Mayday! Mayday!

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The other day at work, I was toying with the idea of doing a “day in the life” series of photos. Taking my camera with me during the day, and snapping a shot every so often, then presenting them to the world. I hadn’t decided quite how to do it — a picture an hour? Every half hour? — but I’d been letting it rumble around in the back of my brain since then.

To my amusement, though, today Dyanna pointed to the Mayday Project, which is essentially exactly what I’d been turning over in my brain, only somewhat organized and loosed upon the blogosphere at large.

So, I’ve signed up, and on May 10^th^, will be documenting my day hourly.

Hrm. This means I’m going to need to actually leave the house that day, doesn’t it? Something tells me a series of fourteen pictures of my computer monitors would be pretty un-exciting…

What did he say?

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Remember diagramming sentences in your high school or college English classes? All those wierd little diagrams finding the various pieces of the phrases?

Here’s a challenge for you, then:

I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq, discussed in any meeting. The likelihood of it seems to me to be so low that it does not surprise me that it’s never been discussed in my presence. To my knowledge.

Courtesy of our own Donald Rumsfeld.

(via Tom Tomorrow)

If only…

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A perfect juxtaposition of headline and photo, from the Anchorage Daily News last month:

If only it were true...

One has to wonder how intentional that was.

(via Jaime)

Things I shouldn't admit in public

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Well, okay — since you asked…

  • I do, occasionally, like some really bad music. I can rationalize it well, but…(sigh)…the occasional song does come along that I know I shouldn’t like, but I do. For example:
    • Britney Spears’ ‘Oops…I did it again!’: I don’t really know why, but for some reason, this song amuses me to no end. It’s not one I’d play over and over, but it’s not going to get shut off when it comes up in the playlist, either.
    • Celine Dion’s ‘All Coming Back To Me Now’: This one, there’s actually a reason for. The first time I heard this song, I had no clue who sang it, but it sounded like a Meatloaf song. Now, I’ve always liked Meatloaf, and both of his ‘Bat out of Hell’ albums were actually written and produced by Jim Steinman. So, just after hearing this song, I called the radio station and asked them who it was, but first I wanted to know if Jim Steinman wrote and produced the song. Turns out he did — then they told me who the vocalist was. Celine Dion? (sigh) Ah, well — to me, it’s a Jim Steinman song.
    • The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’: Again, I’m not sure I can really give it a reason. It’s a fun, bouncy, brainless piece of bubblegum pop, and okay, I like it. Besides, the line “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends” sounds far too much like she’s telling some guy that if he’s going to sleep with her, he’s going to have to sleep with all of her friends, too. This amuses me (not to mention that it sounds like a damn good deal…).
  • Kind of tied to the last of the three guilty pleasure songs above — Spice World (the Spice Girls movie) is surprisingly funny. Just trust me on this one — forget the fact that they were a manufactured pop group, and just sit back and enjoy the silly British humor and the multitudes of cameos. It’s not nearly as bad as you think. Really.

You know, that’s enough embarassing myself for the moment. Time to stop before I dig myself any deeper. ;)

TV Turnoff Week Apr. 21-27

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TV Turnoff Week - April 21-27

This’ll be amazingly easy for me to do — I stopped watching TV roughly, oh, ten or twelve years or so, I think. Since then, the only times I’ve been around much TV has been when I’ve been over at someone elses house and they’ve happened to have it turned on.

There’s too many other things to do in life for me to waste time sitting around in front of the boob tube.

(via MeFi)

A visit from Miranda

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Miranda at Neighbors

Had a very pleasant weekend — just staying at home and relaxing for most of it, but yesterday evening spent a good few hours visiting with Miranda, who had come out to visit. She and her friend Ryan had spent Friday with Ryan’s frend Marty down in Vancouver, WA, and then the three of them came up to Seattle on Saturday evening so that Miranda and I could visit. Was a lot of fun — I keep telling her we’ve got to get together more often than just once a year! ;)

Much of the fun of the evening was meeting Ryan and Marty. Miranda and I had made plans to go out to a couple of the clubs here while she was in town, and as the two that I know best are Neighbors and the Vogue, those were our destinations for the night. While I didn’t have any worries about Miranda fitting in at my usual haunts, it was a little entertaining shepherding Ryan and Marty along with us — cowboy hats, while not completly out of place at Neighbors, aren’t often seen in the goth/industrial domain of the Vogue!

Still, they’re both good guys, and it made for a fun evening. Trish, one of the people I’ve met at the Vogue came up and talked with Marty for a while after checking with me first to make sure it’d be okay, since I was obviously with the two of them. Her first question ‐ “So, do you feel a little out of place here?” As it turns out, they’d been a bit worried at first, but quickly realized that they were perfectly safe, and nobody was going to screw with them. Didn’t surprise me, of course, but it was fun to watch the initial reactions.

All in all, a very fun evening — a little drinking, a little dancing, and a lot of catching up, until they had to head back down to Vancouver to sleep and prepare for the drive back home today.

Always good to see old friends again. Now, who’s next to visit Seattle? ;)

Honda Accord ad

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This new ad for the Honda Accord (QuickTime required) is a definite must-see. It’s just grabbed a spot as my third-favorite commercial of all time.

[Update:]{.underline}

Even more jaw-droppingly amazing: this commercial isn’t faked! What you see in the commercial is one successful two-minute long shot — no trick photography, no CGI. Wow. (via MeFi)

For the curious, my second-favorite ad is the “Rainier Beer Motorcycle” ad of the late 80’s. Very simple — just someone riding a motorcyle across the landscape — but even today, if you go up to just about anyone who watched TV during the time it was on, they’ll remember it. The kicker? The whine of the engine was a long, drawn-out, “Raaaaaaaiiiiiiii…[gear change]nniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeerrrrrrrr…[gear change]beeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrr….”

All-time favorite ad, though, for quite a few reasons, is the Apple Computer ‘1984‘ ad. Apple Computer, Ridley Scott, 1984 — a perfect ad.

Meme proposal: YAAMR

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A proposal for the ‘net community at large, and for Microsoft, in an effort to make complaints about/criticisms of Microsoft and its software easier to collect and analyze, with the intent of letting any concerned party at Microsoft sift through them at will for subjects relevant to their area of expertise.

Requirements: a weblog with an active RSS feed.

Methodology: The methodology from the user end is simple: include the acronym ‘YAAMR’ (for Yet Another Anti-Microsoft Rant) in the relevant weblog post; preferably in the title, though including it in the body should work also.

On Microsoft’s end, the process is also simple: create a Feedster search for ‘YAMMR’. Then, as Feedster allows one to subscribe to an RSS feed of a specific search, the MS employee could then subscribe to that RSS feed in their newsreader of choice.

End result: a real-time, constantly updated feed of issues that MS would do well to pay attention to, in order to improve relations with their current user base.

It goes without saying that this same method could be used for other companies or organizations also, requiring only the selection of a convenient acronym or set of keywords that could be used to trigger Feedster’s search results.

I don’t really expect this to get picked up, or put into practice. But I like the idea. Maybe it’d be more useable for smaller companies? In any case, there’s potential here, I think…

More random ideas connected with this: perhaps a Movable-Type powered site, with different categories for different companies or organizations (or one site for a specific company, with categories for the various software packages). These categories would be set up as TrackBack ping receivers for rant posts.

For instance, a hypothetical ‘www.microsoftrants.com’ could have categories for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., then posts about issues with the software could ping the corresponding category. MS employees in the various software groups could subscribe to RSS feeds for the categories, enabling them to keep an ‘ear to the ground’ of what the ‘common user’ faces when using their software.

Hrm. Ideas? Questions? Comments? Words of wisdom?

I think I’ll toss this one out to the LazyWeb community. It’s not really a ‘problem to be solved’, as such, except that I don’t really have the resources (budget) to set this up on my own, and I don’t even know that the idea would catch on (not to mention that as I’m not an ‘A-list’ blogger [or even B- or C-list…probably somewhere around Q-list, I think…], there’s no gaurantee anyone would ever see this proposal otherwise). Better to toss it out to people more integrated with the various tech communities to see if any of them want to pick it up and play with it.