We have not had a president with facial hair in 100 years. The last president with a moustache was William Howard Taft [1909]. The last president with a beard was Benjamin Harrison [1889]. The last president with sideburns [muttonchops] was Chester A Arthur [1881].

- Z

I've got an original MacBook [2GHz Core Duo, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD (20GB free)]. If I upgrade the RAM to 2GB and the drive to 120GB, would that be sufficient to run Fusion + Vista?

Also, Latvian music is crap [see below].

- Z

Every once in a while some weird fucker will ask me about Latvian culture. And I sort of look at my shoes and mumble something about vodka because the truth is so much more depressing

- Z

The graduated butter dish. Think about it:

You go to make yourself some toast in the morning, but the butter dish is empty. You take a stick of butter out of the box. Perhaps you notice the clever lines on the wrapper that tell you how much stick is in a tablespoon before you take it off and throw it away.

Lunchtime rolls around and you're making mac & cheese. You look at the box: '2 tablespoons butter.' You look at the full stick of butter in the dish, and think back to the wrapper which is now in the garbage and covered with coffee grounds. You dismiss thoughts of using a tablespoon measure. You're about to wing it until you start thinking about it Too Much: would that be cube-shaped or slightly smaller? You have another wrapped stick of butter, but you know if you cut it open it'll taste like fridge before you use it again.

The Zobarware Graduated Butter Dish: It has lines on it.

- Z

I've written off the possibility of doing anything useful this afternoon. I've been 100% on this one project that was due Thursday and so, since everyone was strictly ordered to get out my grille this week, I have no other work lined up. The server was down all Wednesday, so the sysadmin moved the site over to another host, which in turn went down all Thursday morning. This is the project which had to be done using a PHP/Linux solution rather than the standard homebrew .net thing they usually use, due to the specifications of the client's sysadmin. They chose Drupal, which strikes terror into the hearts of men much braver than I, and the whole project turned into six weeks of trying to get it to not suck so hard. This is the same sysadmin who, at 3pm today, told us he was quitting effective next Friday.

When the going gets tough, the tough get naked. But since I'm a digital person I'll just link you to this video of the Austrian rugby team instead. They had much larger problems than I, having just found themselves on the spiky end of a 48-point shutout by Lithuania. So here they are in Vilnius city center:

[flv]0508/AustrianRugby0516.flv[/flv]

(e:chico,44363) contends that the TiTS lineup sucks this year, so I guess I won't feel bad about not wanting to stuff myself into Lafayette Sq with a hojillion other people. Indigenous, the opener on 4 Sept, is an exceptional blues band, so give them a listen [46.9MB, AAC]. We once roadtripped to Erie PA to see them play at some crappy dive bar, and it was well worth the drive.

Here's another math design I did a little while ago in Photoshop, just a real classy muted houndstooth. It blew my mind when I discovered that houndstooth wasn't a doodle, but rather a plaid made up of diagonal stripes that coincidentally made a doodle at the intersections [which is also why it's slightly asymmetric]. Stare into the plaid...



This is my current desktop pattern. Not because I especially like the pattern, but because I hate desktop patterns and this one's easier to ignore than it is to pay attention to. I first tried the traditional black & white houndstooth for about four seconds before my eyeballs popped out of my head.

- Z