General Rambling

“Share This” Icons

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In reply to Alex King’s discussion of potential “Share This” icons, I posit, “what about arrows?” Plus it’s a good excuse to learn more about Adobe Illustrator, which I spend very little time in. No particular reason I picked blue, other than I sorta like it. I have some other ideas but they need some work… Update: here are some other thoughts. I didn’t change the color yet, though blue is the color of OPML. We can worry about that if we get a design that doesn’t suck. Green would be good. We could tip it up so. “Up & out” == sharing, right? Plus the serendipitous shadow arrow pointing back down. You get what you give? Stars are nice. …

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Posting From Microsoft Word 2007

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Blog posts from Microsoft Office 2007? Holy crap! What an unexpected, pleasant surprise. This might actually be cool if it works. The WYSIWYG editor in WordPress has been less than thrilling for me, not to mention you need to be online to use it. Often the best time for me to write is when I’m not online. I’ve written a number of posts in Word that way. This will just make them easier to post. Oh heck yeah, I can even put charts in this post.

OMFG, Commercials Are Sooo Dumb

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I don’t know what it is tonight, but I find myself watching television commercials more than usual, now that I’ve commented on other premature, white supremacist toilet brush commercials. The last commercial I noticed in the background was one from Glade. The final statement in the commercial is: “…and when the oil runs out the candle goes out.” Really? WOW! Maybe there’s a type of combustion that doesn’t require fuel. Which makes me think that if there is and the folks at Glade know about it they have the energy market cornered. Maybe they aren’t releasing it because it hasn’t passed various government safety tests. It’d suck trying to put out a fire caused by fuel-less combustion. Maybe it’s like …

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Christmas Already? And some KONE racism?

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I’m sitting on my couch catching up on my reading, and I have the television on in the background for noise. And… …a Christmas Tanqueray advertisement just played. I looked up because I heard the sweet sounds of “Deck the Halls.” WTF? We have — count them — eleven whole days until *Thanksgiving*. Every year we gain a couple more days of the Christmas season. This isn’t a bah-humbug sort of attitude. Similar to locking operations in software or XML tags, I like my holidays atomic. 🙂 I was stunned for a second following the Tanqueray ad, and ended up watching an advertisement for a new designer handheld vacuum, KONE, from Dirt Devil. “It’s beautiful enough to stay on display,” …

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General Rambling

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2004 J. Lohr Estates Seven Oaks Cabernet Sauvignon is pretty good. I’m trying to keep better track of the wines I like when I stumble across them. Along the lines of keeping track of personal information better, I started a wiki for myself. I’m using the free personal license for Confluence right now. I’m toying with the idea of doing a wiki for my extended family to capture some of the information that is spread fairly unevenly around the family members (birthdays, etc.). If you’re in the Madison, WI area Strollers Theatre’s Richard III opened at the Bartell Theatre last night, and is getting good reviews. I was a total dumbass one week ago today and wasn’t thinking as I …

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Spook Country

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“This title will be released on August 7, 2007. Pre-order now. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.” Ah ha! A new book from William Gibson. Now I just wish I didn’t have to wait until August. I just reread Pattern Recognition, which is the bomb. Actually, all of his novels are the bomb. And I name servers after his characters. The problem is that I already used “Case,” so “Cayce” would be a little confusing. My favorite was the Dell PowerEdge 4400, “Boomzilla.” Yeah, I’m a dork.

Veer?

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I don’t know what goes through the heads of marketers, but why does Juniper call its customer magazine “Veer?” The magazine just appeared in my mailbox. Oh, I see, it’s printed in light yellow inside the cover, like they’re ashamed of it: It’s more like “3. An erratic swerve into a bridge abutment, ending one’s life.” Personally, I’m not a big fan of Juniper. I went around and around with them over a Netscreen I inherited. They couldn’t put it under support because it hadn’t been registered, and because I didn’t have the card it shipped with (or specifically the apparently unretrievable and unreissueable registration number) I couldn’t register it. After about two weeks of idiocy I said “screw it” …

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FilePlanet, Demos, and Piracy

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If you are a software developer you should make it easier to download the demo of your software than it is to pirate the whole thing. Seriously. I wanted to check out Sid Meier’s Railroads! but the demo is only available via FilePlanet. FilePlanet prioritizes paid members, so my wait to grab the demo was 45 minutes. Out of curiosity I checked the availability of said game from a well-known torrent site. Fifteen minutes and I could have had the whole thing. What’s wrong with this scenario? Oh, yeah, I know what’s wrong: it’s easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing. One of my coworkers prevented me from becoming a temporary software pirate by suggesting FileFront. It …

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Yahoo! Bookmarks

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Yahoo! released what looks like a follow-on to del.icio.us in the form of Yahoo! Bookmarks. Update: Tom Chi from Yahoo! commented below on my remarks. Digg.com has his comments, and they make sense. Part of my problem is that I didn’t realize there was an old Yahoo! Bookmarks offering. I still think some of my criticism is relevant, but they know their own audience, or more specifically, both of their audiences. Thanks for adding to the discussion, Tom. My first impressions of Yahoo! Bookmarks: I agree with LifeHacker that the del.icio.us interface leaves something to be desired. You can’t automatically post your bookmarks to a blog. That sucks. The del.icio.us interface for that was turbo-clunky but it works reliably. The …

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Rogers and His Dirt

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I am now officially sick of this whole Kenny Rogers thing. Dirt, pine tar, I don’t care. Why don’t I care? Because after he washed it off he continued smoking the Cardinals. They sucked last night, and that’s that. If they had paid more attention to what they were doing, rather than what Rogers might have been doing, maybe they would have hit a few more balls. La Russa can be magnanimous about the whole thing, but you don’t start a war with a guy who worked for you for six years and knows all your secrets. With all of the crap the St. Louis press and populace is now slinging at Rogers and Detroit I wouldn’t mind seeing the …

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