Posts from September 2008

I'm going to take an unpopular position: I liked Microsoft's ads. I don't even like Jerry Seinfeld, but I liked the idea of Bill Gates as a warped Dave Thomas. I liked the idea of two out-of-touch dudes trying to reconnect with America in the most awkward way possible. They weren't funny. They weren't supposed to be funny. They were weird, but I guess weird doesn't sell.



Here's an even more unpopular position: I kind of like Bill Gates. He's really chilled out since Steve Ballmer took over. He no longer sounds like some college sophomore who's just discovered Ayn Rand. Now he's just some dude you might find hanging out at a bridge tournament in grungy jeans. [True story: my brother-in-law played him at bridge, and won.]



But of course people hated the campaign so they're scrapping it for something that's clever but predictable: a bunch of people who are not John Hodgman, with not-combovers and wearing not-business suits, being not-pathetic, and holding up signs that say "I'm a PC." Lame.

- Z

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ps. Yes, I'm famous for being lazy. I think that's worse than being famous for being fat.

I made a meatloaf last night and it smelled like hot dogs. I don't know how something like that even happens. )-:

Natalie Dee is funny in a way that is difficult to explain.


'dead in the eyes and coming for you specifically'

- Z

1: WANTED: Stats geek to hang out with hot babes. Inquire within.

2: Q: When did Russians start being awesome? A: Once you click this !!!

3: The problem with me in living in the suburbs across the street from a very expensive private high school, is that I just don't have any empathy for anybody around here. A kid from the school was driving his Audi hatchback like a dickweed, and the person he cut off and/or tailgated followed him until he parked [in front of my house] and started yelling at him. Then her shirtless, shoeless husband started getting all up in the kid's grille. And as the argument got more heated, I realized I wasn't on the side of the kid or the 'adult'- I was really just hoping for mutual assured destruction, and maybe some fire. Instead, police were called and, in true Kenmore fashion, three squad cars showed up.
Moral: Don't be an asshat in front of my house, unless you have the courtesy to catch fire.

4: 'I forgot to opt out' email marketing is in some ways worse than spam. You can't mark it as spam in good conscience. I have a mailbox called Unimportant and a rule set up. The rule got so long that I had to split it in two due to a bounds error/distributed infinite loop in Gmail [good work guys]. My shit list:



5: Everybody seems to be talking about Chrome. I like that it keeps track of your most often visited sites, but I don't think that's enough to set the world on fire.

6: Cloud computing is keen but I wish it wasn't all in beta. Google App Engine is very tightly integrated and free, but how much can you do when you don't have write access to the filesystem and all your requests, responses, and database records need to be under 1MB? Amazon Web Services don't care about file or transfer size, but their database isn't totally online yet. And when Yahoo gets into the game I'm sure it will be totally awesome except that nobody will realize that it exists.

- Z

1. In the United States, the word that precedes 'historic' is 'a,' not 'an.' 'An' precedes a vowel sound, and the 'h' is not silent. If you have thought enough about it to decide to use 'an,' you will probably also think enough about it to not pronounce it like a bad Shaw character. It ain't none of mine if you want to do that on (e:strip), but if you're someone who writes for a newspaper, you and your editor should both maybe have half a clue.

2. The last time I went grocery shopping I saw the potatoes labelled as 'pommes de terre,' and I thought that was kind of funny and evocative. Then my brain took a left-hand turn at 'noms de guerre' and ended up at 'pommes de guerre,' which sounds mischievous and awesome.

3. When I was a kid we had three pear trees and more pears than we knew what to do with. If you were on our shit list, we'd ring your doorbell and run away, leaving a grocery bag of like fifty pears on your porch. The ones that fell off the tree and rotted, we would dispose of by playing pearball ['poires de guerre?']. A soft underhand lob, an aluminum baseball bat, a spray of sticky mess. I wonder why I was always the pitcher?

4. We also had an apple tree that never produced any fruit worth eating for as long as I can remember. This summer - with my mom in San Diego and me mowing her lawn - it's apple armageddon.

...ramble on-

- Z

It happens to me too. Today is the second day of football practice:



Notice the situation: has parked illegally across my driveway to avoid parking illegally next to a fire hydrant. Had furthermore left the car unattended for several minutes, which was what seriously irked me. Had enough sense to pull away when I pulled out the camera.

Earlier this morning they ticketed a station wagon for, boringly, parking in front of that self same hydrant. If I start calling these in, I wonder if the town will start paying me commission?

- Z

She sends me a photo, and some commentary.



But this is not the commentary of any Earth being:

'I don't even know how you'd process a photo to get it to look like that ... Grooviest is how the light fixture is hanging off-center.'

- Z

I had started this project a while ago @zobar #39008 but then my hard drive crashed and other things came up. I had some free time to myself this week [go figure] and so I started again.



Here's a demo that doesn't do anything except look pretty. Er, ugly. It's weird enough seeing it in Mac OS X; bringing it up in Windows is more like: that isn't supposed to be there.

<geeky>I've switched from Java to Flex 3; the screenshot is the AIR app, and the link is the Flash app. I've had to build my own xp/Luna skin for Flex, since Flex only comes with the Halo skin. The Luna skin can be separated out for another project - not that there's any reason for it - but it's only as complete as I need it.</geeky>

- Z

Holy schlamoly! Woke up at 4am to the sound of a half-dozen sirens screaming down the street. Normally I would roll over and go back to sleep, except for the strong smell of smoke all up in here. Went to the window and saw a rising cloud not too far away, and I thought I heard walkie talkies. Shit man! I'm not proud, I'm a gawker. Put on some clothes and went to see what was going on.

The smoke was like a fog blowing down Kenmore Ave, which was impressive since it turns out the fire was almost a mile away. They'd blocked off the street and though the second floor was still on fire, they seemed to have it under control by the time I got there. I was right across the street but the smoke was so thick I still couldn't see the building - I only found out just now which one it was. Some residents within eyeshot of the fire said they saw crazy high flames coming out of the thing when it started.

Anyway, if this is yours, um.

Here's the report from WIVB - they say the building may have been struck by lightning, dang.

- Z

Adobe AIR is an impressive* new technology that the BBC has used to produce a swearing Olympics monkey. Although they've since updated the application, the list of swear words has [of course] been archived online elsewhere . George Carlin eat your heart out, they've got 1,400 listed here.

- Z

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• I wrote the scoreboard/advertising/multimedia controller for the QCRGs using the AIR beta, and that's some dang heavy lifting. So far commercially it seems to mostly be used for the kind of application that Marketing thinks would be great but which ends up taking up way too much desktop real estate and provides too little functionality for the amount of advertising it spews for anybody to actually use it,** which is a real bummer.
  
• Guilty as charged. But I only did*** the Mac version and I used Objective-C, which at least excuses it from this conversation. Don't bother looking for it though, it only works in Baltimore.
  
• I will make it up to the Internet, I promise. More later, maybe.

Rice Krispie Treats!



Also: successfully nailing Jell-O to a wall.*

Conclusion: There is still good in this world.

- Z

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• Spoiler: Ramen noodles.