Through a friend, my wife Lila stumbled upon these videos on YouTube from a Japanese show called Gaki no Tsukai. They do all sorts of comedy but the ones that were the funniest were the "batsu" ones, which literally means punishment.

The one above is the result of one of the 5 hosts losing a bet, and he has to spend a day in his apartment  and do whatever the announcer says (like wash your face, watch TV, cook breakfast, etc. but the entire time he’s getting "pied" from the other four hosts. And he can’t react at all to the pies of the other people in the house. Hilarity ensues and it’s a belly-laugh good time.

Other ones we’ve found include 24 Hour Tag and a 24 hours in a police station without laughing. Really funny stuff. Something that’s really not seen here in North America.

It’s a great product, especially if you use Lightroom, and it’s very easy to use, but also very flexible with how you create your online slideshows.

I actually found a cool minimalist, auto-play enabled slideshow template that a fellow created to use on Myspace. It was quite wide so I modified it and tweaked it a bit more to create my own “Sideshow” template that can be used on blogs and other web sites that need a smaller footprint. Also most of my photos are portrait sized (taller than wider), so this fit the bill. Check the Sideshow out on the right and hit the jump for more information on downloading the template, installing and inserting code to make it work.

First, download the file here:

Sideshow – A SideShowPro for Lightroom Template
http://steve.cherrier.org/downloads/SideshowLRTemplate.zip

Requirements:
Adobe Lightroom 1.x
SlideShowPro 1.x

Installation instructions:
Open the Zip file. On Mac OSX, double click on the “Sideshow (240×16) for Portraits.lrtemplate” to install it. For all systems, right click on User Templates in left panel of the Web Module and choose “Import..” from the contextual menu. Use the File Browser to go to where the file unzipped and choose it. Remember, you must have SlideShowPro installed for this to work.

Embedding in a web page:
Now to get this to work on your blog or personal site, you’ll need to embed the following code on your site. I use mine on a Wordpress sidebar:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="240"
width="160" base="." data="http://yourdomain.com/directory/loader.swf">
<param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" />
<param name="movie" value="http://yourdomain.com/directory/loader.swf" />
<param name="flashvars" value="xmlDataPath=yourdomain.com/directory/images.xml" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="base" value=".">
</object>

(Be sure to change the yourdomain.com to your own URL, and if it the files are in a subdirectory, enter the directory name or path to the file as well.)Enjoy! Hope you find this helpful.

I noticed at the bottom of the Lifehacker post a link to a iGoogle Skins Gadget that you can add to your homepage. If you use iGoogle. you should grab this gadget and you can select from dozens of themes (some of them pretty cool) and soup up your homepage.

The cool thing that I liked about the gadget is that it allows you to create your own themes! So I set out to work and created my first theme called Stormy Mountain. It’s a bit tricky to install, so if you’re interested, hit the full post to find out how to install it. Here’s a screenshot:

To install:

1. If you’ve never used iGoogle, just visit google.com and log in with your Gmail login/pass and then click “iGoogle” at the top right.
2. Grab the gadget here, and click “Add to Google” and make sure “See this gadget when you visit Google.com” is checked.
3. Go to the “Custom Skins” box now on your iGoogle page and you can see the skins in the directory tab. Just select one and boom, it will refresh to your new theme.
4. If you’d like to try out my skin (it hasn’t been approved to be added to the directory yet), you can click the “Options” button for that box (the little down arrow in the title bar by the – and x) and “Edit Settings:
5. In the “CSS file of test skin” put the following URL – http://vidguy-igoogle.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/stormymountain/stormy.css
6. Click save and it should refresh to my custom skin!

If you’re brave and adventurous and want to try out your own theme creation, visit the Google Developer guide for creating your own themes or the Custom Skin gadget site.

Spotted on How to Split and Atom

To put it simply, MiniCards are little cards with your photos on one side, and your details on the other. Moo like to think of them as little calling-cards, cards you hand out to keep in touch with friends, or new people you meet.

So I was almost out of my old cards, and wanted to update them with my new blog information and some of my new photos from model shoots, etc. They are about half the size of regular business cards, but on high quality stock that really makes the photos look good. I like handing them out when I am taking pictures and someone asks about my photos.

I love them and they’re only $20 US! We’re even considering getting some made for our company business cards. Dare to be different, I say.

(Thanks for the link, Jason!)

I’m looking forward to be be able to share some of my photo excursions and shoots, along with regular musings about the net, sports, videogames and well … just about anything else.

Stay tuned! Hope you enjoy your stay.