Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Fun with Google
Went to the Reuters News site and came across the headline "Bush Denies Iraq Headed for Civil War". That's funny, I thought, Bush seems to have to deny a lot of stuff lately. So I googled the phrase President Bush Denies and got over 9 million listings.
Design so bad it's funny
Long boring yet hectic day at work. I've been trolling around looking at sites all day trying to get good links for more Squidoo lenses. Sometimes I feel like I want to find the simplest thing on the web and discover that for all the billions of sites out there, nothing fits the bill. At one point I clicked onto three sites in a row that were spider traps. I would try to use the back button to surf away from the site and the page would simply keep loading. Really evil!
I found webpagesthatsuck.com on J. Jeffryes' lens on web design. Thank you J!
I found webpagesthatsuck.com on J. Jeffryes' lens on web design. Thank you J!
Monday, February 27, 2006
23 Squidoo!
After having gone through a state of being del.erio.us for the past couple of weeks, I found a link to squidoo.com on Pye in the Face and now I'm hooked. This is a natural progression that was just waiting to happen. Del.icio.us is pretty addictive. I have to confess that I've spent way more time than I've meant to collecting links about everything from baby care to RSS. I've become a virtual pack-rat.
Apparently so haven't some other geeks out there, so thank you to the fine folks at Squidoo for coming up with the perfect outlet for all that tagging and posting out there. Sign up for free and you become Lensmaster of what ever domain you wish. List your favorite links relating to a particular subject and include a brief description of what you are linking to. So far I've only done one lens which can be viewed here.
More lenses coming soon!
Apparently so haven't some other geeks out there, so thank you to the fine folks at Squidoo for coming up with the perfect outlet for all that tagging and posting out there. Sign up for free and you become Lensmaster of what ever domain you wish. List your favorite links relating to a particular subject and include a brief description of what you are linking to. So far I've only done one lens which can be viewed here.
More lenses coming soon!
Cool Slideshow on BBC site about Jain Festival
Since I'm currently reading the book, "Color, A Natural History of the Palette" by Victoria Finlay, I thought this was a pretty cool demonstration of what she talks about in the book. For a book that's an exploration of the chemical discoveries in history related to pigments like indigo, cochineal, and indian yellow, this is a real page turner.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
It's a small world after all...
Doing the usual lunchtime browsing and I found this site on kottke.org.
I get a ton of charitable solicitations in the mail every week so I bookmarked it in my del.icio.us account for future reference. I love it when I find a site that is something I was always thinking would be a good idea. charitynavigator.org rates charities on an impartial basis so one can see how they do with distributing your hard earned cash.
Then, lo and behold, I'm scrolling down the page and I see that the site's search engine optimization is done by Spidersplat, an internet consulting firm located in the building I work in and staffed by Dave Pye of Pye in the Face fame!
Between all the tagging and posting and blogging people do, it feels like that Six Degrees of Separation thing, just with a few degrees less.
I get a ton of charitable solicitations in the mail every week so I bookmarked it in my del.icio.us account for future reference. I love it when I find a site that is something I was always thinking would be a good idea. charitynavigator.org rates charities on an impartial basis so one can see how they do with distributing your hard earned cash.
Then, lo and behold, I'm scrolling down the page and I see that the site's search engine optimization is done by Spidersplat, an internet consulting firm located in the building I work in and staffed by Dave Pye of Pye in the Face fame!
Between all the tagging and posting and blogging people do, it feels like that Six Degrees of Separation thing, just with a few degrees less.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Did IQ's just drop sharply while I was away?
To see why this question popped into my mind, click here.
I'd love to say more, but it's a busy day and the article speaks for itself.
I'd love to say more, but it's a busy day and the article speaks for itself.
Friday, February 03, 2006
5 Reasons why I do not own an I-Pod (yet).
I'm not a Luddite, but I play one in real life.
As I've stated before, I use a cell phone for things like calling my husband after someone sideswiped my car and as an alarm clock. I suppose if I was ten years younger I would use it for things like taking photos of me and my friends as we careened drunkenly around the subway and/or at concerts, or I would download episodes of "Friends" to watch as I wandered down a crowded sidewalk like a confused cow in Mumbai.
Apparently having just a cell phone is not enough these days. Now I NEED an I-Pod to join the rest of humanity. I see those white cords hanging from everyone's ears like mental floss EVERYWHERE. I have gone around town with a cd player and headphones once in a while and it's a nice vacation from having to listen to other people's conversations. But now we've reached the stage where, if one is out in public, everyone else is: A) Tuning out on their I-Pod. or B) Talking in a language that I can't understand anyway.
After a few short years, the I-Pod accessories market has reached one billion dollars and websites are springing up like mushrooms to feed on the mania for downloading and filing one's entire human existence.
Here are the 5 reasons why I haven't donned the white earplugs yet:
1) The price. Apple sells refurbished I-Pods on it's website at the "low low price" of $199. Since I will be spawning in a couple of months (see: Spawn of Jenns Web), shelling out anything over 5 bucks on myself seems kind of self-indulgent right now.
2) The time. Closely related to reason one. I will have a baby in a couple of months; screaming, eating, spitting and otherwise eliminating every few seconds. Downloading The Perceptionists' entire back catalogue will probably be low on my list of priorities for a while.
3) I want to save my hearing. Not that I would plan to listen to Swedish Death Metal at ear-drum piercing volume 12 hours a day, but I'm sure the baby will do enough damage to my ears as it is.
4) I need to be able to hear what's going on around me. I just mastered walking and chewing gum for chrissakes. I know myself well enough to know that I would be the type to be bobbing my head to something and forget that I'm in the middle of an intersection.
5) If I don't have the initiative to spend two hundred bucks on the inital hardware, then I am not going to want to shell out for all the little trinkets that come with it. Then again, I can see myself knitting a little I-Pod pouch, given the right circumstances.
As I've stated before, I use a cell phone for things like calling my husband after someone sideswiped my car and as an alarm clock. I suppose if I was ten years younger I would use it for things like taking photos of me and my friends as we careened drunkenly around the subway and/or at concerts, or I would download episodes of "Friends" to watch as I wandered down a crowded sidewalk like a confused cow in Mumbai.
Apparently having just a cell phone is not enough these days. Now I NEED an I-Pod to join the rest of humanity. I see those white cords hanging from everyone's ears like mental floss EVERYWHERE. I have gone around town with a cd player and headphones once in a while and it's a nice vacation from having to listen to other people's conversations. But now we've reached the stage where, if one is out in public, everyone else is: A) Tuning out on their I-Pod. or B) Talking in a language that I can't understand anyway.
After a few short years, the I-Pod accessories market has reached one billion dollars and websites are springing up like mushrooms to feed on the mania for downloading and filing one's entire human existence.
Here are the 5 reasons why I haven't donned the white earplugs yet:
1) The price. Apple sells refurbished I-Pods on it's website at the "low low price" of $199. Since I will be spawning in a couple of months (see: Spawn of Jenns Web), shelling out anything over 5 bucks on myself seems kind of self-indulgent right now.
2) The time. Closely related to reason one. I will have a baby in a couple of months; screaming, eating, spitting and otherwise eliminating every few seconds. Downloading The Perceptionists' entire back catalogue will probably be low on my list of priorities for a while.
3) I want to save my hearing. Not that I would plan to listen to Swedish Death Metal at ear-drum piercing volume 12 hours a day, but I'm sure the baby will do enough damage to my ears as it is.
4) I need to be able to hear what's going on around me. I just mastered walking and chewing gum for chrissakes. I know myself well enough to know that I would be the type to be bobbing my head to something and forget that I'm in the middle of an intersection.
5) If I don't have the initiative to spend two hundred bucks on the inital hardware, then I am not going to want to shell out for all the little trinkets that come with it. Then again, I can see myself knitting a little I-Pod pouch, given the right circumstances.
In A Nutshell
"The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's passenger count hit its lowest level in a decade during the first half of last year, with average weekday boardings of 1.12 million, down 8 percent from a high point in 2000. While T officials blamed the cancellation of the National Hockey League season and station repairs, riders blamed shoddy, undependable service and an aging fleet of vehicles."
Sometimes you just have to love the dry cool wit of boston.com.
Sometimes you just have to love the dry cool wit of boston.com.
Friday, January 27, 2006
More Nostalgia
AKA the web wayback machine. List the url of any website in the search field and an archive of that site's various incarnations pops up.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Nostalgia
The first computer I remember was IRAC on "WonderWoman". Every episode would show Diana Prince/Wonder Woman interacting with IRAC the super-computer at IADC. Diana would say something, the tape disks would start spinning, bulbs would light up in yellow and red and eventually an answer would come out.
IRAC seemed like a miracle from the future until an article in "The Weekly Reader" in 3rd grade described a "super computer" that took up an entire room and ran on magnetic disks. There were people the article called "computer technicians" who stood by the machinery in white lab coats reading printouts.
The first time I saw a computer in person I was at my friend Ellen's house after school and she showed me how to play Pong on a computer her older brother had built himself. He spent hours alone in his room writing programs. I started associating computers with fake wood paneled rooms that smelled like marijuana and old tube socks.
Our grade school got computers in the 5th grade (1980). We sat in front of enormous beige plastic monitors that threw off about 100 degrees typing commands like "if then/GO TO in blocky orange letters.
I wonder how far we are from a retro-phile backlash against all the brushed aluminum and paper-thin plasma screens. Maybe Apple should come out with a line of 70's style desktop models with the faux wood panel inserts and chunky beige buttons with a gigantic ENTER key.
IRAC seemed like a miracle from the future until an article in "The Weekly Reader" in 3rd grade described a "super computer" that took up an entire room and ran on magnetic disks. There were people the article called "computer technicians" who stood by the machinery in white lab coats reading printouts.
The first time I saw a computer in person I was at my friend Ellen's house after school and she showed me how to play Pong on a computer her older brother had built himself. He spent hours alone in his room writing programs. I started associating computers with fake wood paneled rooms that smelled like marijuana and old tube socks.
Our grade school got computers in the 5th grade (1980). We sat in front of enormous beige plastic monitors that threw off about 100 degrees typing commands like "if then/GO TO in blocky orange letters.
I wonder how far we are from a retro-phile backlash against all the brushed aluminum and paper-thin plasma screens. Maybe Apple should come out with a line of 70's style desktop models with the faux wood panel inserts and chunky beige buttons with a gigantic ENTER key.
Searching for Mummeleh
After re-reading "Adventures in Knitting", I wanted to add a link to a definition of the term Mummeleh. I typed it into Google and got 2 links. And, Google politely asked me if I was looking for Mammals. So I did a search for Yiddish Dictionary and came up with this.
I stand corrected. Apparently it's spelled "Mommellah" and it means "an affectionate term for a little girl." I guess I meant "Bubbellah" which means grandmom.
I stand corrected. Apparently it's spelled "Mommellah" and it means "an affectionate term for a little girl." I guess I meant "Bubbellah" which means grandmom.
Go Rent this Movie
I stumbled across "The Yes Men" last night on cable and it beats the pants off of most of Michael Moore's work. Watching Mr. Unruh unfurl his giant inflatable video appendage before a stony faced collection of WTO executives who were actually taking him somewhat seriously was the funniest thing I've seen so far this year.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Adventures in Knitting
I'll be the first to admit it. I spend way too much time watching TV. It's a bad habit I picked up when I worked in the film industry and realized that I could write off the cost of Direct TV on my taxes because it counted as "research and development".
I kind of miss being able to deduct reruns of "Married with Children". I learned so much about lighting from watching the way Al Bundy's bald spot was carefully back-lit from every angle. It brought so much confidence to my work realizing that if you could shoot the back of someone's shoulder from an interesting enough angle, any actor could play the menacing killer in a televised re-creation of a crime.
Now I need something else to justify countless hours spent staring at HBO re-runs, so I thought I would try and take up knitting. After all, there's only about 50 books on knitting and crocheting on the New Non-Fiction rack when I go to the town library, so at least if I needed to learn from a book it would be easy. I'm not even going to address the whole "Celebrities who knit" phenomenon. Suffice to say that the last time I cared what Kristen Dunst does while she's waiting on set was on "Mona Lisa Smile" when I had to wrangle cable around her. Besides, I think every woman needs to have at least one "girly" hobby to balance out all the extreme sports and other crap we tend to get suckered into. So I googled "learning to knit", printed out some pictures of the steps, and went to the craft store.
The site that I went to said that the basics to get started would be #8 knitting needles 14" in length, a small pair of scissors, worsted yarn medium weight and a yarn needle. I got to AC Moore on a really warm Saturday afternoon and found the knitting aisles jam packed with sweet little old ladies trying to locate just the right kittens and/or puppies-themed sweater pattern for their next great-grandchild. The knitting needles were clumped by brand in little islands through-out the knitting section so it took me about 15 minutes to find the pre-requisite #8, 14" needles. They looked like something Zhang Ziyi would use to fight off a horde of Mongolian bandits. Yarn needles were not in the sewing aisle. Eventually they were located in the knitting tools rack, deep in the heart of Yarn Country, being guarded by a bored 7-year-old who had apparently not been given her daily dose of Ritalin. I reached over her one woman performance of "Unicorn Princess Pony Saves the Day" and grabbed whatever said Yarn Needle in the biggest type. Now all I needed was to find some basic yarn.
This was like telling a woman to go into DSW and walk out with a pair of basic black pumps. There were 3 aisles of yarn, as well as, two floor to ceiling wall units stuffed with yarn along the wall. The only problem was that what looked like Medium yarn came in either black or day-glo reds and pinks. I wanted to knit something simple like a baby blanket and I couldn't picture swaddling the baby-to-be in black and nuclear red and day-glo pink. Finally I found a rainbow tie-dye yarn that said MEDIUM, WORSTED and one in a non-blinding rose. $22.10 and I was on my way home to learn how to knit.
I realized after a few minutes that who-ever had written the instructions I had printed out, had obviously never seen one of those "how to tie a knot" diagrams. There were drawings of a section of yarn in what looked like some kind of Book of Kells configuration, but no indication of which end came from where. Slip knot was easy enough to understand, but terms like "Purl" and "Casting on" were making me wish that there was some kind of "Rent-a-granny" service that one could call when faced with things like knitting and baking bread. During an episode of The Sopranos I managed to wrestle about 12 inches of yarn in some kind of configuration around my left knitting needle. I sat there looking at it thinking; "What now?"
I was under the mistaken impression that knitting was a process that had been set in stone for millenia and that there was one, inexorable way it was done. As I looked at my left needle and then back at the picture labelled "Basic Knit Stitch" I realized what the difference was. The needle in the picture had several neat rows of stitches dangling off it. My needle had one sorry-looking tangle of pink yarn secured by a shaky slip-knot. How did the extra rows come into being? Apparently, after I checked a couple of other websites, there were as many methods to "basic knitting" as there were kinds of yarn. One site would tell me to cast on one way, one site would have a slight variation, one site would be completely different. I tried a couple of different methods to transfer the cast-on stitches to the right needle to get a row going, but then remembered that our office Mummeleh is one of those people who sits on the commuter rail and makes afghans, I packed a knitting bag and hauled everything into the office to ask her. Turns out she only does Crochet, but at least she pointed me to a decent website.
Maybe this one will work. I need to do something constructive with my time while I'm watching 24 tonight.
I kind of miss being able to deduct reruns of "Married with Children". I learned so much about lighting from watching the way Al Bundy's bald spot was carefully back-lit from every angle. It brought so much confidence to my work realizing that if you could shoot the back of someone's shoulder from an interesting enough angle, any actor could play the menacing killer in a televised re-creation of a crime.
Now I need something else to justify countless hours spent staring at HBO re-runs, so I thought I would try and take up knitting. After all, there's only about 50 books on knitting and crocheting on the New Non-Fiction rack when I go to the town library, so at least if I needed to learn from a book it would be easy. I'm not even going to address the whole "Celebrities who knit" phenomenon. Suffice to say that the last time I cared what Kristen Dunst does while she's waiting on set was on "Mona Lisa Smile" when I had to wrangle cable around her. Besides, I think every woman needs to have at least one "girly" hobby to balance out all the extreme sports and other crap we tend to get suckered into. So I googled "learning to knit", printed out some pictures of the steps, and went to the craft store.
The site that I went to said that the basics to get started would be #8 knitting needles 14" in length, a small pair of scissors, worsted yarn medium weight and a yarn needle. I got to AC Moore on a really warm Saturday afternoon and found the knitting aisles jam packed with sweet little old ladies trying to locate just the right kittens and/or puppies-themed sweater pattern for their next great-grandchild. The knitting needles were clumped by brand in little islands through-out the knitting section so it took me about 15 minutes to find the pre-requisite #8, 14" needles. They looked like something Zhang Ziyi would use to fight off a horde of Mongolian bandits. Yarn needles were not in the sewing aisle. Eventually they were located in the knitting tools rack, deep in the heart of Yarn Country, being guarded by a bored 7-year-old who had apparently not been given her daily dose of Ritalin. I reached over her one woman performance of "Unicorn Princess Pony Saves the Day" and grabbed whatever said Yarn Needle in the biggest type. Now all I needed was to find some basic yarn.
This was like telling a woman to go into DSW and walk out with a pair of basic black pumps. There were 3 aisles of yarn, as well as, two floor to ceiling wall units stuffed with yarn along the wall. The only problem was that what looked like Medium yarn came in either black or day-glo reds and pinks. I wanted to knit something simple like a baby blanket and I couldn't picture swaddling the baby-to-be in black and nuclear red and day-glo pink. Finally I found a rainbow tie-dye yarn that said MEDIUM, WORSTED and one in a non-blinding rose. $22.10 and I was on my way home to learn how to knit.
I realized after a few minutes that who-ever had written the instructions I had printed out, had obviously never seen one of those "how to tie a knot" diagrams. There were drawings of a section of yarn in what looked like some kind of Book of Kells configuration, but no indication of which end came from where. Slip knot was easy enough to understand, but terms like "Purl" and "Casting on" were making me wish that there was some kind of "Rent-a-granny" service that one could call when faced with things like knitting and baking bread. During an episode of The Sopranos I managed to wrestle about 12 inches of yarn in some kind of configuration around my left knitting needle. I sat there looking at it thinking; "What now?"
I was under the mistaken impression that knitting was a process that had been set in stone for millenia and that there was one, inexorable way it was done. As I looked at my left needle and then back at the picture labelled "Basic Knit Stitch" I realized what the difference was. The needle in the picture had several neat rows of stitches dangling off it. My needle had one sorry-looking tangle of pink yarn secured by a shaky slip-knot. How did the extra rows come into being? Apparently, after I checked a couple of other websites, there were as many methods to "basic knitting" as there were kinds of yarn. One site would tell me to cast on one way, one site would have a slight variation, one site would be completely different. I tried a couple of different methods to transfer the cast-on stitches to the right needle to get a row going, but then remembered that our office Mummeleh is one of those people who sits on the commuter rail and makes afghans, I packed a knitting bag and hauled everything into the office to ask her. Turns out she only does Crochet, but at least she pointed me to a decent website.
Maybe this one will work. I need to do something constructive with my time while I'm watching 24 tonight.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Thursday, January 12, 2006
What the-? LOTD (link of the day)
I found this around 1pm on the del.icio.us site.
Secret Asian Man is going to love this one.
Oh, and by the way, it's spelled "musical" people, not "musicail"
Just what the world needs, an downloadable music application to organize all your other downloadable music applications. This kind of reminds me trying to alphabetize all of your phonebooks. At what point do people stop trying to download and upload and streamline everything and just listen to the damn music?
Secret Asian Man is going to love this one.
Oh, and by the way, it's spelled "musical" people, not "musicail"
Just what the world needs, an downloadable music application to organize all your other downloadable music applications. This kind of reminds me trying to alphabetize all of your phonebooks. At what point do people stop trying to download and upload and streamline everything and just listen to the damn music?
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