Catching up, part three

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Again, in no particular order, bits and pieces from my ‘technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire…

  • Mark Pilgrim’s online magnetic poetry generator is one of the coolest online wastes of time I’ve seen yet. It randomly grabs words from a webpage and turns them into ‘magnetic poetry’ to play with. Click the link and have fun.

  • I used to use some of the free fonts from Dinc when I was making flyers for the clubs I worked at. Now all of their fonts are free. Good stuff there. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman)

  • A veritable corucopia of excellent free fonts can also be found at The Lab (warning: loud embedded audio). Lots of drool-worth text toys here…now I’m wishing I was still doing flyer work. Maybe I’ll just start playing at some point. (Via ScriptyGoddess)

  • ESPN has become the second major site that I know of (but then, I’m not really tracking these things) to move to an all-CSS layout. Good work, too — seeing sites like that remind me why I’m not a designer. (Also via Jeffrey Zeldman)

  • Phil Ulrich pointed to someone’s experiment with shoehorning a G4 and a PC into a single box, calling it the “world’s first schizophrenic computer”. To that, I humbly present the circa-1994 PowerMac 6100 PC Compatible, with both a 60Mhz PowerPC 601 and a 66Mhz 486DX/2 processor! Rather bizarre machines to play with, actually.

  • Phil’s also released EspressoBlog 2.1.1, a very nice weblog posting program that I use for posting to this weblog. As a bonus, he managed to implement every single idea I tossed his way in an e-mail conversation last week, even a couple that I wasn’t sure would be possible. Damn cool. And I love the hat.

  • Aaron paints an optimistic — and very plausible — picture of the wireless future. One of these days I’ll have to jump on the wireless bandwagon. All things with time, though.

  • The 10 habits of highly annoying bloggers. Eight of these I think I’m safe on, but numbers 2 and 8 (each of which can be summarized as “not enough really original content”) I’m still working on. Too much of this blog is of the link/comment style, and I keep meaning to do add more originality. Even I like it when I do manage to come up with something, so I should do it more often.

  • A good caveat regarding Amazon Associate links from Jason Kottke. I know that there’s quite a few of my links that fall into the ‘won’t work’ category — maybe it’s a good thing that nobody every buys anything from my Amazon links!

  • MovableType 2.63 is released, soon to be installed here.

  • Ready.gov gets Fark’ed (warning: image heavy, broadband recommended). Hilarious. (Via Phil Ulrich)

Catching up, part two

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This time, the focus is on Macintosh goodies. All you PC-using heathens can read on in wistful fantasyland, or just find something else to do — like reinstall Windows again. ;)

  • Enough people linked to PerversionTracker that I finally had to take a look. Looks like I’ve got another regular read! Any site that the Opera webbrowser has “taken the cake, and it is filled with plague and cottage cheese,” and that it is “slower than a squashed waterbear” defintely gets my approval. (Via Brent Simmons, along with many other Mac-based weblogs)

  • I’m probably the last Mac afficionado to find out about this, but it looks like Safari is actually going to get tabs. Nifty! (Via MacSlash, MacRumors and others)

  • This could be a fun toy to play with: VoiceBox, a tiny app that will take text files and convert them to audio files using the Mac’s speech synthesis. It will even ‘read’ RSS feeds, so I could listen to websites on my iPod while going to work! Useful? Dunno yet. Cool, though. (Via Rael Dornfest)

Playing catchup

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I’m skimming over a lot of stuff in my newsreader (758 new items after being out of touch for a week!), but in no particular order, here’s some of the stuff that caught my eye…

  • Snowmen are good, but snowwomen — at least those with breasts — are bad! (Via Jodi)

  • Bush: “Thanks for letting me kill your husband — mind if I make sure your kid is an idiot, too?” Apparently, children of military families don’t need a good education, according to the powers that be. (Via Paul Hoffman)

  • Heaven forbid someone not agree with the U.S.! Since Germany has expressed a dissenting opinion about the push for war with Iraq, the U.S. is planning (at the behest of Rumsfeld) to withdraw all American troops and bases from German in order to “harm the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s ‘treachery’.” (Also via Paul Hoffman)

And that’s it for now, I’ve gotta head to work. More tonight, I’m sure.

Need some free shoes?

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Need a new pair of shoes? Head down to the beach, if you’re in the Pacific Northwest…

Enough soggy Nike basketball shoes to outfit every high school team in the state are drifting through the Pacific Ocean toward Alaska after spilling from a container ship off Northern California.

There’s just one hitch to finding a free pair.

“Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates,” said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. “The effort’s worth it ’cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!”

A beachcomber told Ebbesmeyer about the shoe spill after finding two new blue-and-white EZW men’s shoes washed up near Queets on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula on Jan. 9 and 16.

Unfortunately, they were sizes 10 1/2 and 8 1/2. Both were lefts.

(From the Anchorage Daily News, via Dad)

He's got a point

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If anyone in [My Fair Lady] was gay, it had to be Higgins and Pickering — you’re telling me two single men in their late fifties who live together and enjoy speaking properly and dressing Audrey Hepburn in fabulous outfits aren’t?

— from ‘Will and Grace’ (Thanks to Prairie for sending this to me!)

Back online

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We’re back!

Sorry about the downtime. In the end, I have to admit that it all boils down to one simple thing — money matters aren’t my strong point.

I was facing a bit of a money crunch last month, so made the choice to let my phone bill slide a bit in order to pay rent. So, rent got paid, but the phone bill wasn’t right away. Normally, this isn’t a problem — when your bill goes late, Qwest does a ‘soft disconnect’ where you can receive calls but not place calls, which as a side affect allows a DSL connection to stay active. It’s only after being in the ‘soft disconnect’ state for a week or so that they’ll come out and do a physical disconnect of the wires, which takes all phone service (and DSL service) down.

I actually did get back to Qwest to pay the phone bill in an effort to keep things from going down — unfortunately, I got them paid the same day that the physical disconnect order went in, and everything was cut. Then, since it was a complete physical disconnect, I had to place an entirely new phone order, and wait for Qwest to get around to coming out and reconnecting the lines, which happened at some point before 10am Seattle time today.

On the upside, though, I was able to keep the same phone number, and the DSL connection came back up along with the phone line (which Speakeasy had actually indicated would not happen), so everything is all up, running, and hunky-dory again. Woohoo!

Now I get to try to catch up with the last week’s worth of happenings that I’ve missed. Ooh, that’ll be fun!

Movie Quiz

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A movie quiz from Dave Hyatt. I didn’t want to open up his comments to make my stab at the answers, since I’d probably see other people’s answers, so I’m doing it via Trackback. I’ll start with the quiz, and put my answers in the rest of this post. You can use the comments if you want to play along, too!

  1. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
  2. “I came here to do two things: chew some bubble gum and kick some ass. And I’m all outta bubble gum!”
  3. “…also left a man’s decapitated body lying on the floor next to his own severed head. A head, which at this time, has no name.” “I know his name!”
  4. “Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”
  5. “Anyway, David, when they find out who we are they’ll let us out.” “When they find out who you are they’ll pad the cell.”
  6. “Do you think there really are people who can just go up and say, ‘Hi, babe. Name’s Charles. This is your lucky night’?” “Well, if there are, they’re not English.”
  7. “A hundred million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister.”
  8. “The first boy I ever kissed ended up in a coma for three weeks. I can still feel him inside my head. It’s the same with you.”
  9. “Just so we’re clear, you stole a car, shot a bouncer, and had sex with two women?”
  10. “Yeah, man just kinda…you know, you got these claws and you’re staring at these claws and you’re thinking to yourself, and with these claws you’re thinking, ‘How am I supposed to kill this bunny, how am I supposed to kill this bunny?'”

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Apple bloggers?

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There’s been much discussion recently regarding Microsoft bloggers, i.e., people who work at Microsoft and blog. I read a few of them (both because they’re good blogs, and because of the whole “know your enemy” philosophy [grin]).

Got me thinking, though — what about ‘Apple bloggers’? The only one I know of off the top of my head is Dave Hyatt, who works on the rendering engine for Safari. Any others out there I should know about?

Scoblemania

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Yikes. After going through my ‘Technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire, which includes RSS feeds for 34 different weblogs and news sites, every link that I called up as ‘probably worth babbling about’ was from Robert Scoble.

I think I want his job. This has nothing to do with what his job actually is (he works at NEC, but I don’t know anything other than that), it’s just that he’s easily one of the most prolific bloggers I read, to a point that I assume his job must be incredibly low-stress and low-responsibility, since it obviously doesn’t interfere with his blogging time. ;)

Anyway, in no particular order…

  • Erik Barzeski calls Scoble a ‘Microsoft Slut’. Scoble returns the jab. Me, I feel like I’m whoring myself out every time I use a Windows PC instead of my Mac. No real point to any of this, except for the amusement factor.

  • Scoble: “Is there any way to stop Microsoft? I think the answer is getting clear: no.” Kind of a scary statement, but (as befits a ‘MS Slut’ [now there’s a product name we need to see…]) he keeps mentioning all the cool stuff he saw that he can’t talk about, so I suppose it’s a definite possibility. Of course, he also admits that he’s “…too drunk with the Microsoft wine to really be objective,” and he even occasionally says some good things about Apple’s future too, so I’ll cut him a break.

  • Scoble: “It wouldn’t be the first time that Microsoft does something innovative by acquiring another company. Oh, where do you think FrontPage, Hotmail, PowerPoint, Excel, Internet Explorer, DOS, etc came from?” Where’s the innovation in acquiring another company? All of these were innovations before Microsoft got their hands on them — all Microsoft did was recognize a good thing and assimilate it (though I’d personally never put FrontPage in a “good thing” category, there are a depressingly high number of people who use it, so it must be making MS some amount of money, and this is beside-the-point rambling anyway). I’m willing to accept the argument that Microsoft has actually innovated in the past, and may do so again in the future (though I’m hard pressed to come up with any examples), but I don’t think that ‘innovation’ and ‘acquisition’ are compatible.

  • Scoble recommends Watching Microsoft Like A Hawk as a good site for MS info, news, and scuttlebutt. Looks like it is. Unfortunately, I can’t find an RSS feed, so I’ll probably forget to check up on them. Bummer.

  • “Apple has some cool stuff coming this year to be sure — including some desktop machines that are outperforming current Intel stuff.” Damn, but I wish I could see some of the stuff that he’s seen. Now I just have to wait and see if Apple will introduce what he’s hinting at before or (more likely) just after I finally am able to plunk down money on a new machine.