Wonder Bread Freemason Bus!

Weird Dream
I dreamed last night that Doc joined a secret society, sort of like the Freemasons. They had come to our house in a huge bus shaped like a loaf of Wonder bread. He let them in and they made their pitch, and he decided to join because members got to wear neckties that had a little lever at the top that when you pressed it, made a really loud train whistle sound. He told me that he really didn't believe what they were telling him, but he signed the papers because he wanted the train necktie. And who wouldn't?!

Mmmmm Chocolate
In other news, I got accepted to be in a taste test focus group study on chocolate bars! Next week I'll get paid $60 to spend 90 minutes eating chocolate and giving my opinion. Can't beat that with a stick.

Work Bites
I spent 8.5 hours at work on Saturday, finishing up a project that was supposed to launch today. We found out yesterday that it has been delayed for another week because the client, at the very last minute, decided that she didn't like any of the copy we'd written. Just a global "I don't like it," no specifics given. I wasted my entire Saturday for nothing. At least I got a free lunch (or was it really free? I did trade my weekend for it!).

Dot-Matrix Printer Bike
I read a few weeks ago about a guy who custom built a bicycle equipped with a laptop computer and cans of water-soluble spray chalk. It received messages that people submitted to a website and printed them out on the sidewalks as he rode down the street. I think he was arrested before he ever got to use it (something about intent to perform criminal mischief/graffiti, and how coincidental that this was during the time of the Republican National Convention in New York City). It's genius, though.

Free broadband! Don't miss out!

Sick of paying your internet or cable company hundreds of dollars each year for broadband access? Now you don't have to! Just sign up for Google's new FREE broadband service, Google TISP (Toilet Internet Service Provider). Simply drop the supplied FiOS cable into your commode and flush. The rest happens automatically!

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

"I couldn't be more excited about, and am only slightly grossed out by, this remarkable new product," said Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience.

Try it now!

Odd spam e-mail subject line

"Must be fit, have nice face, to get fat Chinese baby."

And here I was, wondering why my fat Chinese baby never came in the mail. My face is nice enough, but I'm a tad out of shape. If only I'd known!

roll with it

This is pure genius! Hell yeah, I want to listen to music or a podcast in the bathroom! It's pretty much the one place in my house that is not set up for music: no television, no computer, no radio, no iPod docking cradle and speakers. That might appeal to some people (warm bath, good book, silence), but my Something Shiny Disorder doesn't let my brain relax for very long. I figure that I average about 45 minutes to an hour in the bathroom over the course of a day – showering, fix hair, brushing teeth, contact lenses, peeing, etc. – so why not make the most of that time? (And I'm not a typical girl; I bet the average woman spends double that in the bathroom each day. Ladies? Am I right?)

Too bad that the thing looks so... er... big and white and plasticky. I don't mind the control pad at the top, which is reminiscent of the iPod design. But if only they'd made the rest out of sleek aluminum or something equally elegant and subtle. This looks like a giant iPod, that had a baby iPod, hot-glued onto the top of something you'd get at a dollar store.

And then, there is this:



HP's new in-camera weight loss program. Because, you know, the chick in the example image above REALLY needs slimming. It's not so much the existence of the special effect mode that irritates me; it's that all the models in their advertisements are rail-thin to begin with. Apparently, thin just isn't thin enough.

electronics that i don't need anymore

This might be an unusual offer, but we have some stuff sitting around our house that we don't need anymore, that I want to sell, trade, or possibly just give away. Please e-mail me if you are interested in any of the following, all of which are in good working order:

• Two 19" computer monitors, with black cases
• An Epson Stylus 3000 printer (large-format), with tons of paper and extra ink cartridges
• An Epson Stylus Photo 1200 printer, makes beautiful prints
• A Pioneer 300-disc CD changer

i think you've got snakes on your internet

I've been having entirely too much fun this afternoon having Samuel L. Jackson make personal phone calls to my friends and co-workers, demanding that they go see Snakes on Plane. "Hi, this is Samuel L. Jackson. You may remember me from such films as Pulp Fiction, Star Wars, and The Incredibles. But I'm here today to tell you about a movie that's near and dear to my heart. That's right, I'm talking about Snakes on a Plane!"

once you go mac...

These are toooo funny! Even us "you can take my Macintosh away when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands" types can laugh at ourselves.

Networking



Gaming



Performance

Catwatch 2006!

In case you were curious as to what my cats do all day, you can find out here.

I don't always have the camera on, but you might catch a glimpse of a cat or two or three, and sometimes even me.

Blip: The Digital Game

Look what I found in my closet!

It's Blip: The Digital Game, by Tomy! 1977!

I can't believe I still have this thing. I LOOOOOOOVED to play this game. It was like an early version of Pong, where a little red LED light would mechanically move back and forth across the playing field and you had to press the right button, 1, 2, or 3, to send it back to the other side. I think, in fact, the entire thing is mechancially operated, not electronic. It does require batteries, and unfortunately one of the contacts seems to have corroded. I wonder if I can get that repaired??

You had to be really fast with the eye-hand coordination on this game; it was by no means easy.

The greatest thing about working from home...

... has got to be this.



Cats in laps rule!!

Or is the greatest thing about working from home the fact that I brought home my Mac G5 from work, hooked up its ethernet cable, changed its network setting from manual IP to DHCP, and it just worked without me having to do ANYTHING ELSE TO GET IT CONNECTED? (Yet another reason Macs rule!!) Or is it homemade tea and coffee, and being able to cook my own lunch in a real kitchen? Or is it waking up at 8:15? Or is it working in my pajamas and not having to take a shower?

Oh, who am I kidding. I hate not taking a shower. I feel yucky all day unless I shower as soon as I get up. (Showers rule!!)

My new social networking tool

Well, I've finally given in. I've joined a social network.

I've been resisting it for years, saying that I don't need it, that I already have enough friends, that I didn't want crazy strangers knowing anything about me. I tried mySpace, Friendster, Tribe, and Meetup, and somehow just wasn't satisfied.

Now I've found the perfect social networking tool that seems like it was created just for me: isolatr. Join me and be my friend today!

Google Mars

How cool is this! Google Mars.

It's almost as cool as Google Earth (a free downloadable application), but not nearly as interesting as Google Moon when zoomed in as closely as possible...

Podcasts are for extroverts!

Man, I do not know how people create podcasts.

I don't mean technically... That is easy.

I mean, how does someone talk for an hour at a time? Or even ten minutes without stopping? I just don't get it.

I guess people do it all the time -- teachers, or radio show hosts, for example. If you're talking about a specific topic that is very important to you, and that you know a lot about, I guess maybe it's not that hard to do.

But for me... I don't think I could do it. I'm just not that much of a talker.

I think that everyone (or maybe just most people) have a constant internal running monologue in their heads... Things that we think about, little rabbit holes our minds wander down, rehashing conversations, making to-do lists, thinking up great ideas, etc. And I think that the people who can podcast successfully are the people who just naturally tend to make that internal monologue external. We all know people who will just talk and talk and talk, vocalizing what seems like every random thought that pops into their heads to anyone who will listen, or often just to themselves when they think no one else is listening. A real stream of consciousness. These people, the extroverts, are successful podcasters.

Rereading that, it seems like I'm stating the utterly obvious. Oh well.

This "duh" moment was brought to you tonight by my brain after listening to Radio Free Burrito (Wil Wheaton's podcast). Yes, for those of you who think that name sounds familiar, he was Gordy in Stand By Me and Wesley Crusher on ST:TNG. He still does acting work, but he mostly writes for a living now, and keeps a blog and does podcasts. He is about my age and is married with two teenagers, seems very easygoing, and genuinely interested in interacting with the people who read his writing. He seems very much like a normal guy, someone who might live down the street from you, who does stuff with his kids and goes to the grocery store and watches TVand mows the lawn. It is very refreshing to read his work; he is an excellent writer!

A Return To Capitalization!

For no reason whatsoever, I have decided to return to normal capitalization rules in my posts. I used to, then I quit for a while and have been doing all lower case for a long time now.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the increase in frequency of my use of IM. It's easier in IM to use all lowercase, since you're typing quickly in realtime, usually with no time for spellcheck. I bet if you drew a graph and plotted my IM use with my lapse in using proper capitalization rules, you'd find a correlation.

Oddly enough, I find that when I'm using e-mail at work, I can type in upper & lower case without any problem. I wouldn't want to go all-lc at my co-workers. Except that I do use all-lc on my IM at work. I guess that's OK; it's more accepted to not bother with capital letters on IM than on e-mail. E-mail seems more "official."

"E-mail seems more 'official'"... I guess that it's all relative, isn't it? LOL

I only had to go back over this post and correct ONE capitalization error! Yay for me!

By the way, yes, I am at home on a Friday night. Hey, I'm 33, it's been a long week. Tonight I watched "The Fifth Element" on our new widescreen HDTV, and right now I'm taking a break from filling in my check registers in Quicken. Later I'm going to go make some popcorn, get a Diet Dr. Pepper, and watch another movie before bed.

Tomorrow night we are going to see "The Rocky Horror Puppet Show" at Quad-C Theatre, directed by none other than the one and only Dane Hoffman (actually he's NOT the one and only, I just googled his name and found several people that are decidedly not him.) I went to high school with Dane, and I remember him as being very sweet, and nice to me (lots of people weren't...), and kinda kooky, and he most definitely did not give any kind of a fuck what people thought of him. Case in point: he came to school one day dressed in a spandex Superman leotard and cape, with red underpants on the outside. Just for the hell of it, I think.

dumb headline of the day

probably one of the dumbest headlines i've read in a while:

internet brings telegram era to a stop

ok, right, i get the pun with the word "STOP." i get that the story's about western union's decision to cease offering telegram services. (they still offered telegram services? in 2006?)

but i'm pretty sure that it was technology that came well before the rise in popularity of the internet which caused the demise of the telegram as a form of communication. i mean, when was the last time YOU received a telegram? even as a little kid i remember thinking that telegrams sounded very old fashioned, and i grew up in the 1970s. the internet has only been a household technology since the late 1990s.

however, i think that it would have been cool to receive one, just for the novelty of it. oh well.

giving the finger to sbc dsl

part of the reason that i haven't been writing much lately has to do with the fact that we don't have any DSL service at home. my feelings towards sbc's reliability, customer service, and pattern recognition with trouble reports (or lack thereof) is a different rant entirely. let's just say that while we hate the monopoly that comcast has on the cable industry, we called them up and asked them to send us a cable modem kit.

there was an sbc repair dude ripping up the sidewalk this morning as we were leaving for work so that might mean that we have internet when we get home tonight. but i'm not counting on it.

the sad thing is, i haven't known what to do with myself in the evenings while our dsl has been out. i can only watch so much tv before my eyes glaze over. i did mostly complete that damn painting that i've been working on since, oh, october. and i got the preliminary charcoal sketch done for another one. i guess that is something.

i've realized that reading is a habit i've gotten out of, largely, and that makes me sad. when i've gotten past the beginning of a good book then it's easy for me to really get into it and tear through it until i'm done. but if i haven't read in a while, it's hard to motivate myself to sit down and begin.

bye bye, LCD

now i'm really cheesed off. my monitor just unceremoniously died a few minutes ago. just went black, no warning. i pulled a 15" LCD screen off the server and am using that for now, but that monitor was only 2-1/2 years old, and i paid something like $700 for it.

i am hoping that it is just the AC adapter, because its little green LED is not coming on when it's plugged in. maybe they can just ship me a new one of those.

fingers crossed.