Diplomatic Balls

Blog title...

2009-05-05T10:28:00.001-06:00

Ignore this

New iGoogle page: bad idea, or worst idea ever?

2008-07-20T12:18:00.003-06:00

So Google is running an experiment on users of their portal page (iGoogle); if you've been selected for the experiment, you can't opt out or in any way revert to the old version. I appreciate the attempt at scientific rigor, but the new features are pure crap. In the spirit of enlightened discourse, I'm filling out their survey instead of just flaming them.
This is straight from my survey responses about the new iGoogle experiment:

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about iGoogle?
What changes or additional features would you like to see for iGoogle?
The whole point of using iGoogle for my home page was that I could get information about many different things at a glance (e.g., I could see if there were new things to read in an RSS feed, see the weather in multiple cities that I care about, see my travel alerts). Now that you've made each widget into a 'full page or nothing' deal with your update, I can only use one thing at a time. If I can't aggregate multiple pieces of information on a single page, why use iGoogle at all? I could just bookmark each separate page and have them all open as home pages in Firefox. I think you've missed the point of a portal home page.

What do you like best about iGoogle?
At this point, pretty much nothing. You've made the entire left side of the page useless to people who have only one tab, you've made the concept of multiple widgets on a page useless, and everything I open uses half the page to recommend more widgets to me that I can't use.

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the links on the left? What changes or additional features would you like to see for the links on the left?
I only use one tab; that means that a huge chunk of real estate on the side of the screen is blank. And the integrated chat (which I don't need, since I use Google Talk) doesn't even work. (Incorrect status of me and my contacts; sometimes the messages just don't send.)

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the modules that expand to full width? What changes or additional features would you like to see for the modules that expand to full width?
If a module must take up the whole page for me to see any information in it, how is it different from a 'web page'? I would get exactly the same functionality from a set of bookmarks sitting on the left hand side of my browser (which all browsers already have). The point of the 'modules' (or widgets) is to have them display some information in a section of the page.

Look, I used to be able to see what the weather was like in three different cities just by loading up my home page. Now I have to click four times to see that same information, and I can't compare it side-by-side. But each city does take much longer to load, since it has to pull up a map, 5-day forecast, satellite data, and a bunch of other crap. If I wanted that much data, I'd go to weather.com.

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the chat feature? What changes or additional features would you like to see for the chat feature?
Why can't I turn it off? It's slow, and doesn't really work that well. Also, I have Google Talk installed. And half the time, the damn thing pops up in my Gmail tab, too (even though I turned that off). I don't need three copies of the same message.

Porridge vs. Gruel

2008-06-29T22:21:00.003-06:00

I'm on the home stretch of recovering from a gum graft - a procedure not as unpleasant as I'd anticipated; the big problem isn't so much the pain (which was gone in a day) as the dietary change. It's been difficult to eat anything that required a lot of chewing for about a week, which meant I needed alternatives. Living on smoothies was out of the question, too - straws are strictly prohibited. I'm not clear why, but I imagine jamming a straw into the stitches at the top of my mouth would, well, suck. So better safe than sorry.

Anyway, my diet for about a week has consisted mostly of soup and oatmeal. This led to at least one good find - the General Joe's Soup at Tokyo Joe's is awesome; I never would have tried it without these restrictions. It also led me to wonder about well-known non-chewing foods like porridge and gruel. More specifically, I wondered what the hell they were. I've heard the words for ages in different stories (Goldilocks, Oliver Twist, etc.), but I'd never really bothered to learn what they were.

Turns out the porridge is basically boiled oats in water or milk - in other words, the Quaker Oatmeal I've been eating for breakfast all week. Gruel is a thinner, watery version of porridge; the main difference appears to be that you drink it more than eat it.

So now I know. The stitches are supposed to come out tomorrow, and pretty soon I should be back to eating Qdoba nachos for every third meal. They haven't seen me for a week, so they probably think I'm dead or something.

Sad

2007-02-14T22:27:00.001-07:00

I'm very sad. You know why?

Because I just heard the song 'Blister In The Sun' by the Violent Femmes as the background to a Wendy's commercial.

And it wasn't even a clever or funny commercial.

I now officially boycott Wendy's. This boycott will be lifted when Dave Thomas makes a personal apology to both myself and Gordon Gano.

Reasons To Be Pissed Today

2006-09-13T23:06:00.001-06:00

1. Apparently, every damn online sporting goods store (including MVP.com, Dunham Sports Sports Authority, and at least 4 others) runs the same piece-of-shit e-commerce system. I can tell because they all look the same (shitty forms with some crappy co-branding, and they all show the same item ID in the querystring for the item I'm trying to buy). They all also have the same damn bug that sends any browser other than IE into an infinite loop of page reloads (each page having dozens of charming CSS and JavaScript errors). And up until today, they had some bug in IE that didn't allow me to actually give them any money. Apparently they have that fixed, which allowed their crappy system to finally take my money, but only after redirecting me to another system that pissed me off:

2. "Verified by Visa" - in order to give me more online "protection", I'm now required to submit most of the credit card info twice. And I get a new password to remember, which shouldn't be hard, since it only allows letters and numbers, and only 6 to 8 of them.Six to eight characters I might be able to deal with - maybe space in the database is precious, so you really have to limit the number of characters. But only letters and numbers? What kind of Mickey Mouse, "all of our database queries are done with SQL strings so characters scare us" kind of bullshit is that?

3. Also, Apple saw fit to shit out a new version of iTunes for Windows. The upgrades? The only thing that appears to be an actual upgrade is the option to flip through your album covers like they were in one of those jukeboxes they used to have at the tables at Pizza Hut. Other than that, they seem to have removed the "leave this iPod in the playlists" feature for the Shuffle, so dragging things onto my Shuffle is now agonizingly slow; every single operation appears to lock up iTunes (apparently these fuckers missed the UI class where they teach you how to put the little hourglass on the screen during operations that take geologic epochs to complete); about half of my preferences got lost; an already ugly-ass product is now uglier (goodbye brushed metal; hello, flat gray); and finally, the random-looking buttons they slapped on the top of the interface put you into new browsing and sorting modes that you can only sometimes change out of.

On top of that, that damn bug where playing a video in iTunes turns off my screen saver until the next reboot is still there. And motherfucking Quicktime is in my motherfucking startup again, so I have to go edit it out of the motherfucking registry. Again.

I'm a Liar

2006-08-20T16:08:00.001-06:00

For the first time since I tried to become a Chase Bank customer, I'm giving out the Platinum TeaBagging award. This time, the lucky winner is Comcast. I know that pointing out how much their customer service sucks is more or less like blogging about the sky being blue, but they pissed me off and sucked away a couple of hours of my life, so I'm going to use some of their bandwidth to bash them. It may be cliched, but I'm already a guy with a themeless web site that he hardly ever updates; being a web cliche is something I've accepted.
We (my roomate and myself) recently moved. Not far, just a few blocks away from the old place. Under the (misguided) assumption that an "ISP" might have some way to change the address of our service on "that InterWeb thing", I searched Comcast's site for about half an hour; the best option I could find was to cancel the existing service and set up a new one at $10 a more per month. Since we already pay out the ass for cable and Internet, we weren't thrilled about an increase. So we went to the Comcast office.
Apparently, they like to see our smiling faces - going into the office to change our service resulted in a big price reduction for the first three months. The previous tenants had the same service, so no visit from the cable guy would be necessary. In theory, we could simply hook up our existing equipment and give them a call; they would turn the new service on and everything would be hunky-dory.
Not so. Their system inexplicably (I can only assume this is left over from the days when they didn't have a monopoly on all cable in the city of Boulder) binds an account not to the person paying the bill (my roommate) or to the equipment (even though you can't access the network without a specific MAC address), but to the address. Which, as I would soon find out, the lady at the Comcast offices had mistyped.
The phone call that was supposed to activate our connection turned out to be useless - whatever first-tier CSR we got just told my roommate to hook the cable modem directly to his computer and run the installation software. There were several problems with this:
1. The cable connection is in the living room; the computer is in his bedroom. Here in the aughts, we use that fancy "wireless" technology.
2. No one had given us a copy of the installation software.
3. Even if we had the installation software (which, to be fair, you can download from Comcast's "Walled Garden" without having to activate your account), it installs multiple pieces of hard-to-remove spyware on your machine when you run it. Beware of any installation program that tells you to disable popup blocking, firewalls, and anti-spyware software before running it.
Now, a couple of years ago you could get around this crap by mucking around with proxy settings in IE (naturally, their site doesn't work for shit in any other browser) and going directly to whatever SAS server is appropriate for your region. But that process doesn't work anymore - browsing to the SAS site doesn't automatically redirect you to the account activation page anymore. Since I don't know the exact URL, I was boned as far as that method was concerned.
So, frustrated and fed up with this bullshit (I'm not backing down and letting these assholes install crappy software just to activate an account we're already paying for), I just called the fuckers up and lied my ass off. The magic word here is "Linux". Apparently they're too scared or incompetent to support Linux in their installation software. So despite running nothing but Windows around here (barring the Tivo), I called customer support, impersonated my roommate, and told them "we're running Linux, so we can't run your installation software. Would you please just provision our cable modem for us?"
Worked like a charm - the woman on the other end said she'd be happy to provision the modem. But after she got the account details from me, we ran into a problem - the mistyped address. Seems the lady at the Comcast office had type a "1" instead of a "3" for part of the apartment number; the address would have to be updated before they could provision the modem.
This is where things got really annoying. Though the lady at the Comcast office was able to change our address in 15 minutes, apparently the crack team of phone monkeys at the Accounts department of Comcast's call center can't do it in less than an hour. A solid hour of the shittiest hold music I have ever heard - nothing but John Tesh and Kenny G on what I can only assume from the static was an old FM radio with a broken antenna that someone had plugged into the phone switch. Music designed to enrage. Occasionally the helpful CSR would pop in to say "Still there? Yeah, we're still working on changing that address. It's a pretty involved process." Clearly.
Eventually, the address all sorted out, I was bounced to some other rep who provisioned the modem for me. Then he asked me for information to open a trouble ticket (why? No idea. As far as I could tell, there was no more trouble.), including an email address. After several minutes of back-and-forth about which email address to use, it became clear to me that he had to use a comcast.net email address. It would have taken less time to come to this conclusion if he had answered the question "Do I have to use a comcast.net email address?" with the word "Yes" the first couple of times I asked. Of course, I pointed out to him that I have never checked any comcast.net email address and never would in the future, but that didn't seem to be an issue. So he opened the ticket, and half an hour later we got to start using our own connection again. (Special thanks to the folks with SSID "Actiontec" who helped us through the rough period when we didn't have our own access.)
So there's my Comcast customer service story - complete with bureaucracy, incompetence, deception, and Kenny G.
Tags: Comcast, deception, broadband, customer service, Kenny G

While I'm coming up with new terms . . .

2006-08-06T19:09:00.001-06:00

I'd just like to salute the phenomenon that I like to call 'bike cleavage'. It's what happens when a girl wearing a tank top or other low-cut shirt is riding a bike and thus leaning forward. Even girls who don't typically have a lot of cleavage get nice bike cleavage. Yet another reason to love summer.
Tags: neologism bike summer

I wonder . . .

2006-08-06T19:06:00.001-06:00

If someone gives away the ending to a suspenseful movie before you've seen it, is that a Hitchcock-block?
Tags: suspense Hitchcock neologism

Ridiculously Huge Sunglasses: The New Ugg Boots

2006-05-14T19:38:00.001-06:00

As with art, I'm no fashion expert, but I know what I like. And I know what hideous is. And this recent huge sunglasses trend among trendy chicks is the sort of thing that makes the baby Jesus cry.

Seriously, trendy chicks - the ugg boots were bad enough. They made you look like you were pretending to be some barbarian warrior princess, but at least when you were sitting at a table or driving we couldn't see them. And far be it from me to stop women from wearing more comfortable shoes once in a while. But these huge sunglasses? You look like some sort of horrible insect people. Observe:

Chick with retro-80's huge sunglasses:

Horrible insect person:

Actually, that's just Buzz-Off from Masters of the Universe, but does that really make you trendy chicks feel any better?

The worst part is that I can tell you all think you look cool, just like you did with sheepskin and fur boots. Now, I'm sure none of you really would give a damn what I think - there's plenty of guys walking around with popped collars who will hit on you regardless of your sunglasses. The thing is, those guys lack imagination; they don't suffer the same disturbance I do when they see your huge sunglasses. Because whenever I see a girl wearing giant sunglasses that cover half her face, I can only imagine that when she takes them off she'll look like this:

But You Don't Really Have To Be You For Us To Give You Money

2006-03-10T17:56:00.001-07:00

Another reason to be annoyed with Chase: they'll give money to people who reconstruct your torn-up pre-approved credit application.

Giving them this week's award would be too good for them. But I will be getting myself a shredder this weekend.

On The Benefits Of Coffee

2006-03-05T14:18:00.002-07:00

Coffee, as we all know, is beneficial to work in that it gives us the energy and concentration we need during those hours that society demands we be awake and our bodies demand we be asleep. But one of my colleagues pointed out to me yesterday that, for those of us who have some of our best ideas while sitting in quiet repose on the porcelain throne, coffee has the added benefit of making those sessions more frequent. Truly, a benefit of coffee I had never considered.

Coffee: is there anything it can't do?

We're Not Sure You're Really You, But We Want To Give You Money

2006-03-01T20:03:00.001-07:00

I need to come up with some sort of award to give out to people and companies who in some way introduce extra stupidity into my day. I'm taking suggestions for a name for the award - whoever comes up with the best one will get a free pass next time they make my day dumber.

Anyway, today the as-yet-unnamed prize goes to Chase Bank. Months ago I applied for a Starbucks Duetto card. It makes sense; a big chunk of the money that rolls through my credit cards is used to buy coffee, so I might as well get a little back for it. They sent me a letter stating that they needed to verify my identity before they could approve me for the card. As per their instructions, I sent a copy of my Social Security card and some other identifying information. Through the mail. I had almost forgotten that you could send things through the mail that don't come in Amazon boxes. I had to borrow a stamp - the third one I've used in as many years. Anyway, they helpfully responded with another copy of the exact same letter. At this point I gave up (because I'm lazy) and never sent anything back.

Today I got mail from them telling me I'm pre-approved for a MasterCard(tm) Platinum. Now, I realize that Chase is a company so big that the right hand doesn't know which ass the left hand's thumb is up, but it still pisses me off. Here's a plan, Chase Bank: stop sending out junk mail for a few months. Take the money you save on envelopes and pre-approved card fraud and hire someone to consolidate your databases. Then you'll know who I am, you can send me just one piece of junk mail to shred instead of two, and I won't have to hate you so much. In the meantime, Chase Bank, I'm happy to inform you that you're Pre-Approved For A TeaBagging(tm) Platinum.

BIFF Part 2

2006-02-19T22:15:00.001-07:00

We caught a second film session Saturday evening at the Boulder Public Library. This one included a short 20-minute film and an 80-minute feature.

The short film, "I Killed Zoe Day", is an amusing story about two guys who wake up after a night of binge drinking in the apartment of a very recently deceased pop star. They spend the movie trying to figure out what happened the night before and whether one of them is a murderer. My only real complaint about this film is that these guys look way too alert and coordinated to have spent the previous night doing tequila shots.

The feature, "Filmic Achievement", is a masterpiece. It's a mockumentary about a prestigious six-week film school in New York where the students compete for the coveted 'Filmic Achievement' award. Two words: fucking hilarious. I'm hoping to see this get more exposure; maybe Comedy Central could pick it up and show it instead of "Sorority Boys".

BIFF Review, Part 1

2006-02-18T23:35:00.001-07:00

This weekend is the second annual Boulder International Film Festival. Like last year, my girlfriend and I decided to get tickets for two sessions. Since there's so much to say about the first session, I'll save my thoughts on the second session for the next post.

First, a disclaimer is probably in order. If you're a fan of pretentious, arty movies that end in the word 'Fin' and mean it, then you should ignore my recommendations. If you're looking for movies about people climbing Everest or movies about women being sold into slavery in Turkey, then you want someone else to tell you what to see. It's not that I never enjoy those types of films; it's just that I can only see so many films in a weekend, and I'm a fan of independent humor films more than I am of documentaries and drama. When I bought my tickets, I was looking for something funny. For the most part, I found it.

This morning, my girlfriend and I braved the ridiculous weather to see a session of seven short films at the Boulder Theater. Things got off to a rocky start with "A Black and White World", which somehow managed to stretch nine minutes into an eternity. After that, we had to endure the uncomfortable "Antonio's Breakfast", a film about a teenager caring for his invalid father. I mean the uncomfortable as a compliment; I think the filmmaker's goal was to make you feel something, and I certainly did. My only real complaint (other than the fact that I don't really like being depressed at noon on a Saturday) was that the dialogue was almost entirely unintelligible.

After that, there was an upswing with "Kind of a Blur", the story of two ravers waking up the next day and trying to reconstruct the evening's event. The film was funny, the scenery was gorgeous (most of it was shot in Colorado), and it turns out that Sandra Oh looks fantastic half-naked. A win all around. It was directed by a former Boulder resident and produced by Kathleen Man, a professor at CU.

Next, things went seriously downhill with a film that might as well have ended in 'Fin'. Supposedly "The Calm" is a story about a diverse group of wacko tenants in a theater-turned-tenement being brought together by a baby who appears out of nowhere. What it really turns out to be is a bunch of crappy acting with cliched characters and a barely discernible plot. The movie has nothing going for it except the cuteness of the toddler, and he's screaming half the time. We can safely file this one in the 'pretentious crap' category.

That was the low point. Things started getting better with "Frozen Food Section", a student film based on a Charles Bukowski poem. It could have been two minutes shorter and just as good, but it is amusing and it looks fantastic. After that, we saw "Magda", a funny and brilliantly animated stop-motion film about a circus contortionist. I think the most disappointing thing about the whole session was that one of the guys who made "The Calm" was available for Q&A afterward, but nobody from "Magda". I would have loved to hear some of the details of the production of that film.

The last film was undoubtedly the apex of the session: "West Bank Story". This is the tale of a soldier in the Israeli army falling in love with a Palestinian girl. Their siblings run rival fast-food franchises - the Kosher King and the Falafel Hut, respectively. Naturally, the two restaurants are at war, and the young lovers attempt to make peace. I can't possibly recommend this film enough. It's an excellent parody of both West Side story and Israeli-Palenstinian relations, but where it really shines is the attention the filmmakers paid to comedy craft. Details like the gay Falafel Hut employee putting drink umbrellas in the molotov cocktails, or the Kosher King's mascot (a man in a foam menorah suit) are what push this film from great to brilliant. And I totally want a Falafel Hut hat.

What I learned on my Winter Vacation

2006-02-13T20:12:00.001-07:00

Some friends of mine came into town last week to visit and do some skiing. I figured it was finally time to give it a try - I've grown tired of people looking at me like I'm an idiot when they find out I've lived in Boulder for almost five years without skiing. Of course, I learned a lot about skiing over the weekend (Bert at Breckenridge was an excellent instructor), but I also learned a couple of other more or less interesting things.

You see, I don't own a car. I've managed to make do without one for over a year now, and it's done wonders for my financial situation. But once in a while I do have need for a vehicle; in this case, I needed to have a way to get myself and my friends (along with all of our equipment) up and down the mountain for a weekend. So I hatched a clever plan - I would take the bus to the airport, where I could meet my friends and pick up a rental car for the weekend. When I dropped them off, I could also drop off the car and take the bus back from the airport.

I looked online for something that could hold our equipment and get us up the mountain. Normally when I rent a car, I get the tiniest piece of crap they have (something of the Escort persuasion) for about $20 a day. Obviously, something like that wouldn't work here, so I started looking at prices for an SUV. I finally found a deal for $48 a day - $240 total. The rental went more or less according to plan, but when I dropped it off I was in for a bit of a shock - the bill came to $331.

Keep in mind that up to this point, I'd never had to pay my own money for a rental longer than a couple of days. At $20 a day, plus random "taxes and fees", I still hadn't hit anything more than $200 (Since I don't have any car insurance, I usually have to get the ridiculously expensive coverage offered by the rental company). So I had never noticed a very important fact: the prices these crooked fuckers are charging aren't even close to accurate.

The word of the day is recoupment - apparently, the rental companies make back their overhead costs with fees they sort of fail to mention before you rent the car. Like the 11.11% "concession recovery fee" that I paid for renting it at DIA - this fee helps Budget get back the cost of renting space from DIA. And the $1.80 a day "facility use" fee - apparently the cost of keeping the vehicle registered in Colorado. These fees get applied *before* the 13.35% tax. In the end, the "taxes and fees" are costing me about $90.

So I've learned a valuable lesson, and next time I reserve a car I'll make sure I know about all the hidden fees beforehand. I'll definitely be telling anyone flying into Denver to take the bus (for $10) into town and rent their car there. And next time I'm bored, I'll probably try to find out how it could possibly be legal for these bastards to advertise the prices they do. I'm sure the reasons will be depressing.

Clean!

2005-08-03T20:58:00.001-06:00

Today was the second visit from Molly Maid - we're now on the bi-weekly plan. So every other Wednesday we come home to a spotless apartment. Not having to worry about cleaning (or, alternatively, wallow in our own filth) is worth every single penny we pay.

Plus, they fold the end of the toilet paper rolls into a corner, like in a hotel. That alone would be worth the money.

My new favorite beer of the evening

2005-07-30T21:13:00.001-06:00

Sweaty Betty - I highly recommend it.

Thoughts from tonight's run

2005-07-28T21:13:00.001-06:00

First of all, to that dude in the button-up shirt and jeans walking down Canyon: Your hot girlfriend was totally giving me the eye. You're lucky I'm taken.

Second, I just pulled the a bug the size of a bald eagle out of my damn eye. I don't know how they do it, but those bastards seem to always fly right into my eye. I'd wear goggles, but then that dude's girlfriend wouldn't smile at me. At least, not for the right reasons.

Third, a tip for you aggressive panhandlers: When I'm in running shorts and a soccer jersey, odds are I don't have my wallet. And if I'm not jingling, it's a really good bet I don't have any spare change. Try the nicely-dressed people lined up for the teahouse.

End of Argument

2005-07-28T18:44:00.001-06:00

I sort of had some minor respect for Hillary Clinton at one time, but then she started fishing for family values votes by attacking video games. I'd write a rant on how stupid this recent spate of 'think-of-the-children' is, but Steven Johnson already put together a slam dunk argument that's better than anything I could have written.
I'd say 'Suck it, Hillary', but from past events I think it's pretty clear she doesn't.

New Music

2005-07-11T08:50:00.001-06:00

I'm listening to the new Gorillaz album, which I was only aware of because of the
Wired article about the band. Which officially makes me a dork; I get my music news from Wired. Anyway, the samples of the album on iTunes didn't make me crazy for it, but I picked it up anyway just in case. This is my second time through it, and I'm loving it. iTunes should seriously consider letting you sample the whole song, because whoever picked the bits of these tracks they used to sell the album missed the best parts of most of the songs. Based on the samples, I would've only bought two tracks.
In addition to the music kicking ass, listening to an animated band makes me think of Josie and the Pussycats, which makes me think of Rachael Leigh Cook, which makes me happy as long as I don't think about the movie Scorched. Or, for that matter, the Josie and the Pussycats movie.

Later, I shall rant on how craptastic the iTunes 4.9 podcasting integration is.

Depressed Students

2005-05-24T08:49:00.001-06:00

Found this on Joanne Jacobs:
For College Deans, Crisis at Any Second

In the fourth paragraph, they mention that antidepressants have surpassed birth control pills as the number one medication in college. Seems to me that the real cause of all this depression is obvious.

Vegas, baby!

2005-05-20T11:52:00.001-06:00

Almost to the airport - should be drunk soon.

Chemistry Rules!

2005-05-14T17:43:00.001-06:00

I just picked up a four-pack of Wolfgang Puck Gourmet Lattes at King Sooper's. That's self-heating lattes - human progress at its finest. Basically, there's a button on the bottom of the can that you push to break a foil seal that lets water mix with calcium oxide, which produces heat and slowly warms the beverage in the other section of the container. OnTech is the company that makes the heating technology; apparently they make a lot of other products that use a similar solution to heat soup, tea, coffee, and even some alcoholic stuff.
The latte itself is less glorious than the technology that heats it; basically, it tastes like the coffee you get at a gas station. But that could be easily improved (and these are low-cal, low-carb drinks, so some taste may have been sacrificed in pursuit of those goals). They take about 6 minutes to heat up, and they stay hot for a while (I'm drinking one as I write this, and it's been nice and hot for about ten minutes now). The can design is really clever, with a pop-top and a plastic guard that keeps you from putting your mouth on the heated metal, and a seal on the bottom so you can't accidentally push the button before you're ready to heat the can. The biggest problem is that you have a huge can with only 10 ounces of coffee in it; hopefully that's something that could be improved in future versions. On the plus side, the heating component doesn't really add much weight, so for day-long snowshoeing hikes you're not going to break your back carrying a couple of these along.
I haven't found any data yet on the waste produced from these, or whether they can be recycled at all. The chemical they use is also known as quicklime, and apparently has about a zillion uses. And it isn't super dangerous, so there doesn't seem to be too much issue if something leaks.

Make your own Pope hat!

2005-04-29T16:14:00.001-06:00

This is awesome. You need a big piece of paper, though. I tried it with an 8.5 X 11, and it was only big enough for the dancing hamster on my desk.

Remember that cool bottle where you squeeze it and it fills up the cap with the mouthwash?

2005-04-29T11:21:00.002-06:00

Someone brought this up earlier, and I couldn't rest until I'd remembered the name of the product. I had totally forgotten about it, but with Google and a little persistence, you can find anything. Even
ACT Mouthwash. I remember using this stuff when I was a kid. The label tells you to pour the dose into another cup, but everyone I know just drank it straight from the bottle.

Jon Stewart on Oprah

2005-04-27T11:31:00.001-06:00

Here's a clip from Jon Stewart's appearance on Oprah. Cameron Diaz is there, too, very much out of her league.

Woohoo

2005-04-25T10:52:00.001-06:00

Word on the street is that we've more than doubled our readership in the past month. Fame and fortune are surely around the corner.

Man, that didn't work out

2005-04-19T08:47:00.001-06:00

So I totally blew that whole 'post every day' thing. Keeping to a schedule has never been my forte (that's 'fort', not 'four-tay', as people often incorrectly pronounce it, by the way). But, like with all other aspects of my life, I'll keep attempting to get a consistent schedule going; if my attempt-failure-attempt cycle can maintain a certain frequency, it'll be no different than actually keeping a schedule.

Anyway, we watched Good Bye Lenin! last night. I highly recommend it. The basic idea is that the mother of this East German family falls into a coma right before the wall goes down and wakes up 8 months later. She's a staunch communist, devoted to the party, and doesn't know that everything has changed. The doctors advise her son that any excitement or shock could kill her, so he determines that he must hide the fall of the wall from her. The rest of the movie details his attempts to re-create the fallen East Germany around his mother while she recuperates. While it runs a bit longer than it needs to and is exactly the sort of 'wacky scheme' plot that often annoys me on sitcoms, it's pretty funny. It's also cool to see the westernization of East Berlin from the viewpoint of a kid who grew up there. If you don't mind subtitles (or speak German), it's a pretty good film.

Misschivus

2005-04-06T23:03:00.001-06:00

I'm going to try to start posting more regularly in an effort to make it interesting for our reader. But since I'm recovering from a sound trouncing at soccer and rehydrating from my poisonous Nalgene bottle, I'll just rehash an English language discussion that came up the other day.
The debate was regarding the pronunciation of the word 'mischievous'. I corrected a friend who was pronouncing it 'miss-chee-vee-us'. Another friend justified the pronunciation, citing the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, which states that the pronunciation (and the alternate spelling 'mischievious') are not yet standard, but considered at least sort of valid.
I did a little research, and found that the extra syllable often added to mischievous is an example of an intrusion.
So adding an extra syllable to mischievous is the equivalent of pronouncing 'wash' as 'worsh'. While I will grant that languages, and with them pronunciations, may evolve over time, pronunciations that obfuscate the spelling and roots of a word are not conducive to clear communication. English has enough problems without respected lexicons trying to justify made-up syllables.
And Merriam-Webster is notorious for running fast-and-loose with the English language. Any dictionary that considers irregardless to be a valid word isn't fit to worsh my nuts.

Coverville

2005-03-15T20:28:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to Coverville (and several other of these "Podcasts") since I got my Shuffle and heard of the term "Podcast". Which isn't anything all that groundbreaking, technology-wise - it's simply the idea of recording a radio show and putting the MP3 up for download on your site. Absolutely no 'Pods', 'i- ' or otherwise, are necessary to listen. The really clever bit is that there's also software (I'm using iPodder but I'm led to believe there are others) to automate the collection of these shows from their various homes on the Web. The Podcasters (should this be capitalized? I suppose it's still new enough to deserve the capital 'P') run RSS feeds that let people know about new shows. So it's kind of an intersection of readily available broadband, RSS, cheaper recording equipment, and a whole lot of people with portable music players (even the smelly homeless dudes on the bus have earbuds nowadays).
The truly best part about all this is that (as is typical on the Internet), amongst the thousands of wailing losers, there are quite a few really excellent shows - that is to say, about twice as many as you'll find on the broadcast radio. And standard Internet innovation advantages apply - it's cheap, it serves niche markets (one show I listen to regularly is about astronomy; good luck finding that outside of AM radio), there's a lot of variety, and you can consume it whenever the fuck you please.
I forgot my original point, which is that Coverville is an excellent show, and the dude is from Colorado. So go download a few episodes from our local boy - it's better than anything you'll hear from channel 93.3.

Beer Blogging

2005-03-15T20:14:00.001-07:00

I have to recommend the 'Censored' copper ale from Lagunitas Brewing Company; I'm in the process of finishing off a six pack and I'm quite pleased. Plus, I dig the clever name. From the package:
The Original Name of this Original Ale was Derived from an Origin so Heinous that We Can Not Reveal its Aboriginal Orogeny. Sorry.
Orogeny, by the way, is defined as "The process of mountain formation, especially by a folding and faulting of the earth's crust". So, nothing really to do with beer. But at least we all learned a new word.

Bathroom post

2005-03-15T14:54:00.001-07:00

i'm sending this from the bathroom. Isn't technology grand?

Lack of Perspective

2005-03-10T19:15:00.001-07:00

A none-too-swift fifteen-year-old in Maryland is protesting his school's broadcasting of the Pledge of Allegiance in different languages to celebrate National Foreign Language Week. Apparently, the kid (and his father) finds it offensive to say the pledge in any language other than English (which, by the way, is not our national language. We don't have one.) John Scalzi points out the kid's obvious ignorance of his own language here.

Scalzi beat me to most of the critcisms I'd have of the kid's ignorant position, but he did miss my favorite quote from the article.

"This is America, and we got soldiers at war," the 15-year-old said.

Clearly, this boy got mastery of the language himself.

Also, while I suppose that promoting awareness of other languages is a good idea in schools, do we really need a national week for it? And one of the languages was Spanish - is it really a foreign language when it's the second most common first language in the country?

German Trademark Symbols

2005-03-10T18:46:00.001-07:00

A friend of DB had his father ask a lawyer about the ordering of German trademarks (**** (R) Vier Sterne knives vs. the U.S. **** Four Star (R) ); it seems most likely that the ordering is just a language convention, and not a result of any particular law.

So that's one mystery solved.

Life Imitates Commercials

2005-03-05T15:44:00.001-07:00

So I've had my Shuffle less than a week, and I've already had a cliched commercial moment - while running today, one of the random songs it picked was Jerk It Out by the Caesars. Apple marketing irony aside, I'm loving this gizmo. I've been running with it hanging on the included lanyard, tucked under my shirt. No noticeable weight, and it's easy to press the buttons through my shirt. Much better than my old Memorex player on the armband that either cut off circulation completely or rolled under my armpit. Plus, the Memorex would have been on the second AAA by now.

Unfortunately, my collection of suitable running music isn't nearly enough to fill this thing up yet, so I'm working on acquiring some more. High on my list are the songs I had "purchased" in SSX3; good fake snowboarding music makes for good actual running music. Songs by Basement Jaxx and Kinky are on the running playlist already; some more will show up as my music budget resets. I'd just by the SSX3 soundtrack, but the full albums for some of the bands featured in the game are excellent; the Kinky album in particular has proven an excellent purchase.

Ick.

2005-03-01T15:32:00.001-07:00

Old code is like a high school yearbook photo. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now you look back at it and wonder, "What the hell was I thinking?"

8 isn't enough

2005-02-21T21:16:00.001-07:00

I could easily stay in office 24/7 for the next three months and still not get everything done that I need to do. Getting it all done in 8? Forget it.

This bad boy showed up today, finally. I'll have to actually cook something tomorrow. On the package, the trademark caught my eye - it's "**** Four Star (R)" in English, "**** (R) Vier Sterne" auf Deutsch. Some quick Googling and checking on Wikipedia didn't reveal any particular reason for the different ordering of the (R) between languages. I'm not sure who to ask, but it's definitely going in the back of my mind for the next time I meet an international trademark lawyer.

Grumpy Update (Grumpdate?)

2005-02-11T10:00:00.001-07:00

I asked about the unavailability of Grumpy via Play Along's customer service question page, and this is the response I got:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. Grumpy Bear was one of the first bears to be released in 2002. Unfortunately, this bear is not currently shipping at this time. We do have plans to re-release him in some of our new products later this year.

So it may not be the retailers keeping Grumpy down; it looks like they're not shipping him for some reason. Maybe he was popular and they just ran out - or maybe something more sinister is afoot. We'll stay on this story as long as our attention span doesn't run out.

The Grumpy Conspiracy

2005-02-10T20:01:00.001-07:00

In case you've missed it, all the cool toys of the 80s are back - including the Care Bears. We've seen them in several stores, and we've begun to notice one suspiciously disturbing absence - Grumpy Bear.

Initial speculation amongst close associates of Diplomatic Balls was that Grumpy may have been discontinued; after all, "it's okay to be in a bad mood once in a while" isn't really a message consistent with that we usually send our overly-medicated youth these days. We wouldn't want anyone to be less than cheery, lest it negatively affect someone else's self-esteem. Perhaps Grumpy was a casualty of a country in self-denial.

But some quick investigation of the link above reveals that Grumpy is alive, well, and occasionally thuggin'. So it clearly isn't the manufacturers who are responsible for Grumpy's absence from the Target shelves.

The plot thickens when you check out the five online Care Bears retailers - Amazon, KB, ToysRUs, Target, and Wal-Mart all appear to be missing Grumpy merchandise. Apparently it's the retailers who are trying to keep Grumpy down. Why? We don't know, but we intend (as long as it doesn't take too much effort) to find out.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

2005-02-09T09:37:00.001-07:00

$99 was cheap enough to get me sampling the Apple Kool-Aid, so I signed up for iTunes and bought a Shuffle. Not without due consideration of the alternatives, but the other options in flash music players were a bit craptastic from my perspective. Requirement numero uno was to liberate my self from the tyranny of Energizer, etc., and having to remember to take batteries out of the device and put them in a separate charger is a pain. I want my music player to work like my cellphone - battery and charger all in one. Which was enough to knock most of the Shuffle's AAA-eating competition out of the running. No cables is a plus, too - when I travel with my current player (a Memorex Biomorph), if I forget the cable I'm screwed. And frankly, the only time I look at the screen on my current player is when it stops playing, and I realize it's off, and I curse while I fish around for another AAA.
So the Shuffle's the best bet for the money, right now. It may be horribly outdated by the time I actually get the damn thing (Amazon's current prediction is March 17- April 2), but I'll keep my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I'm leveraging my computer skills to convert the songs I've bought off iTunes into MP3 so I can put them on the Biomorph. It's too bad iTunes doesn't come with a 'I'm still waiting for my iPod, give me my music in another format' option.

Tonight, on a very special episode of Capture the Flag . . .

2005-01-27T18:29:00.001-07:00

What follows is a rough transcript of the team chat in my Big Team Battle in Halo 2 last night:

Me: All right, we need a couple of people on defense. Everyone else, let's grab the vehicles.
Random Teammate 1: So did you guys hear about Scotty?
Random Teammate 2: Yeah, dude.
RT1: I didn't want to say anything, you know - didn't want to, like, spread it around.
Me: Whoever is in the Banshee, can you take out that sniper up there?
RT1: Bob, you're like, 21, right? What would you do?
RT3(presumably Bob): I'd just go and tell my parents. Get it over with.
RT2: Won't they freak?
Me: Uh, Okay, I'm going to grab the flag. Did anyone get that sni- (Respawn in 5,4,3...)
RT3: I bet they'll be more understanding than you'd think.
RT4: What about her parents?
Me: Okay, looks like the other team scored. And blew up our Warthog, 'cause it's right here. I'll drive - anyone want to be the gunner?
RT1: Dude, it's pretty sad. I wonder how they're doing.
RT4: I bet it gets around pretty fast. People are probably talking about it already.
Me: Okay, I guess I'll just drive over there and get the flag. Does anyone on our team have the rocket laun- (Respawn in 5,4,3...)

After that I lost track of the after-school special. We lost by a considerable margin. Anyway, if you really need to discuss the issues challenging your teenage friends, I'd suggest Skype instead of Halo; when you're pouring out your heart to your friends, you don't want to be interrupted by a bullet from a sni- (Respawn in 5,4,3...)