Cashed Checks

"The rise of check cashing places is directly tied to the growth in illegal immigration. How do you think illegal immigrants manage their finances? They can't open bank accounts because you need SSN's to do that. But they have bills to pay like anyone else. So they have to go to check cashing places where the cash they have or the checks they receive can enter the financial system. If you think of the money they collect for work as "illegal", this is how that money gets laundered."

via a MeFi comment.

TED: Rethinking the Music Video

G4TV and Rockband: Can you actually learn to drum?

There are a million ways to fake this, but if its' true that G4tv's "Attack of the Show" host Kevin Pereira actually learned to play this song on Rockband, well, let's just say sliced bread better watch it's back.

Haste Economy

Net Product:			$ 3.99
Tax:			$ 0.00
P & H:			$ 6.95
Total Order:			$ 10.94

Sometimes in my daily haste, I'll simply miss a glaring stupidity. In this case, I paid $7 to send a $4 piece of plastic two thousand miles across the continent.

In a more perfect world, the name-brand manufacturer of this particular plastic would have simply forwarded the order to local supplier, rather than ship across the country.

If you're looking for someone to blame for this week's perpetual increase in gas prices, start with me.

But for one week only.

Brain Dump: embedding fonts in OpenOffice PDF's

This is little more than a brain-dump post relating to OpenOffice Writer, True Type fonts, and the PDF encoder.

I happen to make frequent use of the PDF creator in OpenOffice. One issue I've run into a few times, however, is the rendered PDF's will not display the correct font. When I open the PDF, I find the font hasn't even been embedded, and some kind of substitution (usually MS Arial) will occur. Most frustrating, this occurs with one of my favorite fonts, Adobe's Myriad Pro.

It turns out the issue is related to the way PDF files handle fonts, specifically, fonts that are not freely shared, and not embeddable. Myriad Pro is one of these fonts.

Apparently, a font-maker can decide whether or not they want their fonts to be embeddable. If they choose "no", OpenOffice's PDF creator will (correctly) honor that wish, and embed a substituted font.

If you're on a Microsoft operating system, I'd suggest using only MS fonts in documents that are destined for PDF. There are a bazillion embeddable TrueType fonts available.

Ironman is going to be a movie.

Wildly Popular 'Iron Man' Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

Last summer's hit trailer is finally going to be made into a movie.

Flight 404: Solar

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

An explanation of how this was put together is found here.

10 years ago (or more), MTV ran a program called "Liquid Television" that would feature clips of computer generated graphics and animations. Watching "Solar" ignited that same feeling of....newness.