scrap pad

more iPhone

iPhone scratch/drop test. from the comments: "AAHH! I'ts like watching someone torture a kitten! A scratch-resistant, unbreakable kitten, but still..." (I'm skeptical about how this compares to real, long term use, but still). via daringfireball.

Pogue iPhone skit

David Pogue's goofy video about the iPhone. cool how the nytimes has leaped into nice video productions over the past year or so.

word: "proprioception"

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense. ok, friends: now can you start joining twitter?

... proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are...

wanting a new laptop hd

straightforward coke can

new coke can design: classy. can't wait to see these on shelves, not that I drink the stuff.

youtube a major campaign element

I'm really disturbed by Hillary's "choose my campaign song" thing, but at the same time fascinated by the youtube use. not that using youtube is unusual in campaigning these days. also, as weird as the campaign song schtick is, I'm horrified by some (most?) of the responses.

movie

just watched Go Fish, a somewhat arty lesbian flick from 1994. It made me really happy, even though the story is goofy and the dialogue is awkward. Even though it's black and white and has pretentious abstract sequences. It has a cheesy ending but isn't cheesy. It is full of '90s dyke style and regular dyke bodies. In it there was only one man who said one sentence (if that). I can't really figure out what made it so awesome. Maybe I'm just queer-starved.

MLK quote

MLK quote: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

paris hilton

Paris Hilton doesn't change facial expressions (makes noise). via kottke.

quote

"I like to think of a CMS as a file cabinet hooked up to a projector." I forget who said this, but it was during Penguin Day in Lowell, MA last week.

weird/annoying

I came into the office this morning after being on vacation for two and a half weeks. No one is here, and no one bothered to email about why they aren't here. Is everybody in line for the iPhone or something? oh, wait: it's not Friday yet.

potter water

ceramic water filter for the developing world. can be made by a team of potters. via this Ask Umbra column.

Porticus

Porticus, gui for MacPorts. I guess I'm missing the boat, I still have Fink hanging around. via df.

"zero day"

"zero day exploits" are exploits that are published before (or on the same day as) a vulnerability and/or patch is published. "zero day releases" are videos, music, or software cracks that are (illegally) released simultaneously with the day of the official release. (zero day on wikipedia)

nerd marble toy

binary adding machine with marbles. via defective yeti links. (back of the machine, etc.)

misc

bathroom signs

bathroom signs showing people needing to pee.

Feed Quick Start

Feed Quick Start. Interesting: I never thought of subscribing to RSS feeds as a spam evasion thing.

away

I've been visiting my family and friends for the past few days. I'll be around my computer more for the rest of the week, but probably the usual brain dump won't resume until the end of next week—after June 27th.

adopters

so cool: people at my work are using Doodle to schedule meetings.

children's book

children's book at The Morning News: Files Are Not For Sharing

drag

my friend Meyer on drag (protected LJ entry).

vulva angst

All About My Vagina : talks: On labia angst and ideal vulvas.

Anil Dash on mangoes

Indian mangoes are being imported to the US for the first time this year. I want to try some.

retro awesome

sweet Mac OS 8 styled web site: Julian Opie (artist). via kb.

comic

The Perry Bible Fellowship - fun exploding heads/sex/whimsy comic strip.

women in tech communities

women-friendly communication in tech. via Simon Willison. I dude it up a lot (possibly too much) these days, but definitely recognize these patterns. especially:

Many women spend time observing online groups before deciding if they will participate, for this very reason. They want to ensure that they will not feel verbally attacked once speaking up, and that their issues, comments and contributions will be heard and handled fairly.

I don't wait to see how my comments will be received so much as wait to see where my questions and comments will fit in, but.

microformat notes

notes from Tantek Celik's "Microformats and You" slides:

  • "POSH" = Plain Old Semantic HTML
  • "Add to Address Book" links for hCard-microformatted data: link to http://technorati.com/contacts/URL (URL = the URL of the page containing the hCard.)
  • check out the use of hCards in this list of @media 2007 speakers. not the standard rigid looking hCard markup, but hCard elements as part of paragraphs about people

hot

It hit 101° F yesterday, so I'm pretty glad to be missing whatever I can of of Sacramento summer. Even if it's only a week and a half.

(National Weather Service)

chickens on flickr

photo of chickens. I miss chickens.

inane lyric that I love

"it's sunny and seventy-five, it feels so good to be alive" -- from the Silver Jews' song "People." actually, most of their lyrics are inane, and I'm basically obsessed with a lot of American Water. (thx from xmas, ben)

shouldn't be that funny

"Japanese tetris." via defective yeti links.

fuzzy vs. inaccurately crispy

mac- vs. windows- style font rendering. potentially an "I hate Safari" feature for windows users.

I has a flavor.

^flavor^style. so, my web app is open to the public now! I don't want to be a referrer, but here's the url:

http://calruralhousing.org/housing-toolbox/inclusionary-housing-policy-search

and here's my writeup at ctcvista.org.

mass emails

so I've made an HTML email and sent it to 450+ people. I guess I'm going to hell. Anyway: used an Outlook plugin called Send Personally. It generates and sends an individual email to each person in the "To:" field. Costs $24, but there's a free trial.

new Safari

weird: Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows, too.

oh wait: that's a feature.

I'm sure there are jokes about myspace that look like this:

Solaris

by the way, this is how I feel about Solaris:

you should definitely see Solaris (1972) the movie, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. the pictures and sounds are beautiful, and it's decent job of imagining a spacefaring future. on the other hand, it's long, obscure, and quiet. a fair portion of the film is just inanimate scenes with ambient noise. it's not particularly funny, but it's spooky and a bit trippy. good for a super-mellow night in.

or, maybe you shouldn't see it.

(commented)

word

lech.

text: a lecherous urge or desire : I think he has a kind of lech for you.

hosting

Acorn Host (web hosting). I have a crush on the website and the principles.

Doing Local Right

Slides from Simon Willison's talk, "Doing Local Right." I fantasized about doing something like this in Portland, Maine when I lived there.

esri mapping techniques blog

ESRI Mapping Center blog. guess I'll be keeping an eye on that, as I use ArcMap 9.x (reluctantly).

"hot queer sex writing"

except not.

  • there was a photography show at [somewhere] entitled "Safe and Dirty." there should be more of this. (The McGill Daily)
  • "Latex was a part of my sex life from the beginning. For me, latex is not weird or unsexy." also, "the thing that I really want to do with this book is teach straight people how to be more queer." Salon interview with a sex columnist/author

I don't have specific feelings about latex, but am kind of fascinated about the ideas around it.

magpie saying

I've been meaning to look up the saying that goes with magpies since first seeing them in Ireland this summer. Also: a group of magpies is called a "parliament."

One for sorrow, two for joy;
Three for a girl, four for a boy;
Five for silver, six for gold;
Seven for a secret, never to be told;
Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss;
Ten for a bird that's best to miss.

I kind of prefer the version that ends at seven, but also there's one (found here) that goes to twelve.

Eight for a wish, 
Nine for a kiss, 
Ten for a letter, 
Eleven for Worse and Twelve for Better

homemade tortillas

"Sin City Breakfast Tacos." cooking on youtube. homemade tortillas! cool chopping cuts! but otherwise it's totally dude-food. via trenchant.org/daily

cheerios

neat trick from the June 8th diesel sweeties print comic: the text on the low-res cheerios boxes is made legible by alternating the colors of the letters between grey and black.

new MapWindow

a new version (4.4) of MapWindow is out. (MapWindow is a free GIS tool for Windows)

Pogue on Parallels

David Pogue on Parallels (using windows on a mac). nytimes, via my dad. possibly my long-term goal of getting him to buy a Mac is closer to realization...

fancy

This Ain't No Disco - photos of design agency work spaces. via coudal.com.

autoerotic

pictures of people kissing themselves (photoshopped). half of them are looking in weird directions. via kottke.

emacs movement keys

emacs movement keys. these work in a lot of places in OS X, but are especially useful for editing sql statements on the command line. on the Mac, 'C-a' means control+a, 'M-f' means option+f.

Nollywood

oh, this is cool: "subsistance film making;" "You can make a movie in seven days for $10,000." from Ethan Zuckerman's writeup on a talk about Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry.

New School graduation

New School grads share tales - I spent my last highschool semester at TNS. (thx, Jen)

also in the news: a friend from the New School, Timmy Gagne, died in a car accident last weekend.

meringue cookies

Meringues - fluffy crispy egg white cookies, impossibly delicious texture. how to make them.

new favorite browser

new release of the Camino Browser (1.5).

families with their food

more of the What the World Eats photos, this time at Time Magazine. (I took a picture of myself with two weeks food back in December)

fancy HTML Mail with Microsoft Outlook

how to make fancy HTML emails with Outlook: make the email as an HTML file, view it in IE, and choose "send page" from the IE mail button. Tips: don't use background images; don't expect anything to center with margin:auto; it is weird and difficult (and weirdly, modal) to edit the email in Outlook, so you might as well do all the editing on the original HTML file. Test the email on yourself so you know what CSS outlook will disregard. Also, in IE 6/Outlook 2003, an <hr /> gets tacked on the end; delete it before sending. HTML Mail with Microsoft Outlook.

fixing gmaps street view privacy concerns

by adding hats and mustaches to all faces. via waxy links. uh, not real.

London 2012 olympics logo

2012 London Olympics logo animation. I guess the world is being invaded by jaggy shapes from the eighties?

countries

countries graphed as traditional vs. "secular-rational" values and survival vs. self expression values. via kottke.

new circuitous design

I've scraped together a new design for circuitous.org, I think. now, if I ever get around to implementing it...

work organization


work organization
Originally uploaded by bec.w
tasks get written on a sticky note and stuck to the desk. today's tasks go on the main desk, future tasks go on the side desk. after I do something I get to snatch it off the desk and crumple it up.

iPhone tv ads

iPhone TV Ads just came out. they showcase the user interface (pretty!). via daringfireball.

flying spaghetti monster toast

I'm really curious to see how much this goes for: eBay: Flying Spaghetti Monster Toast FSM Religious Holy Relic (end time Jun-10-07 18:15:00 PDT).

sounded familiar

the "underpants gnome guy" is Terry Chay... I knew I'd heard that line of anti-Ruby-on-Rails reasoning before; turns out it was on his blog, in the post "Is Ruby the dog and PHP the dogfood?." (that post has exactly the same tone as his talk: funny, all over the place, playing into the politics of the community, informative.)

Cocoa XML-RPC Client

Cocoa XML-RPC Client (mac os x softare). via the "underpants gnome" guy who spoke at bar camp sacramento.

camino

the other day I went on a try-new-browsers kick. I tried Shiira, Camino, and Opera. Camino came out on top; I was looking for something nimbler than Firefox and Camino is lighter-weight but still very similar to FF (expected; they share a codebase). Useful Camino add-ons: how to enable type ahead find in Flock/Camino, Camino downloads and add-ons (custom tabs), CaminoSessions.

napoleon dynamite plus mac os x

It's pretty much my favorite operating system.

karate belt color order

white, yellow, orange, green, blue, brown, black. traditionally just white, yellow, green, brown, black. the colors get darker because originally students would just re-dye their belt. History of karate belt colors.

Battlestar Galactica 4th season

just one more season of Battlestar Galactica. chasing Earth is getting a little tired. there will be a 2 hour episode in November (2007) and the rest of the 22-episode season will start in "early" 2008. via slashdot.

weird fear

I'm afraid of things that adjust our environment so we don't have to: glasses that darken in the sun, air conditioning in every building and car, etc. I worry that we as individuals will stop being accustomed to changes in our environment and that huge character flaws will emerge from this.

passive-aggressive notes blog

blog of passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers. via mimi smartypants.

lolbots

lolbots, in the style of i can has cheezburger but with robots. especially funny: the eating ones. dentist chair, robot with chute? by rstevens of dieselsweeties.

National Donut Day

Jen says that Friday, June 1 is National Donut Day. That's tomorrow!

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