February 2006

Hooray, ae gets to see Dean in Durham #

To think about: Ruby on Right speech (one of the steps on the Eight-fold Path in Buddhism) #

Life philosophizing, from the staff of the Onion:

“Most of us don’t have a background in anything at all, to be honest. We were just punching the clock, working cash registers, and all of this happened to us accidentally.”

He thought for a second. “I guess the lesson is, if your life is going nowhere, don’t try, and it’ll all work out.”

#

These are so cool: The Lego Suicides #

Another perspective on life philosophies: Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren’t that organized, disciplined, or motivated. #

On time management: don’t read the newspaper or email in the morning because it will scramble your brain with lots of disconnected ideas and you won’t be able to accomplish any serious work for the rest of the day (ibid) #

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 tonight. That was easy. #

Ha! the captain invited me below deck to show me some wood (Christy you’re going to need to go back and take a picture for me.) #

For future reference: TidyGUI, a Windows GUI Version of HTML Tidy #

Quote of the day: I think it’s great that people have soap. I’m a big supporter of soap. (Is today April 1st or something?) #

Recently seen on newstands (in Northern California!): Y’all: The Magazine of Southern People

#

Today I figured out why Movable Type breaks permalinks #

You have got to be kidding me: For NSA photo opp prop, Feds use security portal as if top-sekrit #

Quote of the day, from Joy: It was like a cold, slimy, dead frog that was also shaped like a pony. Naturally, it had to be destroyed. (go here for some pictures of me [and Stephanie] from Superbowl Sunday) #

More pictures with me in them from Sunday, including this gem:
#

Cool: Debbie had the idea that it would be useful to have a reference work suggesting which book of an unfamiliar author would be best to read first. Start reading an author with a poor or atypical example of his work, she observed, and you would likely never read that writer again—perhaps losing in the process a world of pleasure and knowledge. #

Firefox extensions worth considering: Extend Firefox Contest Finalists #

To read later: Ben Goodger on Where Did Firefox Come From? #

Unsettling quote of the day: It’s beautiful, untouched, unpopulated forest; there’s no evidence of human impact or presence up in these mountains until now. (via Joy) #

Welcome to the 21 century: new oreilly.com site design “launches” #

Book to think about reading: The House of Paper #

Woo! I made Make: MAKE: Blog: Letterpress Printing (Disclosure, I work for O’Reilly Media, Inc., which owns Make) #

Cool pics! Maverick’s Surf Contest #

I hope this is good: Nacho Libre (from the director of Napoleon Dynamite) #

I love movies that actually attempt to capture something real: Film Geek #

I like the background in this photo: Shannyn Sossamon (I just watched The Rules of Attraction. Hmm. I need to sleep. I feel like I’m in college.) #

How to make a Tilt-Shift Lens #

I feel ya girl: It’s a pretty freaky feeling, really, this being weighed down by my possessions. I have always valued my portability. I even went through a Spartan phase where I lived with no furniture. Now…I own things like a washing machine and a bread maker…But I don’t like what owning these things say in the societal sense. I don’t like their provincial solidness. #

Yes! Trust People and They’ll Surprise You (Jeremy Zawodny on Engines of Democracy) #

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to avoid trolls on Justinsomnia, but something suggests to me that the Troll cap icon would be perceived more as a badge of honor, rather than a deterrent. Setting display:none; on a div around a troll’s comment might be more effective. #

Just stumbled upon this: Screenshots from Windows 1.01 Cool! #

Seven, the new club that just opened a block away from my apartment, apparently has a pair of liquid nitrogen tanks can drop the temperature on the dance floor by about 30 degrees in seconds #

Hehe:
#

Band name of the day: Test Icicles and in second place, The Dead Kenny G’s #

New term: Doorway page, a web page that is created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. #

Dad takes a Buddhist turn, shaves head, prepares for Austin Marathon. Go Dad! #

Word of the day: chaparral #

Interesting digital photo technique: HDR (combining different exposures of the same scene to produce a single image)

Here’s the obligatory HDR flickr photo pool (via Boingboing)

Sure would be nice to have HDR processing in camera! #

OH MY GOD! Darth Cheney shoots man #

Aaron Burr, I was right! Dick Cheney made history as the second vice president to fire a gun at someone — though accidentally in this case — while in office…with only Aaron Burr as a precedent #

How great! “We’re people for whom recycling is no longer enough,” said one of the members of the fledgling movement, John Perry, who works in marketing at a high-tech company. “We’re trying to get off the first-market consumerism grid, because consumer culture is destroying the world.”

and of course they have a blog! sfcompact.blogspot.com #

For future reference: Yahoo! UI and Design Patterns Released #

So neat! Web Authoring Statistics from Google (requires SVG-enabled browser, aka Firefox 1.5) #

vday at white castle #

This is very funny: Weekly Grocery Lists for Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, Summer 1962 (I’m surprised it didn’t come from McSweeny’s) #

I’m loving this photo:

Original source of the images #

Another recommendation for burgers at Taylor’s Refresher in St. Helena (I’m so there) #

Thing I’ve never heard of: DailyCandy

…a free daily e-mail newsletter and website, is the ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered — from fashion and style to gadgets and travel. As useful as it is entertaining, it’s like getting an e-mail from your clever, unpredictable, and totally in-the-know best friend.

Hmm. How very “Web −2.0”. #

Everything needs a pretty logo, even programming languages: PLT Scheme #

Phrase of the day: so uninformed as to be nonsensical (via Ruby) #

Book Corey says I should read: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (all online!) #

Interesting: Current style in web design #

You’ve got to be kidding me: Craig Detractors Bash Blond Bond (and of course, they’ve got a website: craignotbond.com) #

How to shoot yourself in the foot: Sue Google for directing traffic to your site because they use thumbnail images of your content (Cross-listed under “This does not compute”) #

Abortion news of the day:

South Dakota lawmakers yesterday approved the nation’s most far-reaching ban on abortion

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the federal government can ban what opponents call “partial birth” abortion

Something seems terribly awry in all this abortion madness, and the worst part is there are two camps who can’t seem to communicate in order to find a workable compromise. I propose a national abortion convention where representatives from the various groups meet and attempt to define a workable strategy for women’s health and abortion procedures in this country. How else are we going to move forward? #

I want! To: Elliott from: Portland #

This quote bothers me: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (Because it seems sometimes I’m the only one maintaining consistency. Where are all the little minds?) #

I really love this style for formatting code blocks.

Turns out it’s generated by a year and a half old WordPress plugin called Code Viewer.

The only downside is that the code is not cleanly copyable because it’s structured inside an ordered list with indentation determined by CSS. I’m not sure I like the arbitrary line breaks either. pre {overflow:auto;} still works the best for me. #

YAGS: Google Page Creator #

Ben Hammersley’s doing something interesting with his blog: Leading by example (apparently using Apple’s iWeb) #

Jeremy Zawodny’s sez there’s supposed to be a Yahoo! PHP Development Center (but the link is currently dead) #

Reading this today totally cracked me up:

In 2005, [Rogers] Cadenhead achieved brief notoriety for registering the domain name benedictxvi.com several weeks before the name was chosen by Pope Benedict XVI, stating that he’d give it to the Vatican in exchange for a mitre and “complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.”

(catching up on the ongoing RSS drama) #

Blog (design) of note: Subtraction 7.0 #

The intarweb is just brilliant to me today: the center of the world — according to Google #

The Acacias are blooming yellow in California #

Great photo: Textpattern vs. WordPress #

Ingy döt Net asks, Am I the first person ever to change their name to their domain name? #

Hot shit! Boing Boing starts war with Secure Computing, SmartFliter, and censorware! #

To read later, Rasmus fires a shot across the Rails bow: The no-framework PHP MVC framework #

Updated: The Random Image Plugin for WordPress

New Feature:
Customize the HTML that is outputted between images

Bug fix:
Prevents more than one of the same image from showing up #