Two cool posts this week on my son Max's blog.

The first was a stop-motion animated movie he made as an assignment for French class with his friend Alice. It highlights the oppression of women in Algeria, and I think it is wonderful, both in its compassion and its technical skill. He made it with iStopMotion, a clever Mac tool that overlays successive frames with the current live view from the camera so that you can carefully animate your models.

On Thursday, he was at the Boston Apple store opening, getting a green monster t-shirt and special edition iPod sock. He's got lots of pictures of the event in his gallery.

This past weekend, someone accidentally spilled about half a cup of water onto my laptop keyboard. I actually shouted "Agghhh!" like a cartoon character, and we all burst into action, grabbing paper towels, mopping up water, moving books, etc.

When I picked up the laptop, water came dribbling out the other side of it, making a puddle on the table. It was not the kind of thing you want to see involving your laptop. The screen started flashing and going into video conniptions, so I flipped the computer over and removed both batteries.

Max searched Google for what to do, and found a page recommending opening every part you could, and blow-drying on the coolest setting. So I got a screwdriver and started opening panels. When I got the hard drive out after 20 seconds and three screws, Max (a hardcore Apple devotee) exclaimed, "Wow, you can get it out just like that!?" I was a little pleased to have at least a small advantage go to the PC.

Max also found the service manual for my model laptop, so we could get under the keyboard and other hard-to-reach places. The scary thing was that no matter where I looked, I saw droplets of water, except on the RAM.

Over the course of two hours, we blow-dried it a few times, marveled at the insides, and discovered new places to poke paper towels to get the last of the moisture out. Finally, I put it all back together, put in the batteries, and booted it up. With a sigh of relief, I saw that it was going to be fine.

Once it was all over, my computer was cleaner, and I learned something to add to my Middle-Aged Man repertoire of minor but useful knowledge.

Blu is a street artist from Argentina. He's taken graffiti to a whole new level, creating animations on walls and sidewalks. His latest is Muto which is both a technical tour de force and an eye-opening creepy animation.

Not only did he work in the less than ideal environment of the sidewalk, but it meant that he couldn't have more than one frame in existence at a time, with no possibility of reworking old frames or sketching out new ones. Once the frame was shot, the work was destroyed. Amazing.

Here's a short but complicated question: if grown men object to being called "boy", why don't grown women object to being called "girl"?

I was raised in New York City in the 1970's by a radical lesbian feminist, and to my ears, "girl" is completely wrong. I'm always a little thown by hearing adults referred to as girl. It seems demeaning, but plenty of women refer to themselves that way. Am I completely out of touch? Are they?

Last Thursday, I posted the animated CSS Homer, and it was a big hit. Friday morning, it was popular on Digg (over 3000 diggs). The resulting Digg effect was enough for my hosting provider to shut off my site.

I was a cheapskate when I bought my hosting plan from TotalChoice Hosting, looking only for low cost. Their reaction seemed aggravatingly uninformed. The support guy kept referring to the traffic spike as "an attack". I tried to explain that it was in fact a success, and that they had failed to help me deal with that success. I could understand needing to protect their widely shared servers, but at least they could speak knowledgeably about the event.

He also called it a DDOS, which it was, but only if it stands for Distributed Desirability Of Stuff.

Further angering me was the fact that my email was unavailable, since they simply shut off my entire account. Also, there was a misconfiguration in the 403 page they were serving, so the traffic logs showed every request resulting in another request for a non-existent 403.shtml page. TotalChoice will be the first to point out that they are not the right service for a high-traffic site, but they should at least be conversant in the language of their newly disappointed customers, and know how to correctly shut off accounts.

Saturday morning, the traffic had subsided and the site was reactivated, and I figured I could spend some time researching options for a new provider. Slicehost seemed good if I wanted to go the VPS route, though sysadmin is not my interest or forte, so I was leery of taking on all the responsibility for the machine, however virtual it was.

WebFaction seemed the best choice of the shared providers, with supported Django, and many Django sites hosted.

I was away for the weekend, so I wasn't actively working on the problem. My site was up, I could now plan my next move.

At least, until I got slashdotted. Now the site was really shut down, and TotalChoice wasn't too pleased. The only way back online was with a new provider. WebFaction got the gig, because I don't need complete control over a machine. A shared account with shell access and supported Django would be great. I looked in their forum for Digg effect issues, and saw intelligent conversation. I had dropped them a line outlining my situation, and they made clear that they had dealt with it before and would work with me if such good fortune arose again, but that they would shut down sites if it was the only way to protect the shared servers. In a way, that last caveat reassured me. If they had made a blanket claim that their servers were Digg-proof, it would have smelled of naive or dishonest admins.

Monday I signed up, switched over my domains nameservers, re-uploaded my site, and I was back online. After getting TotalChoice to reactivate my old site, I transfered the blog comments, and now everything should be back as good as new.

It would have been nice to survive the Digg and Slashdotting. Maybe with WebFaction I will next time. I've got a new appreciation for slimming down the server needs of my blog. The avatars in comments are something to think about: the Homer post has 70 comments, meaning each page load also generates 70 image requests. One possibility is to offload the image to another service.

The irony in all this is that although I started with TotalChoice because of how inexpensive they were, I'm not paying much more for the WebFaction account.

The NeoCube is an astonishing toy made of 216 high-strength magnetic ball bearings. The movie shows an array of surprising transformations:

I'm mesmerized by the shifts from one form to another, especially when it pops from a flat net to a Platonic solid all by itself.

Seems like a fun toy to have around, except for the part where those little ball bearings could zap your disks or credit cards if they get too close...

Two great animations, in very different styles:

• Welcome To My Life is a rough pencil-drawn animation mockumentary about growing up monster. I like the Smoking Popes' cover of Pure Imagination at the end.
• Nick Hilligoss' L'Animateur is an amazing stop-motion allegory about Adam and Eve. Just wonderful on many levels.

Clay Shirky has a knack for putting his finger on it. In Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (subtitled by the slug as Looking for the Mouse), he points a finger squarely, humorously, and accurately at television as a huge time sink that people don't even realize they are a part of. You should read the whole thing because it is wise and entertaining, but here's the quantitative eye-opener: he figures that all of Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of work, which is a huge amount, but that in the U.S. we watch 200 billion hours of TV each year. In other words, if we stopped watching TV, not only would we have plenty of time to create Wikipedia, we could create 2000 of them every year!

I've often had people ask me how I have the time to do whatever side project I'm working on at the moment. Then the lunch table goes back to the usual discussions: did you see the game? how about last night's episode of E.R.? Those are fine ways to spend time, but at least don't be surprised that others have found other ways. I'm not trying to sound like a Luddite (named for a fellow Ned), I like TV too. I look forward to 30 Rock like nobody's business.

But if I sit and watch for too long, I get antsy, I want to be doing something. This is Shirky's second point: that TV is a one-way medium, and that computers and the internet have shown us the power of two-way interaction.

It's a great essay — turn off the TV and go read it, then write something.

Here's Román Cortés' Homer, animated to show the structure. I haven't done anything to Román's amazing work other than to annotate the divs with ids and add a bit of jQuery to show them in sequence so that you can see the characters being added one at a time.

» read more of: CSS Homer, animated... (6 paragraphs)

Román Cortés has done an amazing thing. He's made portraits of Homer Simpson and George Bush. Here's Homer:

o o o o ( O O O \ L ( O O O O O \ L ( O | | \ \ | | \ \ \ \ ( ( 8 o o o ( ( 8 o o o o ) ) b o O o o o o o o ) b o O o o o o o o o o o / / / • • • • • _ _ _ • • • C C O ( -

and here's Bush:

o o o o o o o l o ´ ´ ` ) ) ( · o ` - - - · · o o - / 0 / - ( o o ` ` ( ( o \ ´ o o o o ` 0 ( \ - ` - · · o ( 0 0 ~ o o o o 0 0 0 0 ( ` ( o o o o o o o o - ‘ - 0 0 o o o o o o · • O ´ o o ` / · ( · ´ ) ` \ · · o o 0 0 • ` ` • / / - - - - o 0 o o o o o o o o - - - - • • • o o - • • • • • • ´ - - ( \ ( o o • • • • • ) • • • • • • • • • • • / / • ` • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ` ) ´ ` ` ` ` • • ´ ´ ´ ´ l `

Wait, those won't look right without the proper CSS styling. Here they are as they are meant to be seen:

Yes, those really are characters styled to position them correctly to make the images. Go look at the HTML source on the original HTML pages to see for yourself.

This is oddly reminiscent of a similar Simpsons-themed artwork: Google groups ascii art: Bart Simpson.

This has been around for a long time, but I'd never heard of it: ReactOS is an open-source re-implementation of Windows. I guess it's possible to be fanatically devoted to both Windows and open source. As mammoth a task as this sounds, it seems they are making progress. Although they've been at it for about ten years, they have screenshots of working code, and an active subversion repository (they're working on DirectX support now).

I wonder what the future will hold for ReactOS. Microsoft will continue to build Windows, widening the gap between what Windows and ReactOS are, though if the reaction to Vista is any indication, perhaps XP and its ReactOS clone will be considered the golden age of Windows. At the same time, anti-Microsoft sentiment will continue to build among the open source community, either in the pro-Linux or pro-Apple flavor.

Here's something I don't understand: why do hotels provide all sorts of little bottles of bathroom stuff, but they don't give you toothpaste? At the hotel we stayed at in New York over the weekend, they gave us shampoo, conditioner, hand lotion, and mouthwash. So why not toothpaste?

BTW: this question reminds me of David Weinberger's Daily Open-Ended Puzzles.