Jason Crowther’s Blog

Keeping with the movie frenzy, I stumbled on 2 different tools that let you make your own Simpsons characters:

SimpsonsMovie.com

Geez, I don’t think I’d giggled so much in a long time. Pick sex, body shape, hair, eyes, noise, mouth, and clothes. Fun to go back after you’ve made yourself and see what you’d look like Snake or Krusty hair.

Simpsonizeme.com

MikeV at Purplewire gave me a shout about this one. I couldn’t find it a first because I was looking Simpsonizer, not Simpson-ize-me. Hmm, this one had the potential to be a lot more interesting, as you start with a photo upload.

I snapped a quick picture with my Macbook webcam and gave it a shot. Unfortunately, the site either didn’t like my picture (I think it probably didn’t like the black background) and gave me a humorous error message about the some doohickey not being connected right.

I gave it another go with a fresh picture from my cellphone camera (the pic on the right above) and it seemed to make it through this time. I was twitching with anticipation as it counted down a timer for about 2 minutes. While I was waiting it gave me some general questions to help iron out the details like sex, age, body shape, etc. The completely automatic pick wasn’t bad, but really just some generic stuff that would be pretty hard to get wrong.

After the big reveal, they give you just about the same options for customization in terms of characteristics, but they seemed to have more interesting options. Another 15 minutes of giggling and I was done.

Verdict - Even though Simpsonizeme had more better customization options, I’m giving the gold to Simpsonsmovie because you can just hop right in and start building.

So what are you waiting for? Get started on yours. If you do, put up on flickr and put your link in the comments, I’d love to see what everybody comes up with.

With t-minus a week until the Simpsons Movie, I’ve got a few fun tidbits to share…

• Giant Homer. An over the top movie kick off stunt.
• Beer and Doughnut Ice Cream? You betcha! Ben and Jerry are bringing you Duff and D’oh Nuts.
• 7-11 to Quik-E-Mart Conversions. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve already see how they’ve converted some 7-11’s into real Quik-E-Marts. My buddy in Mountain View says one of the stores right near him was changed over.
• Real World Simpsons Products. Yep, the 7-11’s sell Krusty-Ohs and Buzz Cola. Of course, I had to go buy myself some Buzz Cola on Ebay.

Can’t wait until next Friday. Simpsons on the big screen is gonna be amazing.

Heard about a guy who tests his hard core kitchen blenders by blending items that you normally wouldn’t on one of the Twit podcasts a while ago.  Finally saw a link to the site go flying by on digg.  willitblend.com is a riot.  Golf balls, hockey pucks, light bulbs, cell phones, and ipod?  You name it, they’ll blend it.  The host, Tom Dickson, is cool in a PC guy type of way.  ’scuse me as I get back to watching these over and over, giggling the whole way through.

Slickr, by cellar door software gives you a photo screen saver that scrolls through your (or everybody’s) flickr photos.  Cool pan/zoom/fade effects kinda like the similar screen saver on OSX.  Bonus, if you have a dual monitor rig, it shows different slide shows on each screen.  Check it out.

Last night, Sandy and I headed out to the Landmark Theater for the 2006 Ghost Hunt. Its basically just a spook themed fund raiser. The CNY Ghost Hunters crew was out in full force.

Not quite what I expected. I figured that there’d be a lot of sit down about Landmark history and its known ghost (Claire) and not much actual touring of the premises. But surprisingly, after a short intro, they turn you loose in the entire theater alone. The only rule was that you were welcome to explore any area with an open door. Any doors closed/locked were off limits.

Surprisingly, there’s really not a whole lot to see outside of the generally public areas. We wandered through the stage and back stage areas, which are quite cramped as the traveling shows always say. I enjoyed the massive antique electrical cabinet stage left that looked to be pretty original to the theater. From there we went up to the dressing rooms (where I noticed people always forget to turn off the lights as they’re visible from Clinton St). Hardly luxury accommodations by any means.

From there, we snaked our way behind the stage and back down under the stage area. The basement is pretty average for a building of its age. Dark, dank, and smelly. The green room was especially austere; just a few random tables and chairs under the stage. Don’t see performers spending much time down there.

Outside of that, the rest of the basement is pretty much storage (as you’d probably expect.) A lot of small dark rooms packed with assorted junk. A real flash light, might have been a good addition to the ghost hunting kit. While the some of the areas were kind of spooky I was more worried about tripping over some random junk in the dark. The LED light on my key chain, wasn’t quite up to the task.

Completing the underground circuit that goes from the stage up to the men’s lounge under the lobby, we came up to the theater level again and headed up to the balcony. No worries about seeing over the head of the person in front of you up here. The seats are on a really steep incline. Almost scary steep.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff to see up there, other than some a gigantic flow spot and some peeling pant. I would have liked to have seen the projection room, but that was one of the few off limits areas, doh.

One of the perks of the ghost hunt was that you bring in what ever ghost hunting devices you wanted, including camera (both still and video). I figured this was pretty much a once in a life time chance to get some pictures. You can check ‘em out as a slide show on flickr. I’ll pre-apologize for the camera (too slow for low light) and the operator (who can’t seem to take a straight shot or hold the camera steady to save his life) resulting in some pretty unexciting shots. There are a couple that came out pretty OK…

Purplewire crew: I made a half hearted attempt to find the room off our deck that we’re always wondering about. I suspected it might be accessible off the emergency exit corridor from the north side of the balcony, but didn’t see any doors that looked likely. I’m guessing now that its actually accessible from the projection room itself.