my shoulder at the time) seems to have escaped harm.

Well, unfortunately Air Force couldn’t quite pull off the upset of Notre Dame and lost 14-21. I was rooting hard for them the whole game though. I’m always interested in teams that use unique offensive and defensive schemes (in basketball too) and Air Force has both these days. Their triple option running game is pretty uncommon in today’s college game, but there 3-3-5 defense is especially unusual. Unfortunately Notre Dame’s superior athletes were able to negate the advantages Air Force’s offensive and defensive systems usually provide.

Boy survives savage mauling David Block ran to save his son. The boy was naked, except for one sock. He was covered with bites. Two dogs chased him. One of the animals stuck its muzzle under the fleeing boy’s buttocks, flipped him, jumped on him and prepared to seize the child’s throat in its jaws.

As if an incident like this wasn’t scary enough in its own right, it hit especially close to home as Mary used to work with the boy and is good friends with the Block family. Thank goodness he wasn’t seriously injured or killed.

I’ve been enjoying the St. Louis - Oakland game immensely this afternoon. On the one hand as a Seahawks fan I’ve always hated the Raiders and on the other I’ve liked the Rams ever since Kurt Warner led them to a Superbowl Championship three years ago. It’s the fourth quarter and the 0-5 Rams are up 21-6 on the 5-0 Raiders. That’s the crazy thing about the NFL, you just never go how a game will go. Now it wouldn’t shock me if the Raiders came back and won… actually now it might as Grant Wistram just intercepted a batted pass Rich Gannon pass. Sweet.