My family does two Christmas gift exchanges every year: one within our immediate family where everyone gives something to everyone, and one secret santa thing with my aunt's family. There is a bit of a twist to the secret santa exchange in that we also do a creative gift-wrap competition.

OK, you think, sounds (fun|lame), whatever. But you need to understand that my family is both extremely creative and extremely competitive. Entries include a 2' diameter replica of an Oreo [with the correct number of serrations], a large toucan in a cage on a stand, a foam-core laptop computer with functional cd-eject mechanism, and a replica of a meat counter at the Broadway Market -- and none of these were winners. Eventually we felt it wasn't challenging enough, so we began restricting entries to a theme - in 2004 it was "Broadway" [most entries were related to various Broadway shows, but there was also a replica of an N-R subway car as well as aforementioned meat market], and last year it was "The Pantry" [somewhat disastrous, as many people leaned on the pan-tree pun]. Dammit, (e:dragonlady7) - I thought you had photos of this stuff online.

This is the competition's ninth consecutive year running, and it was decided once again to make it more difficult. Since our festivities are being held in San Diego this year and TSA does not take kindly to unusually-disguised secrets, we will be bringing our gifts unwrapped [or having them shipped] and assembling our wrapping, Iron Chef style, in two hours on Dec 28, with only certain provided elements. The theme is "Fun & Games," but the competition will be nothing short of Intense.

And, lest you think I'm joking around, I just got finished putting the finishing touches on this year's revision of the SQL-backed gift registry web application that we use. Yes, it is strictly necessary. [We had done it by hand before, but we had to wait until everyone's list was in before we could send them out, and we ended up having to make two separate gift lists, one for each exchange.]

- Z

Hope everyone had an excellent Thanksgiving. I was going to upload Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," but even if I could get it to fit in 5MB it would sound like an AM station through a shower radio. On fire.

On Monday, my coworker said hey, does anyone have a fish tank? I said yeah, and she said do you want a couple fish? Just a goldfish and a catfish, not too big. They need to get off the dining room table before Thanksgiving. Sure, why not? We dubbed them the Pescado Non Grata.

I got them home yesterday, and the goldfish is as pretty as a koi but has the manners and more importantly, the size and appetite of a carp. Truly, honestly ... I have eaten fish smaller than this goldfish.

The plecostamus catfish, however, is awesome. He's kind of cute, and totally antisocial. He can swim pretty good, but mostly he just schlorps around the tank with his lips. I'll get a picture of him up soon, but here's one I found on the Internet of a similar pleco totally chowing on a vacation food brick. I guess they really like zucchini as well.



- Z

I think this should be our new marketing campaign:



Very succinct, and it sure beats all these pretentious 'The Art Of Thinking' and 'Welcome to the 21st Century' bumper stickers we've got slapped on every available surface around here.

- Z

...but I wanted to see what it would look like if I put our entire bar/business/gallery/restaurant directory on one map. Answer: really crowded. [requires Google Earth]

If anybody can think of any real use for it, I'll fix it up real nice and officially put it on the site; otherwise, I'll just leave it around as a curiosity.

Also, you can get notified of our events by RSS now; there are feeds for each calendar, category, and venue in the database. I think this would be an excellent application for the wireless web, but sad to say, I've got other stuff that needs to get done first.

- Z

Dammit! I had my meth lab all set up in my basement and ready to go - until I got to the drug store and found out I had to ask the pharmacist for a 24-pack of Sudafed. Damn, damn, damn! Curse my bashfulness! Now that I can't corrupt the youth of America I guess I'll have no choice but to spend my spare time helping old ladies cross the street.

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling legislators.

- Z

I have to get this off my desktop, but I don't want to lose it. One of the video guys sent this to me a while ago. He was putting together a commercial for a client and had the video cued up wrong at the end.

::DOWNLOAD MEDIA::

He gets results.

- Z

- Z

I got some productive fucking-around done at work today.

I've been playing around with Django a lot. It's a very young framework, but as long as the developers retain tight control over the architecture, I think it's got staying power. Not very long ago I started reading up on J2EE and Jakarta Struts, and it seemed to me to be such a brilliant idea, but like anything Java, it was just way, way more complicated than it needed to be. As I read more about it I kept saying, yeah, if this were done in Python instead we could just cut that out, ... and that ... and wow, you'd actually be able to use it. Django is gunning for everything in J2EE and Struts that is useful, without all that other bullshit that's only there to circumvent Java's fascist static typing. I get the impression that Django is a lot like Ruby on Rails - except that I know Python.

Today I started poking around at the Yahoo Flash Maps API. I like it. I know this is going to offend certain people, but let's face it- AJAX+DHTML is an egregious hack based on a misbegotten API [XMLHttpRequest I'm looking at you]. I think using Flash instead is a much more elegant solution to map service in particular, and Flash's HTTP library, while a little weird, at least suggests to me that someone thought it over before they released it. Also, Yahoo offers the Boring-old-image API to their maps, which I intend to use on our fledgling mobile website. Feature request: you should be able to dump a pile of markers onto the map and ask the map to make sure they all fit. Yahoo's agreement says Non-Commercial Use Only, but as long as (e:ajay) doesn't blow me in, I think we're cool.

- Z

Ever since (e:dragonlady7) joined the Rollergirls she's been going to practice early every Sunday morning ... giving me a chance to sleep in, take my time waking up, and cook up something nice for when she comes home, bruised and exhausted. I'm no chef, but cooking is one of my favorite hobbies, and it provides a nice, relaxing way to start my Sabbath. Today I made a small frittata with bacon, green peppers, green onions, and Swiss cheese; the store-brand coffee was enhanced with a dash each of amaretto and locally-produced [Grimsby, ON] Oh Canada maple liqueur . Yum.

Public Service Announcement:
It's almost that time again where we tell our elected representatives what we think of them, and there are a number of very important federal and state offices up for election this year. The League of Women Voters has put together an excellent guide that should be required reading as far as I am concerned. Please read it so that you know what the Hell is going on before you get in the booth next Tuesday.

Positions up for election:
US Senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) incumbent
NY Governor, George Pataki (R) retiring
(NY Lt Governor, Mary Donohue (R) retiring)
NY Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer (D) retiring
NY Comptroller, Alan Hevesi (D) incumbent

All three House of Representatives seats are up for election this year as well.

26th District (Amherst and points east), Thomas Reynolds (R) incumbent
27th District (West Side, Lackawanna, and points south), Brian Higgins (D) incumbent
28th District (East Side, Tonawanda, and points north), Louise Slaughter (D) incumbent

-- My Opinion --
I think everyone is entitled to their opinion, regardless of how wrong it may be, and we pay our politicians to represent our opinions. If I disagree with a politician because I disagree with his constituency, well ... for better or worse, at least he's doing his job. Lately, though, it seems that our representatives are more interested in promoting the soap opera of politics [and at a very bad time, mind you] than in, you know, running the country. If the country's in the shitter and you want to know who's responsible, I'll give you a hint - it's not the Republicans or the Democrats at fault - it's the incumbents.

This year, I think a simple vote of no confidence would suffice.

- Z

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New journal music: Rasputina, 'The Mayor,' from 'Frustration Plantation.' gather:0607319001162147286

because my laptop is in the shop. See, the thermostat is mounted to the heat sink and wired to the power management unit. When the heat sink expands, the thermostat shifts just so and disconnects from the PMU. The PMU assumes catastrophic failure and cuts the power. It's an academically-amusing butterfly effect kind of deal, but I'm not really amused anymore and I kind of want my computer back.

I've also found myself near the center of a number of poorly-conceived Vision of the Future meetings. Normally I dig Vision of the Future meetings, since it's a chance for Management to give us underlings direction and motivation. The focus of the meetings is We Need a Better Website, which I don't disagree with. Our online readership is, frankly, abysmal. From where I sit, the largest obstacle we're facing is that the website we have is just about as much [if not slightly more] than our current staff and organization can handle. If we want more, we need more staff and better organization.

I think we have two options. The first is that we can continue doing what we're doing. The website exists mostly as a byproduct of our daily operations, and as such, it really only needs a one-person web department and a small amount of cooperation from other departments. It is cheap and functional, and we're not going to go out of business if we keep it the way it is. If this is what we decide, I would only wish that we'd stop pretending small usability improvements and devastatingly grandiose gimmicks would magically net us a million hits a month.

The only other option I see is to 'go daily' online. We have 19 articles this week, and no new content until next Thursday. A certain competitor has 16 new articles today and more on the way tomorrow. And before you say I'm crazy to insist on nothing short of total organizational overhaul - Editorial is behind me on this one 100%.

So we seem to be having a meeting every week now. For fifteen minutes every Thursday afternoon, we have a premeeting meeting wherein we get our stories straight about what we're doing to follow up on miscellaneous ineffictive ideas. Then we sit at a table for an hour while the Boss shows us some keen websites he found, with the implication that we should be more like them [here is a true, honest-to-God example; I wish I were making this up]. Then there's a tense fifteen minutes where we try to regroup in a secure location [which is difficult to do in a blind rage] and spend fifteen minutes calming down by deciding what we're actually going to do before the next meeting.

It's fucking ridiculous, really, that we have to secretly plot how to be productive and organizationally successful.

- Z