asides

I do love reading some of the blog comment spam I get. While thousands of them are just links and more links, some of it is just “flattering” text, generally as a test to see I’m spammable. My favorite this week is:

Your site is a refreshing change from the majority of sites I have visited. When I first started visiting web sites I was excited by the potential of the internet as a resource and was very disappointed initially. You have restored my enthusiasm and I thank you for your efforts to share your insights and help the world become a better place.

I’m glad that I’m a refreshing change. Oh, and I want to know how people are searching for a specific four-word phrase (which I’m not putting here, lest someone search again) having to do with porn and arriving here. Must be all that porn I post… I thank Akismet for catching 206,914 spam comments/trackbacks/pingbacks since I last reinstalled it.

Apparently some of my writing is being emailed around? HA! I’m glad I could entertain. Am I providing insight? Humor? Inspiration?

In any case, I’ll use this time to bring your attention to the late Katie Reider, whose music and life should inspire you. For $1 you can own some of her music and give to a good cause.

I seem to have fixed a lot of the things that were driving me batty about this particular theme. With very little work, I might add. I still feel like I need an image in the upper left, but don’t have anything that strikes me as “the one” for use in that size.

Less annoyed with the layout, still unsure. That’s the state of the union.

Though more will come on the topic soon, I’d like to announce that today was my final day at my old job. Quitting was a long time coming (mostly) and I’m so excited to be starting my new venture. Whew!

Congrats to my friends who graduated this weekend. I love you guys and had a great time watching you walk across the stage, pose for photos, and hanging out during the not-graduation times. Thanks for coming to the beach with me, eating breakfast with me, and being awesome friends.

Now I need a nap. Helping other people graduate is exhausting!

Brass and kreece: You guys are awesome! I’m so proud of you! =)

In addition to have a top 5 lifetime sandwich today (thanks Gina at La Villa), I also got to have a little treat. A bottle of Dublin Dr Pepper which uses cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Yum!

An article regarding Abraco, the closet coffee place I loved in the East Village.

I got a freshly roasted (less than 48 hours old) bag of \m/etal at Barefoot tonight. I can’t wait for a French press pot of this stuff tomorrow morning.

A video to give you something to do that’s not watching the Super Bowl. I don’t know much about DJ Scriv, but I find this video mix to be enormously fun.

The latest by Improv Everywhere. They have 207 people frozen in place in Grand Central Station for five minutes. [via]

[via] Instapaper is a great little tool for marking websites to read later. Why? Because it’s not del.icio.us? I’m using it to mark non-news I want to read later, that I doubt is interesting to many other people (like a Wired article on bike wheels or stuff I want to share at work) and which doesn’t require me giving out my email info and which I can access at any computer. (Much like how I use Bloglines as a feed aggregator instead of a desktop client.) I sit at a computer for many snippets of my day, it just isn’t always mine. Now I’m not emailing myself links back and forth between my work and home computers. Whee!

I just recently posted about the brilliance of Netflix and the fact that they recommend movies for me in (apparently) the same way my friends recommend movies. But this one? I will enjoy an Eddie Izzard concert film becuase I liked a British Holy Grail farce, an Italian neo-realist film, and a samurai movie?

No, really. Watching the Australian Open is something I’ve always enjoyed, but watching it in HD? Holy shit. I think I watched five hours of tennis last night and I’m an hour in today. I like tennis, but generally not this much. Sports in HD will be my downfall…

I don’t really like the new theme. I will probably eventually go back to the old theme. This one breaks too many things I spent so much time creating, my tiny little brain hurts.

Visit the Buy n Large, an elaborate promo site for Pixar’s new film, Wall*E.

To those who wait. A new, awesome ad for Guinness.

See it here.

While you’re at it, you can watch an amazing Rube Goldberg machine on this site and ooh and ahh a lot.

Battlestar: Galactica will not start season four until April. GAH.

ETA I needed to add something positive. Listen to Spoon live in concert.

Threadless is having their $10 shirt sale! Ostensibly it’s for back to school, but for those of you not in school, a $10 tee is nothing to scoff at. I bought two this morning!

I was reminded that I could password-protect entries here. Shoot me an email if you want the sekret code. They’ll all be the same.

What do I like right now? Mad Men. Check it out, because it’s worth every minute.

bbq with friends at our house with hotdogs and hamburgers and wine and cake with music and poker and friends and laughter with a tinge of sadness and a wresting match I say goodbye for the first time and the last time and sit here having had enough to drink that typing this has taken an extraordinarily long time and has, for the first time in a long time, involved spell check

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Other Music’s Digital Music Store has opened. With a bang, I might add. The most important part? “All of the tracks here are sold as premium-quality 320kbps DRM-free mp3s.”

I’ve been a huge fan of them for years, purchasing CDs from them online as well as visiting their physical store twice while in New York. Much like Bleep, I’ll be watching Other Music for new releases and will spend my money there many moons before I spend at the iTunes Music Store.

Our friend Dan, who photographed our wedding, is awesome. And not just in that “what a kick ass friend” kind of way. Though he’s that too. He’s also a fabulous photographer.

Check these out. The last one is my favorite, by far.

Laundry is my nemesis. I’ve got so much of it to do…I haven’t really done any since before we left for Canada. I’m down to the socks and underwear I don’t like and I’m running out of work-appropriate shirts.

I do need to say here that Sarah sucks, and I don’t deserve to be a six, I should be a four.

Retro comic book panels whose use of the English language has not kept up with the evolution of the language itself. Hilarity ensues.

Top 15 Unintentionally Funny Comic Book Panels

My dad was convinced I had whooping cough because I’ve been sick for about two weeks now. People at work then decided that it might be whooping cough or SARS or avian flu or whatever else. I woke up this morning at 4am feeling like the left side of my face had imploded. The verdict is clear–sinus infection! Now I’ve got antibiotics and nasal spray (which, ironically, smells awful) and will hopefully be better in a few days. If only the cough would go away.

How excited am I? I have a Saturday off and some of the girls and I are going to San Francisco. We’re going to thede Young Museum and the MOMA, then off to dinner at LuLu’s for dinner. Wahoo!

Upgrading Wordpress to 2.1 today. I’m a little muddle-headed, so it’s taking slightly longer than I might hope. In addition, I’m upgrading my theme basis, Tarski, so I apologize that the sidebar is temporarily broken.

We pulled the trigger on a new tv. It’s really about time, and the new one weighs in at about 20% of the old one. For now we’ll be using the bigness for DVDs and generally watching standard broadcast TV. Switching from DirecTV and TiVo is a hard choice, and if the rumors are true, they’re getting back together and making a DirecTV-compatable HD TiVo by Q3 2007.

Thanks for getting out and voting. Whew.

Sometimes a police blotter offers the funniest shit ever. Read the second, longer paragraph.

Congrats to Melissa and Pete, who got engaged on Halloween!

Stop having it, my friends. STOP! While I’ve decided that I can heal people with the power of my mind (my mind, man), I’m going to be doing a lot of healing it seems. So rather than me exhaust my brain (which has been broken by certain gossip about certain people…which Sarah didn’t tell me), I request that you all take a deep breath, and chill out. Ahhhhhh.

That’s what we call it at work. So when a friend of mine from work decides to set goals that have nothing very little to do with work, I help her create a color-coded IDP with actionable items. And I offer a reward for successful completion aside from the…uh, joy of completion. I will join.

Sometime today Akismet caught the 5000th spam comment on my blog. Here’s to (thus far) 5019 comments snagged, no false-positives, and just a handful of comments even making it to moderation.

An awesome, awesome loser! I figured out what was causing the idiocy between Adium and iTunes. All my fault. Bah. But now I can listen to Justin Timberlake in secret and no one on my buddy list will know! Oooh, and I make Lorilee sleepless, so maybe I am super awesome fantastico…

I have no words. None. Ok, maybe a few. Battlestar Galactica is amazing. The season 3 premiere was “guh?” after “wha?” after “zomg!” Coherent thoughts later…if possible at all.

Shopping for a dress with me is apparently less painful than Radena shopping for a bridesmaid dress for her sister’s wedding. But I have a dress! I’m really just not that picky and at the same time, I found a dress that I like. So yay! (This entry will look better when it’s not pirate-y.) I’d post a photo of the dress, but I’m not showing Bryan. Not for any silly reason like it’s a representation of my (ha!) virginity etc., but because I want him to be surprised! As if me in a dress wasn’t surprising enough…

Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day. Me blog be changed for this day, mateys.

Not enough time to read the literature classics you skipped in high school? Try Daily Lit. They’ll email you a section of a book (all of their titles are in public domain) each day until you’re done. Sweet.

Canon has shipped my camera back to me, unfixed. Apparently there was nothing that could be done, and after a few weeks in the Canon facility, Little Snappy was declared All Crapped Out. Le sigh. Apparently this is a dumbass tax that I’m supposed to pay for all the dumb things I’ve done consequence-free.

I hate iTunes and it hates me. It’s fucking with Adium and my status messages. What’s interesting is that when I use “iTunes sucks” etc. as my away message in Adium, I get three pings regarding my hatred. I just wish Audion had not been retired.

Farecast is a service in beta, but it’s still the coolest way to look up flight info online. Unlike services like Expedia or Orbitz, Farecast will give you a prediction on whether the flight cost will be rising or falling in order to ensure you’re getting the best rate, even looking forward to tomorrow and the next day. Now with 55 cities served (including the 3 airports closest to me) and an RSS feed for your flight searches, Farecast is hot shit in a world of cold poo.

Sarah’s motto at work has always been, “Sarah first, safety second.” Shit motto, She Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. Today at work, Sarah was drilling something (actually safety-related, ironically enough) when the drill bit broke and went through her thumb. Yes, all the way through. Her thumb is now like a pinhole camera.
ETA: View a photo of the thumb!

Thanks, Akismet. You’ve caught more than 4000 spam comments on my blog thus far, and no false-positives yet. A few random ones got through to moderation, but I forgive you.

Yesterday I began getting spam comments (caught, of course) containing Mark Wahlberg quotes. It seems that the latest iteration of this bot has been crawing Marky Mark interviews to try and get past spam filters. Huh.

In lieu of being a normal couple, Bryan and I are going to work the geek thing to the full extent. This is what happens when geeks get married. I sense…disapproval from the one person I’ve told, but whatever. Our wedding, our rules. Keep up with us, there’s more on the way. Two weeks from now, I think. My next two days off will be for camping, not for geekery.

Wordpress has released 2.0.4, which you should go get right now. Fixes galore, and still the easiest upgrading on record.

You know, being the fire marshal must be a lot like being a diety. And the first commandment is: “Thou shalt not be inspected until thy cluster is fucketh.” My cluster is quickly becoming fucketh, so where is our damn inspection?

Are you familiar with lists of 5ives? If not, you can read up. If so, and you work at REI, then OMFG hysterical!

Today I vacuumed the dog. He loved it. He’s awesome.

FlossMan earlier threatened to drink my face. I think I’m supposed to be scared.

Anyhow, I’m having a retro-geek moment, and thinking about my love for The X-Files. Which also ties into the fact that my external hard drive may have died again. I have terrible luck with these things. It ties in because at some point in the hazy distant past, I made a set of 100×100 XF-themed images, intending at some point to rotate them into my LiveJournal. (This waaaay pre-dated being able to have a bazillion user pics, so I was going to have to manually rotate them out.) Now I’m thinking that I might just want to use a similar idea in my current blog iteration, but it does seem over-graphic-y to do so. Meanwhile, I just marvel at the sheer choice available if I wanted.

Sarah hit me tonight, people. Just letting everyone know, since when I dropped her off, she barely made it to her front door on her own power. I had a fun night (really) as the designated driver for her. It was hysterical, actually. Oh, and Sarah? You were so drunk, you sent me the same text message twice after I dropped you off. I assume the second one was intended as a response to my mocking, but still. The same message. Twice. HAHA

Rachel asks a good question: where are the best beaches in the world? Yahoo! posits their own list. Clearly I need to go spend more time at beaches so I can contribute more discussion to this topic. I do know that I really love the beach, water temperature be damned. Cold is fine!

How much do I love Threadless? So damn much. Ten dollar shirts! Reprints! New stuff! My favorite? It’s already out of print, but Meat is Murder. Tasty, Tasty Murder. In fact, we’re going to start using “tasty, tasty murder” as a new catch phrase at work.

So after years and years of not eating tomatoes (unless cooked into a sauce or disguised as salsa), I have decided that when the tomato is right, it’s fantastic. I’ve had one a day for the last three days, and they’ve been a wonderful addition to my meal. Apparently this anti-tomato stance isn’t genetic like my family thinks.

You. The person from Houston who searched Yahoo! with the words “tell story about seller restaurant server serving a beer to a minor unintentionally” and got this site: WTF? Do you have an underage drinkers fetish? I apologize that I’ve been able to buy my own beer for many years now.

P.S. Now I’ll get to be the first result for that search, not the third…

My friend Audrey (who I last saw for a very early morning breakfast in Boston) has temporarily moved from Burlington, Vermont to Oakland. She’ll be doing a rotation in the ER at the hospital there, and will be here for the month of June. We had a lovely dinner together in Oakland. I recommend Cactus Taqueria. Mmmmm.

I’m gonna fuck it up again
I’m gonna do another detour
Unpave my path

And if you wanna make sense
What you looking at me for
I’m no good at math

And when I find my way back
The fact is I just may stay, or I may not

Ooooh. PMS. Grumpy-pants.

I wore a skirt tonight! And of course, congrats to Dave and Jen, who got themselves married tonight! But really, the odds of them getting married again are roughly the same as me wearing a skirt again. I might have to wear it in front of Amanda, just to prove that I actually own a skirt, but that’s not an out-in-public kind of thing.

I’m writing music reviews again. That’s right, me. Check out iPod Observer for iPod news and music reviews from people more clever than I.
[ETA: Check one out.]

I’ve become obsessed with organization at work. With a million things to do each day and only eight hours to complete said million things, I’ve needed to become almost obsessively organized. Since I’m moving to a new office space next week, I’ve been collecting ways I can “start over” and become even more efficiently organized. Thus the five minute organizer system, which I’m going to try out.

I love Tuesdays because new CDs and DVDs are released. Here’s a list of today’s gluttony:

• Stadium Arcadium — Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Whatever People Say I Am Thats What I Am Not — Arctic Monkeys
• The Greatest — Cat Power
• Wolfmother — Wolfmother

Norelco has a new, online Flash ad campaign. Brilliant. It’s mostly work-safe, but I guess that depends on where you work.
[via]

Tee hee. Never in my life did I think that I would post about the new Star Wars DVDs nearly 11 full hours before Slashdot. Hooray for The Digital Bits for keeping me in the loop.

Moving Veronica Mars to Tuesday night has seriously affected the TiVo. It’s now on at the same time as House and Scrubs. One time, two tuners, three networks. Grrr.

I’m spreading. Three days per week at the gym (minimum) is my goal. Or if Sarah buys a damn mountain bike frame, maybe I could do outdoor activities too…