Toilet Seat Time
April 8, 2009
One of the worst things about spring for me is spring cleaning. One of the worst things about the apartment is the toilet seat. So, time for a new seat.
Of course, the first step was to do some internet research. I found an article at The Fun Times Guide to Household Tips, in which Lynette muses about size, style, and material, and prompts comments about color and other considerations.
Having decided that the toilet seat task and the article merited a post, I went to Flickr to find a suitable photo. I did not give serious consideration to using a photo of the incumbent seat (or of an incumbent on that seat). My thanks to Mark Blevis and his opthalmologist.
Two Examples of Political Intelligence
March 1, 2009
Gallup recently surveyed Americans on what the federal government should do about banks. A majority of Americans (54%) favor a temporary government “takeover” of major U.S. banks.
So most Americans would support bank nationalization? Not exactly: when Gallup used the n-word (nationalization) itself, support dropped to 37%.
If, in the search for political intelligence, we turn to our local Boston broadsheet, we find, in today’s Globe, new of Michelle Obama’s sleeves, or lack thereof.
Snow and Other 4-Letter Words
February 3, 2009
This is the mountain of snow formed by clearing the parking lots around the Roche Bros Supermarket (and neighboring stores) in West Roxbury. Since I took this picture 8 days ago, we’ve had another snowstorm, resulting in Boston schools being closed last Wednesday, and it’s snowing again now.
It’s also been snowing in the land of my birth (UK), so here are reports from a couple of the places I lived in when I was there. In Nottingham, the BBC set up a webcam at “Slab Square.” The camera captured a four-letter word, which wasn’t snow.
Meanwhile, London pretty much shut down due to a snowfall that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary here in Boston. I found on Reddit a pretty good account of why London couldn’t cope with a scant few inches.
Two Days in the USA
January 19, 2009
MLK Day and Inauguration Day, that is. It seems fitting that the inauguration of the first black president of the USA is the day after the celebration of MLK’s legacy.
I wondered about the algorithms for assigning specific dates to these days. I should probably have known, and maybe most citizens do, but I didn’t. An article that popped up on Yahoo News today told me that the 20th amendment moved inauguration day from April 30 to January 20. There were technological reasons for the switch to the colder time of year. A senate committee put it like this.
Under present conditions [of communication and transportation] the result of elections is known all over the country within a few hours after the polls close, and the Capital City is within a few days’ travel of the remotest portions of the country.
That was in 1937. It’s somehow cool to juxtapose that with the thought that Obama is taking a train, rather than jet plane, to DC.
On the other hand, it’s somehow strange to see how white the world is this MLK day. I refer to the snowstorm that went on rather longer than the forecasters thought it would. MLK day is “observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King’s birthday, January 15″ (from Wikipedia).
Side Projects in Music, Software, etc.
January 12, 2009
The Guardian’s music blog describes The curse of the side project. Johnny Dee cites projects such as Robert Plant working with Alison Krauss instead of Led Zep, Alex Turner being a Last Shadow Puppet when he could spend more time being an Arctic Monkey, and so on.
I disagree with the post for three reasons. First, I don’t think that most of Dee’s examples stand up: I’m not a fan of fortune-making reunions, and I don’t think that three quarters of Led Zep, almost three decades after the death of John Bonham, would do anything to change my mind; and I think that The Age Of The Understatement is pretty good.
Second are side projects not mentioned in the post, such as Tom Tom Club and The Postal Service. Third, I think that Plant, Turner, and others should make the music they want to make.
Then it struck me that side projects are important in software. Linux was a side project for a student, del.icio.us made a change from work in equity trading, and so on.
I found the Guardian blog entry via Largehearted Boy, itself a side project of a sort. I find myself firmly on the side of side projects.
There’s No Thought Like Death For the Holidays
November 26, 2008
We tend to spend time with extended family at holidays, at celebrations (weddings, big anniversaries, etc.) and at funerals. Most of us need to spend some time thinking about the last part of that. So I join blogs such as Universal Hub in posting this one slide.
That said, I wish a happy and death-free Thanksgiving to all my readers, regardless of whether they celebrate Thanksgiving. We have a six-hour drive tomorrow, but there will a feast at the end of it.
Dragon Day 16 at last100: List 5 Products
May 16, 2008
Do you want to win a HP HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook? There is, or has been, a chance to do so every day this month, thanks to HP, its 31 Days of the Dragon promotion, and the participating web sites. Each day, a different site hosts a contest.
Today it’s the turn of last100. To enter, leave a comment there (not here, I have no prizes to give out) “listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services.”
I found it difficult to pick just five. Then I reflected that there are satisfactory substitutes for many of the products and services I use. For example, I use Google search and Reader a lot, but wouldn’t be too upset if I had to switch to competing products.
In contrast, here are five products to which I’m attached in one way or another.
- WordPress: this blog lives at WordPress.com.
- Rhapsody streaming music.
- Flickr: here’s my photostream (or at least the public part of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog or its feed, and like looking at photos of kids, please drop me an email).
- Canon PowerShot A540 6MP Digital Camera.
- Sandisk Sansa Clip 1GB MP3 player.
Each of the first three is a software product for which I pay, even in this age of free stuff. For example, I have a Pro account at Flickr. That is of course where the photo lives. It shows the Sansa clip, along with its friends, the ridiculously good value Koss KSC75 headphones.
A Whole New Manga on Careers
April 23, 2008
The chopstick-wielding manga character is Johnny Bunko. He’s about to get some career advice.
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is: a book on careers; a blog; the work of Dan Pink (writer) and Rob Ten Pas (artist). I’ve read, and highly recommend, one of Dan’s previous books: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.
The blog/site for the book has a WTF? page rather than an FAQ page. One of the question and answer pairs is “Why write a career guide in manga?” and:
… What they want in a book, or so people tell me, are what they can’t get from Google. They want strategic lessons – and they want it presented in an accessible, to-the-point way… You can read this book in an hour.
Now for some fancy multimedia stuff. There is a widget, but the WordPress.com version doesn’t seem to work. It turned up in the original version of this post as a link to the widget page at ClearSpring and a link to the book site. But I can embed the video trailer.
Natalie Kocsis
April 20, 2008
Yet another artist to whom my attention has been Drawn! is Natalie Kocsis. Most of the work in her portfolio is less cute and more grotesque than Lucy here, as the example at Drawn! shows.
A nerdy aside: one of the ways in which the WordPress.com interface changed recently was in the way we can include images in posts. This thumbnail is generated by WordPress. It’s rather smaller than I like images in posts to be, but the medium size image generated is rather larger (400 rather than 128 rather than the just-right 240 of the small image size at Flickr).
