Bloggasm

Hey, does anyone out there know how to do a screen grab? For instance, if I want to take out a slice of something that I see in my browser window from a website and save it as an image, how do I do this? What if I don’t want to grab the whole screen but a very specified part of the screen?

I currently use Firefox. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Just leave the answer in my comments section.

Damn, it appears that my opening line in my article on the mainstreaming of atheism is false, atheists do have holiday cards, though these don’t come from Hallmark. A reader named Andrew Shaffer wrote in to say:

Re: Hunter’s comments in the “Dawkins Effect” article: “If they had hallmark cards, maybe they wouldn’t feel so left out. We have Christmas cards. We have Kwanza cards now. Maybe they need to get some atheist cards and get that whole ball rolling so more people can get involved with what they’re doing.”

…funny thing is, we DO have holiday cards!

(wink, wink, points at links to own shop below)

Atheist Holiday Card

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Related posts:
1. Facebook users fight back

I first heard about the rise of poker bots a year or two ago. They’re basically computer programs that can enter online poker games on your behalf and gamble — and they’re getting increasingly good at it. Poker websites have tried to figure out ways of detecting them, but it’s not an easy task.

The Freakonomics blog tackles this issue and compares it to a computer program that plays a perfect game of checkers:

It is not an opportune time to start an online gambling site for checkers.

In July, researchers at University of Alberta “solved the game” using brute computer force. As such, their computer knew the best strategy to play in any of the possible 50 billion checker positions. Humans should now be very scared to bet money against any virtual opponent, for fear that they are really facing the Alberta computer or its clone. (You also wouldn’t want to play a money game against a computer in Connect Four or Othello, or even backgammon.)

I don’t particularly agree with the comparison because — unlike Checkers — there’s no such thing as a perfect game of Poker. Though the programs have some statistical advantages, they don’t have the insight to make risky judgment calls. While they probably do have an advantage over less skilled players, I think it’s still very possible to beat a poker bot. But still, it does attenuate the honor of the game.

Everyone who has seen commercials for Cingular Wireless (now AT&T) has no doubt heard its slogan: “Raising the bar.” What it’s referring to, of course, are the bars that indicate the strength of the wireless signal.

What they fail to mention is that sometimes those bars are utterly useless. For the last half hour, my phone has shown that it has three bars, but whenever I try to make phone calls, it beeps at me saying “Emergency Calls Only.” And this isn’t a rare occurrence; it happens a few times a week. The bars certainly don’t mean anything if all they allow you to do is dial 911.

Well, this is the second major wireless company I’ve tried (I had Verizon before) that turned out to be shitty. You would think that with all the hatred people have for the major wireless phone companies out there that there would be a viable competitor to emerge. I guess that the current ones have such a monopoly with the FCC that it’s difficult for an underdog to rise.

But once one does, the blogosphere will be waiting to cheer it on. It’ll get all the free publicity that money can’t buy.

It’s widely known that no review copies of the final Harry Potter installment were sent to book reviewers ahead of time. And I had seen several reports that book reviewers were basically going to read the book in that one day and have reviews ready for the next day’s paper. But apparently, for some British newspapers, that wasn’t quick enough. They actually hired professional speed readers to start the book at midnight, finish it and review it in time for that day’s issue.

via national review

Style Weekly, an alternative weekly in Richmond, reports that two reporters from the daily Richmond Times Dispatch were suspended after it was found they made political donations. The code of conduct they violated, I assume, was based on the notion of journalist objectivity.

I find the sense that journalists must be unpolitical neutral tennis nets rather silly and always have. Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author and New Yorker writer, has a great essay on his website arguing that journalists can have political leanings and still be objective. Also, this idea of neutrality falls into the logical fallacy that all opinions–and political schools of thought–are created equal. This is the same mentality that creationists use when they argue that “all theories must be taught.”

The scene lasts no longer than a few moments.

Thomas Haden Church’s character, frustrated and looking to get laid, tells Paul Giamatti’s character that if the two women they’re about to meet want to drink Merlot, they’re all drinking Merlot. “No, if anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving,” Giamatti responds. “I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!”

The scene is humorous but fleeting, yet after the movie Sideways was met with both critical and popular success, news organizations began reporting Merlot’s demise. Sales within the industry dropped as casual, uninformed wine drinkers turned up their noses at the drink. And wine afficionados weren’t all sad to see the grape’s downfall.

“In the previous decade, cheap Merlot had become the red wine of choice for many folks who wanted something easy to drink,” said Alder Yarrow. “If it was 1992 and you were putting on an opening at an art gallery and you wanted to serve wine, it would have been Chardonnay and Merlot. So I guess some shallow wine lovers might have decided over time that such common affinity was a turn-off.”

Yarrow, 33, writes for Vinography.com, a wine review website that receives over 10,000 unique visitors a day. In addition to his thoughts on wine, he offers sake reviews, restaurant reviews and notes on food. He lives in California with his wife and runs a consulting firm by day.
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The wine lover said that though there were anecdotal stories of diminishing Merlot sales, he didn’t know of any wineries that went out of business. There was an immediate media counter offensive against the movie, pointing out that the wine loved by the main character has a significant percentage of Merlot in it. Paloma Vineyards and Swanson Vineyards, both of which specialize in Merlot, sponsored a Merlot publicity tour to overturn the public conception.

What surprised Yarrow was that such a simple, short-lasting scene could have such direct repercussions.

“I never would have guessed the movie would have had such an effect on the U.S. wine industry. Not in a million years,” he said. “Mostly because Americans famously drink so little wine and because I didn’t think that there was a huge overlap between serious wine drinkers and the general Hollywood moviegoing public. I was clearly very wrong.”

But Mary Baker, owner of Dover Canyon Winery, thought that not all movie viewers came away from Sideways with a bad taste for Merlot.

“[I]n the movie, Miles (Giamatti’s character) isn’t really protesting about Merlot, the grape. What he’s protesting against is the tooty-fruity, bland Merlot styles that are often found on restaurant wine lists,” Baker said. “There’s also a misconception, among men mostly, that women prefer white wine and Merlots. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Women, as Miles was about to find out, like gentle men and strong wines…you didn’t hear Miles complaining once he was captivated by two stunning, assertive, wine-savvy women. There are a lot of layers of humor in both the book and the movie.”

Dover Canyon is located on the west side of Paso Robles. Baker and her co-owner, Dan Panico, worked for large wineries before opening their own place that produces limited productions from small, elite vineyards. They have limited editions of mountain-grown Merlot, and she said that their sales weren’t affected at all.

“It’s interesting that no one wants to be the ‘geeky Miles,’” she explained. “Miles apparently hated Merlot, and that made people curious about Merlot because no one wants to come across as such a navel-lint-gazing wine snob. But Miles adored Pinot Noir, (and who wouldn’t after Maia’s beautiful speech?) and so people want to be cool . . . they want to be into Pinot Noir.”
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California isn’t the only place where the grape is widely grown. It’s also planted in both France and Italy, among other places. Andrew Barrow, a UK resident who writes for Spittoon, a wine blog that receives 2,000 visitors a day, said that the film didn’t influence oversees Merlot sales.

“We have the most extensive wine range available in the world in the UK but Sideways was viewed as little more than a fun film,” he said. “A good film but insignificant to the world’s wine centre in terms of influence on sales.”

Of course, Merlot isn’t much of a UK wine, but there hasn’t been any significant evidence that Sideways was able to cross over the language barrier enough to negatively affect wine sales in France and Italy.

In addition to the Merlot offensive, many wineries in the US found other ways to adapt to changing popular tastes.

“I know of one good Merlot vineyard that grafted over to other varietals,” said Jeff Stai. “But I couldn’t even tell you if it was a direct reaction or multiple factors.”

Stai owns Twisted Oak Winery, which is located in Calaveras County, CA, what he likes to call “the best wine region you’ve never heard of.” His winery doesn’t make Merlot, so most his commentary was anecdotal, but he asserted that the movie had its positive effects.

“If the movie had an effect, it got people thinking about alternatives to Merlot - which is good for people making Tempranillo!” Stai said. “But maybe even more importantly it brought wine back into popular culture again, and that will help us all, even the Merlot producers.”

But, in the end, the question remains: Will Merlot sales ever recover? Sideways debuted in 2004, surely the bad PR ripples must have subsided.

“American consumers are a fickle lot, but I would say that Merlot did not suffer so much in sales that any wineries went out of business,” said Fredric Koeppel, who wrote a national weekly print wine column for The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis and the Scripps Howard News Service from 1984 to 2004. “The proper response to Sideways would have been to make better, more distinctive Merlot and Pinot Noir, but, honestly, I don’t know of any producers that got into a snit because of the Sideways situation; trends come and go.”

Most wine experts seemed to agree with this opinion.

“If every time a cheap version of a varietal got popular in the US, we scorned the grape completely, we’d all be drinking Mourvedre,” said Yarrow, the Vinography writer. “Which, come to think of it wouldn’t be that bad.”