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 (e: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