links for 2006-09-29
Friday, September 29th, 2006-
I love potstickers, and now I must find the perfect dumpling
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Roth’s experience working for Topps
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Monster gets caught in sock-puppetry on Joel Cheesman’s blog (which I read daily, btw)
Archive for September, 2006
burgers and trivia… what’s not to love?
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006As we settled in for Monday Pub Quiz last night, Tom, Kimberley, and I were discussing how much we look forward to it each week. We enjoy having this standing date with our friends to catch up with one another, enjoy a meal together, and just generally relax.
It’s sort of like Sunday dinner with the family, only it’s Monday dinner with the urban tribe. 
Oh yeah, and we won, too.
Best. CaseMod. Evar.
Monday, September 25th, 2006
This is probably the best idea I’ve seen about what to do with that Apple logo on your laptop.
stouthearted is the forest ranger, he’s a scout
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006So I’m poking around on the Internet, having heard that the new mayor of Pittsburgh is 26 and being a little curious about that kind of occurrence. (Mayor Bob O’Connor died on September 1, and Luke Ravenstahl had been elected president of the City Council as the compromise candidate, so now whoops! He’s mayor!)
Whilst poking around, I noticed that Mayor Ravenstahl’s chief of staff, the former deputy mayor, is a guy named Yarone Zober.
I recognized the name immediately even though I haven’t thought about him in over 10 years. How do you forget a name like that?
My high school used to have to borrow boys from other schools for its drama program, because it had been an all-girl school and it wasn’t until a couple of years into being co-ed that it had enough boys of its own. So my freshman year, the musical was Little Mary Sunshine, and while we had a second male lead, we were seriously lacking someone who could play Captain Jim (head of the Colorado Mountains Forest Rangers, of course).
Enter Yarone (who had been in a couple of WT’s plays the year before, but that was before my time).
As I recall, he was really quite good. He struck me as a bit of a goof, but he was 18 and the lead, and I was 14 and playing the flute in the orchestra, so weren’t we all a bit silly? I particularly remember him taking off his Forest Ranger hat and tossing it away during a particularly emotional moment. The problem was that the brims made the things like Frisbees so it went flying all the way to the back… and HIT the backdrop, causing the Colorado Mountains to shimmy from the impact.
All of that is really kind of tangential, though. I’m seeing a lot of handwringing about these young kids who supposedly got their jobs by fluke or twist of fate or whatever, and lots of worrying about whether or not they actually know what they’re doing, and honestly, I think it’s crap.
Look, old folks have been running Pittsburgh for years, and you can see where that got us- the city was near bankrupt not too long ago, young people are leaving the city in droves, and to this day, people from out-of-town who visit the place are SHOCKED to discover that it’s actually quite a nice town.
So maybe having some people in charge who happen to be from the demographic that Pittsburgh is having trouble holding on to might be just the thing it needs. It’s not like the “experienced” politicians who have been running the place have done all that much to get excited about. Give the young’uns a chance.
links for 2006-09-22
Friday, September 22nd, 2006-
via Jeff, an educational post on stuff I was only vaguely familiar with.
» Tips for design and lifeusability-gasm, and a cool product
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006I just heard about this over at MBDC and had to share the joy over here.
Moo is a printing company which seeks to help people make physical objects out of what they create on the Internet. Which sounds all touchy-feely and arty until you find out how cool their first product is.
Flickr MiniCards! Cool little business cards/calling cards with your info on the front, and your Flickr photos on the back. For cheap!
The real joy for a usability wench like me is how beauuuuuutiful the card-creating application is. It shows you your Flickr photos either in the photo stream, by set, or by tag, and then you just drag the ones you want on your cards to the holding area. The cropping interface is just gorgeous- it shows you the available crop area, and then you just move your photo around inside it, zooming in or out as needed until you get the effect you want. It’s even smart enough to make pretty good guesses about what the subject of the photo is- when the main subject of the photo was vertical, the crop was pre-set vertically for me.
They could stand to make it easier to delete photos once you see how they crop, because sometimes you don’t know until that point whether the photo is going to work in that format, but still… Bravo!
I ordered 200 cards. So excited to get them…
Yup, we’re geeks alright.
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
It’s a Unix joke. Some of you will get it.
links for 2006-09-19
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006-
Jim Durbin on the value of business blogging
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I know, I use WordPress, but this seems educational anyway.
a dose of total nerdiness
Monday, September 18th, 2006So I’m playing WoW this weekend, and I’m about to do what’s called an “instance” with Ian and one of his friends. Essentially, in an instance, you get an appropriate group together, you enter the dungeon or cave or whatever, and once you’re in, you don’t run into any other players- each group has a unique opportunity with whatever is in there, so no other players can take the loot you want or kill the guy you’re trying to kill or whatever.
So I’m waiting around for Ian and his friend, and this other party rolls up- people I don’t know. They ask me to come do the instance with them, and I respond that I have a party already, but thanks for the invitation. They persist, and I stand firm. They wander off. Then Ian arrives, and we’re hanging around by the entrance, and one of the members of the other party comes back.
He continues to ask that I come play with them. Now, keep in mind that I’m not much more advanced in the game than he is- he didn’t really NEED me to do this (He’s a 15 Tauren warrior, I was a 16 troll priest, for those of you who know what that means). But I’m watching him use all the chat /emote commands- he begs, he dances, he flexes…and finally flips me off and runs away.
I say to Ian, “So, what’s up with the begging? Is it just that I’m a chick?”
Ian says, “Definitely. Women get all kinds of attention in MMOs. It’s kind of pathetic, really.”
“Clearly Blizzard needs to make a new trinket for the female characters- the Wedding Ring of Unavailability.”
Why not just say, “Hey, my group could really use a healer for this run?” It would be a lot less pathetic…
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The Tip of the Day when I logged in to the server to play was, “Being polite while playing with a group will get you invited back!” So sad that you actually have to TELL people that.
here in my car…
Monday, September 18th, 2006I received an early birthday present this weekend (yes, I know, my birthday isn’t for nearly two months). Tom got me an XM Roady for my car, so I can have good radio on my commute.
I am enthralled. I’m still getting used to it- there are three wires coming out of it (tape adapter, power adapter, antenna) which make handling it a bit awkward since I don’t want to block my vents to install it on the dash. But OMG! Ethel 47 in my car! I’m so happy! I’m settling into the quirks of which buttons do what, and I’ve got my four favorite channels on pre-sets, so my commute is getting much better.
It’s awesome, because there are few things that make my commute more frustrating than sitting in a traffic jam, noticing that I forgot to charge my iPod, and there is nothing but crap, crap, and more crap on FM radio. XM has like 200 channels, each targeted to a specific subgenre. Surely I will be able to find something I like at any given time, even if it means I’m switching to the 40’s/Swing station a lot.