New Geek Badge

You know how I claim to not care about hardware?
We just figured out that because of some crazy specials that Dell is running, it'll be cheaper for us to get new PowerEdge 2900 server than anything from the 1900 series. I'm reading technical specs, and I'm actually salivating.
"Salivates over Server Specs." That's a new badge.

Fogey File

Things that make me feel old:

(1) Area codes with a non-1-or-zero center digit. When I was growing up, all area codes had either a 1 or a 0 in the middle. I asked my dad about it once and he said it was a technical limitation of the telephone switching system from way back.

(2) After accidentally deleting the Busta Rhymes episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast from TiVo about three years ago, not realizing until yesterday that we could just look it up on YouTube.

(3) The thing I'm happiest about finding on YouTube so far is a 1914 recording of a song written in 1820 from a poem written by a guy who was born in 1774.

(4) Realizing (while doing a crossword puzzle) that I remember when "undo" was a fancy new computer function.

(5) Having a panic attack because I only have 3.8 GB of space left on the file server, and then realizing that probably sometime in my lifetime, 4 GB was more storage than there was on all the computers in the whole world. (Maybe. Have been unable to find a chronology to confirm.)

Addendum: I was talking to Colin about this the other day, and we figured this: Back in the day (the October 1970-type day, when I was born), a really whiz-bang corporate computer had maybe 1 kilobyte of storage. Yes, kiddies, that's 1KB. Most of the data at that time was on tape or cards, so the computers themselves were not big on the byte capacity. For there to have been 3.8GB available on the planet, there would have had to be 38,000 1KB computers in 1970 (or, alternatively, 3,800 1MB computers), which we are pretty sure there were not. But if anyone can tell us otherwise, we'd be delighted to hear about it. And P.S. I got my shiny new file server and now I have 418GB of available space, and I sleep much better, so ha!

Really good weekend

Ehren's out sick. (I mentioned this already.) But I had a really great weekend, so I'm posting this to remind me to tell him about:
(1) Why my hands are all blistered,
(2) Kelby's puppet, and
(3) The Amazing Four-Armed Man.

More coolness from the WorldClock people

World Clock Meeting Planner. (Brought to us by the "Three Kinds of Twilight" people, as aforementioned.) (I want to say "hereinaforementioned." Makes me feel all linguistically Germanic, and therefore cheerful, despite Ehren being out sick today.)
Why: I might have to schedule a phone meeting/web conference with someone in Wales.

Unacceptable.

There is corn in my Italian Wedding Soup.

*Corn.*

Biggest acorns ever

The giant mutant acorns I saw are apparently from a bur (or burr) oak, Quercus macrocarpa. I'll bring one to the office to show you. Web images are mostly lacking in scale—I had to look for about half an hour before finding the image that clinched the identification. I'll check the leaves tomorrow too, if I can do so without incurring the wrath of the guards of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the tree is.

Finally grokking YouTube

So far the lure of YouTube had been minimal for me, but I'm now in some fair danger of spending hours delving into its odd little jewels. Started when I was doing research on a song that I sing (called the Braes o' Balquhidder), and I found this 1914 Alma Gluck recording that someone had put on YouTube. What a great way to preserve old recordings! And then from there I found this adorable tour of Bothwell Castle. "And all of this is on my doorstep, I have to say!"
I'm all teary, in a smaller-world, better knowledge management, yay for the Internet kind of way.

Eye-Watering Starfields, continued

In my previous post I lamented the eye-watering starfield background of a site devoted to the parallels between the mythos of Battlestar Galactica and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. I just found another one: a website I wish I could have delved into further, but was prevented by actual nausea because of its design. It's this: http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/buffy. This site has some pretty amazing statistical analysis of how highly each episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is rated, broken out by character, director, and several other variables.
Firefox to the rescue: Firefox has a feature that strips out most page formatting. Just choose View>Page Style>No Style.
Phew.

(I watched a lot of Buffy while I was sick. I am blogging after midnight because my sleep patterns are all messed up again because of copious but irregular sleeping through this sickness/recuperation. And while I do appreciate that I'm accumulating major dork points for having even found the Buffy stats site, I'm again reminded that there are people with dork beacons far brighter than mine, because someone had to make this site in the first place.)

Mormon Conspiracy

I would like to retract my accusation that Netflix are a bunch of slackers for not telling me when Battlestar Galactica Season Three will be available. I think something much more sinister is afoot, far above the Netflix sphere of influence. Here's my best guess:
Something went badly wrong with the DVD-burning process, and the series master files accidentally got inscribed onto golden disks instead.[1] So now instead of getting to see it on TV, we have to wait for it to be painstakingly translated out of some Caprican hieroglypic dialect using a pair of 3-D glasses (except, of course, for the first two episodes, which will be lost when the translator takes them to show to a financial backer). Once they are all transcribed, traveling pairs of actors wearing white shirts and black ties will cycle door-to-door and act the episodes out for us.
I'm not going to link to any of the "Battlestar Galactica/Church of Latter Day Saints Parallels" sites because the ones I could find weren't very scholarly and/or had eye-watering starfield backgrounds. But when Baltar and Starbuck ring my doorbell, I'll know I was right.

[1] Either that, or Universal Studios are a bunch of money-grubbers who have me thinking "boycott" because they're not going to release Season 3 until after the Battlestar movie (called "Razor", apparently) comes out in November. I believe this solely on the basis of reviews posted on Amazon.com. I would love to have some kind of press statement from Universal confirming or denying, but their website is utterly silent on the matter. I would get Will to TiVo the movie, except that I won't want to see it, because I haven't seen Season Three yet. Dammit.

Thought Follower

I'm a couple years too late for this to be brilliant, but: I borrowed what I thought was the 2005 movie of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from Phalen. (Turned out to be the tv series, which filled my at-home-with-a-cold-Tuesday much better.)
Watching Arthur look something up in the Guide was almost exactly like watching someone poke around on Wikipedia from their Treo. (Except for the bathrobe, of course.)

La Veuve Charmante

There's something endearing about this, in an Eleanor Lavish[1] kind of way: The homepage for Veuve Clicquot champagne is in French. It presents the viewer with a dropdown menu to enter your country and birthdate, to screen out under-legal-drinking-age kids. Once I picked "USA" it translated the page into English; I just think it's funny that you have to speak enough French and/or be online-savvy enough to know to fill out the dropdown to get your own language.

Sadly, the endearingness wears off almost immediately: A pretentious Flash site that took forever to load, even over a T1. (I guess people think champagne sites should be pretentious. I was looking for something that reflected the champagne we drank yesterday, which tasted of flowers and joy.)

[1] "It's very naughty of me, but I would like to set an examination paper at Dover, and turn back every tourist who couldn't pass it."

My Noodly Appendage is all tense.

You know how I've been having wrist and arm problems lately (partly due to repetitive motion/poor ergonomics, partly due to excessive cat's cradle)? Well, now I'm mad. The marathon stats reporting session yesterday tired out/tightened up my mousing hand. I know this because I only converted 14 Pastafarians. Oh, the shame. I should have to wear two eyepatches, or something.

(I was playing the Flying Spaghetti Monster game because right after I finished my piece of business plan draft , I got a piece of spam that said "Take a break! Play a game!" and I thought "Good idea!", but of course was not inclined to play the game proffered in the email. Yes, it's almost 8pm. Yes, I'm going home now.)

Mutant Super Power

As you may know, I have a mutant super power: being able to identify actors from one role to another, even through full-head Star Trek alien makeup or a 40-year age difference.
A slightly alarming variation just occurred: I'm watching the 1963 film Tom Jones. Susanna York[1] stars as Sophia Western. "She looks an awful lot like Samantha Morton," I thought. I paused the movie to check imdb to see if they are blood relations. They aren't.
But in the 1997 miniseries The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (which I have not seen), Sophia Western is played by...Samantha Morton.

[1] There do not appear to be any pictures of Susanna York circa 1963 available on the Internet, alas, so I can't demonstrate just how eerie this is.

Sic transit gloria(2)

Candey Hardware is going out of business.
They've been open since 1891.
This is disorienting. Candey Hardware has been part of my professional universe for 14 years. In fact, now that I look at the map, they are literally the center of my professional landscape.
What's a girl to do when she needs potting soil, or some keys, or some WD-40, or a knife for birthday cake, or a decent staple gun (not like the one Staples sold me once, for which they did not carry refill staples, but I digress)?
I guess I'll be going to the True Value at 20th & P from now on, which is inconvenient. Just barely too far for a there-and-back-at-lunchtime trip.

(You kids today and your non-walking-distance hardware superstores. Get off my lawn.)

I'm gonna need some Epsom salts.

There are approximately 35 YouTube videos of cat's cradle tricks.
My hands are cramping up just thinking about it.
Some of them are in French, which is exciting--extra bonus skill points!

Ball Home Canning Jars...

...are no longer made by Ball Corporation.
The jars still carry the "Ball" logo (exactly the same as that used by the Ball Corporation), but they are now apparently made by "Jarden Home Brands". More info at the URL "freshpreserving.com"[1]
This might be the most confusing branding issue I've ever seen.

[1] This site looks pretty thorough and useful, despite the Flash-into-with-music.

Get ready for the zombie hordes

I'm pretty sure this means zombies.
(My kinsmen are in general agreement. We might skip Watermelon Park Fest in favor of some fortification activities.)
Luckily, we've all been training for this.
(I literally just looked around the office for something that could be used to remove the head or destroy the brain. Dibs on the swingblade from the paper cutter.)

On Avoiding Emoticons

From Wikipedia:

It's hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the "(k)" as a big pair of red smoochy lips.^[8]

Talk like a pirate...

...in German!

(It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

Eddie's in the Onion.

That's it, really.
Oh: Except there's a comment after the interview that Americans always pronounce his name wrong. "It's Iz_Ard. Doesn't rhyme with Lizard."
We *have* to pronounce it wrong, unless we want to have the "invokes Linus Torvalds" problem. We're Americans. It's either "rhymes with lizard" ("IZerd") or "talk like a pirate" (izARRRD), because we sound pretentious to ourselves if we pronounce it "izAHD."
'Course, "invokes Linus Torvalds" partly pissed me off because so few people care about pronouncing words that are not Amer-English. The fact that we're at war in eyeRACK is witheringly embarrassing. If we're having a war in their country we should at least pronounce it eeRAHK. How come we just make up names for other places? Those places have names. Perfectly good ones. Good enough for the people who live there. Turin/Torino was a good example—we should have been calling it Torino all along. How pissed off would we be if the Dutch addressed all their Brooklyn mail to Nieuw Amsterdam, NY?

Feel the burn. (Or not.)

I got takeout from Wasabi^[1] for lunch today^[2].
Chicken with "herb salad"^[3] and a spicy tuna scallion roll.
Got back to the office and realized they had left something out.
Guess what they didn't give me.


Hint: It starts with a "w".


[1] I'd link to their site, but it's a seasick Flash experience.
[2] I know we said we were done with them, but I'm trying not to eat wheat lately^[4], so my options are limited.
[3] This is, as far as I can tell, mesclun mix. They should change the name of the salad (see below, "Crouton Madness") unless they intend the word to be taken in its botanical sense (that is, "This salad is made from tender-stemmed plants, not wood"), rather than its culinary sense ("Tastier than lettuce!"). How hard is it, for crying out loud? I know they have a kitchen. I know they have shiso. I bet they have cilantro, too, because they are all about fusion. Just throw some herbs in the salad, already!
[4] I've been feeling marginally less well than usual for a while now, and my brainstem says that wheat is a major contributor to the less-wellness. I'm not completely eliminating it—Barbara got me a French mixed-fruit tart for my work anniversary on Monday and I did not say nay—but I'm trying to demote it from "staple" to "treat".

Flotsam

(1) A² + B² = Opportunity²
This is a slogan on a billboard (is it really a billboard if it's not gigantic/on a roadside?) at Farragut North. It makes me pause every morning. I don't think I like it, but I do enjoy the mental sensation of trying to figure out what the factors of opportunity might be. From a marketing perspective it's a failure: I know it's promoting math and science, but I don't know why or by whom.

(2) Joke I heard from Scot the Viking:
Q: In an elevator [in Finland, presumably], how do you tell an introverted Finn from an extroverted Finn?
A: The introvert is looking at his own shoes. The extrovert is looking at someone else's shoes.

(3) Teenage girl suicides are on the rise. This opens a giant chasm of fury in me, rage at our culture, fear of powerlessness to protect my beloveds from the forces around them. Don't really have anything else to say about that. Just the chasm. Of fury. (And flippantly: This is what happens when there's no Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television...)

(4) Belief-o-Matic: For some reason, belief.net comes up first in the Google search for the article above. The site also features the Belief-o-Matic, a nice questionnaire that in my case was spot-on. Oddly reassuring: "Yep, that's the religion for me, all right!"

I need a new guru.

Jakob Nielsen is dead to me.
I'm thinking a lot about web design and usability, and while he understands usability, he wouldn't know design if it came up and bit him in the face.

Ehren withdrawal

He's not just not blogging. He's not here. He's in France on his honeymoon. (Probably in the Loire Valley or Brittany right now.) I keep forgetting to eat lunch. Shital's doing a pretty good job trying to remind me but it doesn't always work.


pine.

Sic transit gloria

Pavarotti.

Crouton Madness

I want people to stop calling things "Caesar Salad" that are not Caesar Salad.
Chopped romaine with pre-shredded parmesan cheese and this odd assortment of croutons (I'm looking at pumpernickel, rye, and some kind of multigrain) is not a Caesar Salad.
I'm sure a pumpernickel crouton in its natural habitat is a fine thing, but what I wanted was a Caesar Salad and I have not gotten it.

I think my basic objection here is the Martini Problem.
I like complex nomenclature. Language differentiates things by using different names for them. That's what language is for. That's why we have it. If you make something new, you should make up a new name for it. That's how we got all those great cocktail names, like Singapore Sling and Rusty Nail and Hoptoad. Just serving it in a martini glass (which, incidentally, is also called a "cocktail glass") and putting "-tini" on the end is a mediocrity-driven nomenclature cop-out, which impoverishes and demeans our language.

So, for example, if this lunch object were called a "Daily Market Romaine Salad", I'd be fine. I probably wouldn't have bought it, but I wouldn't be feeling all unfulfilled.

I break for Beethoven.

WETA is conspiring against me, professionally.
Normally they are a tremendous help. More often than not, they get me through the workday.
But twice already this afternoon they have played pieces that are so beautiful/stirring/heartstring-catching that I can't work with them in the background. Have to stop working and only listen for a bit.
Albinoni's Oboe Concerto in D Minor (from the Concertos a Cinque, Opus 9), and now Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4.
Lalala! (Or more accurately, "La, lalalala, lalalalala-la-la-laaaaaa, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dee-deedledy-diddledy-diddledum, dum-dum-duuuum...")
It's good, though, really. Because of joy.

Spurious Algorithms

Netflix thinks I'll enjoy Strong Bad's Emails. Which, of course, I will.
Apparently the Netflix recommendations algorithm (or possibly "group of recommendations elves") has created a correlation between "people who like Strong Bad", "people who like Eddie Izzard" (okay, with you so far), and ... "people who like Rivers and Tides".

I mean to say: "Quoi?"

Now, as you know, I like Strong Bad's Emails very much indeed. Overall I'd give 'em a 5. Same goes for most of the Izzard oeuvre (well, Circle gets a 4 because the audience was dense, and I kinda hated Circus, but that had nothing to do with Eddie). Andy Goldsworthy gets a 7 on a scale of 1-5. I know that many of my friends like all three works/artistes/oevres very much as well. It's not that I'm disputing that there could be some significant Venn Diagram overlap between fans of SB / IZ / AG. It just seems like a spurious leap for the Netflix algorelves to say that since I liked Rivers and Tides, I'll like Strong Bad.

Sorta like saying "We know you loved The Terminator; why not try "A Room With A View"? Or "Hey, you like foie gras, right? Try this rhubarb!" It's true, I love them both, but I certainly wouldn't use one as a basis for recommending the other.

Spoiler Alert!

I'm feeling oversensitive today about people not adequately announcing spoilers. And being as I'm hideously over-caffeinated and thus not qualified to do any important work, I'm going to rant for a bit.

For cryin' out loud, people! Not everyone has seen everything you have seen! Thanks to DVD, I might be watching something tonight for the first time that you saw three years ago and think everyone already knows about. And some of us like to keep our suspense, well, suspenseful! It's gotten to the point where I'm afraid to look at the cover of Entertainment Weekly in case I accidentally find out something about Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica (which btw Netflix still has listed with an "unknown" release date, the slackers).

Here's an example of how I want to see content about a show/movie/novel/amusement park ride/other artform/experience where suspense is important:


*****SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *****

This post contains a spoiler about Season 2 of the HBO series Rome.










Honest. If you haven't seen Season 2 of Rome but you think you might one day, don't read any further.










Keep scrolling. There's a spoiler down there somewhere.








Seriously. I'm pissed off about the increasing lack of spoiler alerts. It's not like it's a new idea. On Usenet you'd have been flamed eyebrowless for stuff people feel free to post now, spoiler-wise. (You kids today, and your fancy browsers. Get off my lawn.)










*****SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *** SPOILER ALERT *****

There's a spoiler right below this.






Okay: Season 2 has been less enjoyable for me to watch so far not just because of the overall more somber/desperate nature of the circumstances the characters and the republic find themselves in, but because I accidentally found out a couple of months ago (while looking for some pretty general information about Indira Varma) that [here's the spoiler!] Vorenus' children didn't die at the hands of Erastes Fulmen in the first episode [that was it. The spoiler, I mean.]

So I was completely deprived of the major suspense-driver for the first few episodes of the season.

Boo.

P.S. Someone ought to cast Simon Woods and Paul Bettany as brothers.

I'm a sybarite, that's why!

I found this product for the first time at a Sheetz (which was sorta odd; I associate Sheetz more with Combos and Diet Mountain Dew than with strangely up-market flavored water).
I liked it. Makes a nice mid-road-trip beverage. Pick-me-up-ish without the hissy caffeine vibration, the sugar rush/crash, or the red dye dementia.
And then I went camping for two weeks. When it was hot, I drank this, and became less cranky. When it was muddy, I wished for a case of it so I could use it to wash my muddy little feet, in part to make life more pleasant for my grovelling minions, but mostly because I'm a sybarite.
I've added it to the list of must-have supplies for next year: 3 jars of pickles, 24 little cans of V8, a case of Gerolsteiner Sprudel, string cheese, and minty, minty water.

[1] Defensive footnote about the appropriateness of my supply choices: No, Iron Age Celts didn't have all that. (Pickles, probably; string cheese, maybe; bubbly water, only if they lived near a bubbly-water spring). But they did have houses with actual roofs, and trackways through the sucking mud, and didn't live somewhere the heat index gets over 100 degrees, ever. Plus, they had water, and mint. I'm unrepentant.

Geek Badges, continued

These merit badges for science professionals don't line up with the Geek Badges I have earned myself, but I find them highly inspirational, particularly from a design perspective.

Not current, but perfect.

"[I]n America, it almost seems like 'family' has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas."

Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon in one geekalicious interview.

This just shouldn't be so hard.

We've been a language-using species for, what, at least 40,000 years, and we still don't know how to talk to our kids. About anything, apparently.

Random Awesome

Couple of clips (both videos with sound), c/o Matthew my brother-out-law: Surface computing and single-handed Stonehenge.

Dang, yo.

More things on earth, Horatio

Okay if I call you Horatio?
I will probably tell you all this in a big rush on Monday, but thank you so much for pestering me to buy the DVDs of Planet Earth, or I wouldn't have, because I have a giant queue of David Attenborough productions I don't own yet and I would have stuck it in there. And then I would have been deprived.
Swimming elephants!! Golden snub-nosed monkeys! Cranes riding thermals over the Himalayas!
So far, it's all amazing. With the crying, as predicted. When I was very young, maybe 3, we had a mobile of cranes in our bedroom, and they looked just like the footage of the migration over the Himalayas--in that riding-thermals, kite-sail-winged, dangly-gangly-legged way. I couldn't find any images online that capture that odd elegance. And *why* is it so delightful to watch elephants swimming? Is it just the incongruity of the largest land animal floating weightless, or is it that their knees all bend forward, plus the snorkely trunks and the evident pleasure? Ridiculously pleasing. I watched that bit four times.
Also, so I don't forget: Pester me to write a fan letter to David Attenborough. I started one ages ago but didn't finish, plus never found out where best (or at all) to send it. ("Sir David Attenborough, c/o The BBC" probably wouldn't work very well, alas.)
I just realized (reading about his career) that I have clear memories (clear--full audio-visual and emotion and everything) of a show of his that aired in 1975, which means I was 4 years old. It was called "Fabulous Animals" and was mostly about mythical beasts (including those weird pictures of people with faces in their chests) but also touched on real ones like Komodo dragons, and I remember Sir David (just David, then) sticking together broken pieces of a huge bird's egg with masking tape. Bigger than an ostrich egg. More like a really big honeydew melon. And the people who found the pieces used them to carry water. Madagascar comes to mind. (I thought it was "Madacasca" because I heard him say it before I could read.) Maybe an elephant bird? So he's been a huge piece of my life since I was four. Very much a part of the fabric of my world. That deserves some mad fan mail.
Also I have a theory about why Sigourney Weaver did the U.S. voiceover: Sir David's voice has lost a tiny bit of its crispness. He has a very, very faint slur on some words now (he is 80 years old, after all), and I'm guessing the American viewer isn't prepared to deal with even faintly impaired speech, even if it's coming from someone with 60 years of solid gold credentials. Boo on that. I'm glad I got the UK version.
I owe you one.
P.S. I couldn't find that trailer you tried to show me (remember, I made you stop, "Crying, crying!"). And the clips I could find on the Discovery website have some random American dude doing the voiceover--neither Sigourney Weaver nor Sir David. Grumblecakes.

Gobsmacking Beauty

My bees are pleased. (And apparently plotting.)

Rogue Apostrophe Speaks Volumes

I just got an email from someone whose title is "Communications' Manager".
Not "Communication Manager" or "Communications Manager". That apostrophe stands out bigger than an exclamation point.
It gives me cold shivers.
What's the rationale? Is she the manager of all the individual communications produced by her organization, and therefore sees "Communications" as a plural, and therefore "Communications'" as a plural possessive?
Is the word "Communications" as an academic or professional discipline not recognized as a formal word? Did she kowtow to a spellchecker, or does she have a stronger pedigree for this bit of pedantry?
Whatever its origins, innocent or not, that apostrophe makes me desperate to avoid ever having to deal with this person or her communications department (or presumably "Communications' Department").

Eyestrain

This is kinda cool, and slightly painful, and mildly disconcerting.
It's a simple example of the kind of manipulation of responses that leads to things like Frank Luntz's entire oeuvre (which, as illustrated in this interview, feels all kinds of evil to me—he's using true words to tell lies...)
Not sure why a simple illusion like this would make me think of him. Interesting.

Mmmmmmarmite!

I was shopping this evening for my insolent minion ("the Boy") who has requested a German chocolate cake with almonds instead of pecans for his 15th birthday. While searching in vain for Dutch-processed cocoa[1], I was stunned to find jars of Marmite in the baking aisle.
(You don't bake with Marmite, except as a flavoring. It is not live yeast. It won't make bread rise. It doesn't belong anywhere near baking yeast. Urgh.)
But I bought some anyway, and then got to thinking about what the Marmite-eating public does with Marmite (other than eating it straight from the jar, which is my usual Marmite-eating mode). I've been giggling/gagging over this dubious collection of Marmite recipes for a good 20 minutes. What's great about it (to me) is how none of these recipes even pretend to be "How to introduce people to Marmite without scarring them for life" or "How to get your children to eat Marmite because it's so good for them even though it tastes like toxic saline axle grease".
These people love it, and they aren't afraid to try new things, and even recommend those things to strangers. It's the antithesis of the monoculture mentality, and that's a joy.

[1] There was no Dutch processed cocoa at the Arlington Road Giant, so I'll be making an extra trip to Whole Foods tomorrow. This may seem like a lot of work, but not everyone gets a minion and he's a good 'un, so I'm happy to oblige. His birthday cake last year took two grocery store trips as well.

Honest Marketing and Cheerful Tangents

"His websites, Keaggy.com and Grocerylists.org, have been described as genius, useless, inspiring, stupid, beautiful, profound and a complete waste of time."

Now, there's an artist/social commentator/waster of bandwidth I can get behind.

This whole thought-stream resulted from me going through my spam folder, which despite repeated training attempts has yet to learn that I really do want to receive Liquid Treat. A recent issue featured this intriguing book about graphic interpretations of single words (which I think we've looked at before; that comes from this fabulous design blog; I really like this series about "Primal" but can't imagine why none of them feature horseshoe crabs), which Amazon (for some reason) connects to this book about grocery lists, which is a print work drawn from the website above. This tangent cheerfully leads me to think of James Lileks, whose web-work has turned into books, and who has on more than one occasion made me laugh so hard I thought I might actually die.

I think there might have been some caffeine in that coffee I had this morning. I love the Internet.

Another Google Identity Crisis

(I was going to post this as a comment on the story below, but Blogger rejected my HTML for some reason.)

Who is the Greatest Living American?

Google Identity Crisis

Another NTEN listserv piece: This link (that I am setting up here) is solely intended to try to boost this Michael Hoffman above other Michael Hoffmans in Google results. I don't know this man from Adam's off ox[1], but I admire the impetus.

[1] I imagine I started using this phrase in 1993. Funny.

Sunsets, timezones, dialing codes, and more!

I was looking for what time the sun goes down tomorrow and found this extremely useful site--lots of bits of knowing that normally would take eight separate searches to come up with.

Building a World We Don't Want to Live In

Somebody over on the geek listserve just posted this:

I've had three Palm Treos [i.e., Treos running the Palm operating system] and they were much more reliable then the Win OS version I currently have. But Palm is probably not going to be around forever and to stay in tune with the times I switched, but can't say I'm happy about it.

I find myself mildly (and increasingly) outraged that someone would do this. It's like switching from Beta to VHS before the studios stopped releasing Beta tapes. (We hung on until the bitter end. I wouldn't be surprised if my mom still has a working Beta machine to watch all the classic movies she taped off cable.)

I suppose some people call this kind of behavior "flexible and forward-thinking," or "seeing which way the wind is blowing." I call it defeatist, anti-idealist, and toadying to the forces of mediocrity, conformity, and assimilation. (Not that I have a dog in this fight, being as I still use a paper Filofax, but still.)

The Opposite of Mediocrity

According to today's news:

A man about to be executed decided to make one final gesture of goodwill before his imminent arrival at St. Peter's Gate or some alternative place of judgment. Instead of keeping his last meal for himself, he asked that his meal (a veggie pizza) be given to the first homeless person found outside the prison.

The prison officials (seemingly less worried about their respective judgment days, or consigned to the fact that their fates are already sealed) would not meet the man's request, citing the prison's policy of not donating to charities. What a fantastic policy!

Thankfully, not all people are so callous. Nearby homeless shelters were flooded with donated pizzas from kind-hearted people throughout the area, including one woman who with a group of friends delivered 150 pizzas to one local shelter.

Weren't we just talking about this?

In an article in today's edition, the Post takes a look at the effects of technology on TV schedules and advertising revenue.

It sounds like we might be in for quite a sea change in how we think about, and interact with, TV.

Sounds good to me!

Cool story, lame graphics

I'm a big fan of astronomy-related news, so this was a nice little read. But I'd much rather prefer some Hubble shots of this supernova than the artist's rendition chosen instead. The drawing evidently shows what the star "may have looked like when it exploded."

My two grudges:
1) I'm not a big fan of concept pictures unless the subject is purely theoretical or immensely difficult to capture. I've seen plenty of real exploding star pics to know this is not the case here. Why should I believe the artist? "May have looked like" is not a very convincing disclaimer.

2) If you are going to use a concept picture of what an exploding star might look like, go all out! We're talking about the brightest supernova ever! That's the picture you choose?! C'mon! What about this or this?!

Ceci N'Est Pas Une Nation

Discovered while reading this extensive blog thread about the finer points of fried potatoes, this site contains an extensive analysis of the complete lack of an actual Belgium.

Stylized knife? Or some sort of Venus thing?

Driving home from Union Station last night with Michelle and Matthew, the car in front of us had a sticker on it showing a symbol that none of us recognized (it was a pointed oval/vesica piscis crossed with a tilde). I haven't found it yet but I did find this intriguing reference site.

NTEN sells green pills?

I've mentioned before how I didn't understand the reasoning behind the recent redesign of the NTEN website, right? Here's a tiny bit of sad: Their Firefox tab-icon looks like a shiny green pill.
(I should talk, 'cause we don't even have a Firefox tab-icon. But still.)

Homemade Jam

Have I, of late, waxed rhapsodic on the coolness of my brother-out-law?
Endless vastnesses of cool. (Like this.)
Also warmth.
(This is his website.)

"Devour DC"

Here's what I got when I tried to Google the CLPI caterers.

Spring!

Look! It's Will! (I've been thinking the same thing. But it looks more like Will.)

My crocuses are gone, and the daffodils are starting to look a little dried out and sad. The cold snap means I have not yet planted nasturtiums and snapdragons to take the place of the gone-by bulbs in my flower-border. I was getting really crabby about that, and then this morning suddenly the narcissi under the maple tree have come up, and some tulips that I forgot about are in bud. Whee.

Good job, Lunch Man

I just wanted to say thanks for the Lunch Man tip to go get sushi yesterday. The Sake Club is much more pleasing than its jarring Flash site would suggest. Hamachi with shiso was wrapped in beautiful serrated aromatic leaves, instead of just having little slivers of shiso rolled in with the fish. The genmaicha was brought in a teapot with a tiny cheerful white rabbit with brown ears as the lid-knob. Infinitely preferable to a conference lunchtable.

I can hear the bees a-clicking!

Check out this piece of serious geek beauty (YouTube, with music). It and other things I learned today have intensely excited the robot bees. They are giddy, energized, and incredibly noisy. I bet you could hear them clicka-ticking if you put your ear against my ear.

I just had a moment of intense nostalgia for Max Headroom. I wanted to use the word "blipvert" as a simile—"It's like a blipvert, but in a good way"—but then I remembered you were Max Headroom-deprived. It's not available on Netflix (peeve!) or to purchase on DVD anywhere (outrage!!), but is apparently available here on AOL Video.

Geekalicious!

A cavalcade of geeky fun, courtesy of Anubh (who's in the education PhD program at UVA). Enjoy.

Brains...

I've spent a whole week a-taking of my dolce far niente. Be proud of me—I accomplished nothing at all beyond practicing doing what I felt like. I lived on ice cream for two days, and watched all of Freaks & Geeks and Blue Planet. Came down to Kelby & Lonan's in Scottsville last night following Nessa and Rona's smash hit at the Lovettsville Elementary talent show (with two friends, they dressed as the cutest pirates you've ever seen and sang Bully in the Alley).
Dinner tonight includes 3 pies (the new piecrust technique coming in handy again), and mashed potatoes with extra skin 'cause we made 'em from the cored-out casings of spud gun ammo. Most people (3 kids, 10 adults, 3 dogs) are currently engaged in an all-out humans vs. zombies battle. Nessa just yelled "Mom, Mom! I need the chainsaw!!" Alas, Tara has bitten me on the ankle, so I oughta go get some cherry pie before all I want to eat is brains...

404'd!

What kind of oddness is this?? How I can post to our blog, when I can't even see it?
Wackier yet: I can edit posts from the dashboard, but I can't view them.
grumblecakes.

Geek Badges

These are the virtual merit badges I have earned during my hard-fought transition from "I'm a writer with some tech skills" to "Don't touch my code!"

Scoffs at the WYSIWYG: Here's where I crossed the Rubicon. We had a new content management system on our website. Given the choice between a buggy and annoying WYSIWYG interface and a "just put your HTML here" option, I chose the code interface.

Invokes Linus Torvalds: Classical radio announcers get accent-affected-expressive when saying Italian names like "Cecilia Bartolli". There's r-rolling and i-lengthening and saying "ch" instead of "ss", all carefully con brio. This is a peeve, because no-one gets all concerned about pronouncing "Linus Torvalds" or "Arnold Schwarzenegger" in their native idioms. (It's a badge because the first non-Anglo/non-Italian famous person who came to mind was Linus Torvalds.)

"Man, SourceForge is really slow today": That's it, really. Just the utterance.

The Great Punctuation Shift: I'm a grammar/usage/punctuation stickler. Commas and periods go inside quotation marks[1] (unless the quotation is followed with a parenthetical expression). Semicolons and colons go outside quotation marks. You'll note that I no longer apply the comma/period rule. True, we're in informal-writing-land, but at one time my fingers would have strangled me before willingly typing a comma outside a quotation mark.

Hat Trick—Geek, Nerd, Wonk: Another utterance badge, this one for exclaiming aloud, "Hey, you can get a Creative Commons license in Magyar!" to which Ehren replied, after a pause, "Okay: that wasn't English." (It was Will who pointed out that it was a three-in-one winner.)

Crafts badge—Flash Drive Earrings: Do I need to explain this?

Giggles While Scripting: While cleaning my desk I came across printouts of the last batch of navigation scripts I wrote in FileMaker, and I laughed, in an "Oh goody!" kind of way. (That was today.)

Those are the only ones I remember, which means they might be the only ones I have properly earned.

[1] Of course, strictly (and pedantically) speaking, I haven't been using actual quotation marks (“ ”). I've been using dumb (or "ambidextrous") quotation marks, because I'm lazy. But I'm also twitchy enough that I have half a mind to go back through the blog and fix all the punctuation. I guess it's time to go home...

Super-duper

According to CNN, California and as many as 15 othjer [sic] states may soon be joining the seven states who already hold their primaries on February 5. This apparently gives CNN license to dub February 5, 2008 "Super-duper Tuesday." WTF?! What is the average age of CNN.com's readership? 6?

This led me to look up actual viewership/readership demographics. Very interesting stuff. Check it out.

No, we love Macromedia!

Rick commented yesterday that our blog name makes it sound like we hate Macromedia. Far from it. We are fans. Whee, Authorware. It's not their fault that people use Flash badly. Marketing Sherpa[1] says that 80% of consumers hate Flash intros.

[1] Can't link to the MarketingSherpa article without registering.

You too can be posterized! Or a cartoon! Or, um, all blurry!!

The folks at Social Edge are having a bit too much fun with graphic processing filters. (I like the idea but I think they've taken it slightly overboard...)

Troops

Can't believe you haven't seen Troops! It's coming up on its 10th anniversary. Maybe they'll show it at the Uptown, and people will camp out[1]. (It's a 30MB file, way too big to email, sorry.)

[1] I am not mocking the camping people. I was a proud camping person. A community leader among the camping people, in fact. Long may they camp. (Those whose faith was strong enough to survive the Phantom Menace, anyway.)

Pi Day!!

It's 3/14, which is Albert Einstein's birthday...which means I get to use my fabulous Christmas gift from the E-K's (Haig, Jill, Aislinn, and Nora). Unfortunately I don't have an Albert Einstein action figure, or I could improve on this genius idea.

What I Learned Today

Answer: Dentate Gyrus

According to a CNN article, every one of us has a dentate gyrus within our hippocampi and it is related to our ability to remember things. The article describes a new study that shows that when mice work out they build new brain cells in their dentate gyri thereby combating the loss of memory associated with getting older.

Peeve: Jewel cases and non-standardization

I got a bunch of CDs for Christmas. Many of them came packaged as pairs—two CDs in one jewel case. I keep breaking fingernails and worrying about shattering (or at least putting dings in) my Telemann quartets because I cannot figure out how to get CD#2 out of the case.
There's no standardization. They all open differently. I'm going to need a cheat sheet, or maybe I'll put clues on post-it notes (sort of like the stickers I put on the copier doors to show which order to open them in when clearing a paper jam). It's idiotic.

Welcome to Macromediocrity

What it's[1] all about:

Simone (me) and Ehren (him) were longtime colleagues who, circa 2007, recently thought we might be separated by the vagaries of nonprofit funding and the ebb and flow of executive leadership. We decided we needed a shared blog so we could continue entertaining/distracting each other with bits of joy, hilarity, and outrage. (Mostly various degrees of outrage, ranging from the peeved to the apoplectic.)

A lot of our shared concerns arise from the growing tendency of American culture to encourage and reward mediocrity, hence the title of our blog.

The original content herein is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. Of course, it'll be hard for you to attribute anything without our last names. I'm Simone Parrish. I'll ask Ehren if it's OK to put his last name here.

[1] I used to be able to type/write "its" and "it's" in their respective appropriate contexts without even thinking. Now most times I write either, I have to sing the Strong Bad song (mp3).