Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Nobody ever accused me of having a sophisticated sense of humor.

At least I am in our house:

(and yes, they have been known to call our names)

Upon returning from our Sunday Drive this weekend (and a hugely satisfying breakfast of raspberry pancakes at Bonnie’s Diner), we noticed a new resident in our pond. Phil’s taken some excellent pics:

Gak. Have 5 years passed already since I was boggling at Smiley turning 20? Sheesh.

Happy 25th to the first emoticon. (arrr!)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

[snip]

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

[from Wired]

This should be the official mascot of the day:

[Link]

In case you were wondering why:

John Baur and Mark Summers, who have come up with a concept that is going to make you kick yourself for not thinking of it first: Talk Like a Pirate Day. As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea, or what? There are so many practical benefits that I can’t even begin to list them all.” — Dave Barry, Miami Herald, Sept. 8, 2002.

(from http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ )

And in case you want to join in the fun, here’s a little training vid:

I need to get me some of these LEGO ice cube trays, because what could be better than making Chocolate LEGO bricks? Not much, I tell ya (then again, pretty much anything chocolate exudes awesomeness).

Also, not just Death by Chocolate, but Extermination by Chocolate with this Chocolate Dalek cake. If we ever have a Doctor Who-athon, I think I’ll need to try some variation of this.

[via BackupBrain]

When my brothers and I were little, my mother made us a huuuge drawstring bag into which we dumped our collection of LEGO building blocks. I don’t remember using them much myself, other than to build the occasional small toy or, more often, spending an afternoon designing a LEGO floor plan for a house, complete with bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen layouts. Nothing too exciting, really.

It’s probably a good thing the book Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against! (amazon) wasn’t around back then, or things might have been a little different.

The publisher’s page has the following:

Forbidden LEGO introduces you to the type of free-style building that LEGO’s master builders do for fun in the back room. Using LEGO bricks in combination with common household materials (from rubber bands and glue to plastic spoons and ping-pong balls) along with some very unorthodox building techniques, you’ll learn to create working models that LEGO would never endorse. Try your hand at a toy gun that shoots LEGO plates, a candy catapult, a high voltage LEGO vehicle, a continuous-fire ping-pong ball launcher, and other useless but incredibly fun inventions.

For an example, check out the YouTube vid:

Actually, I’m sure my folks would have nipped in the bud any interest my brothers or I showed in projects like these, right quick. I wonder how much trouble I’ll be in if I tuck this book aside for our nephew in a few years…

[via BoingBoing]

According to a MacWorld UK post:

[Toshiba revealed] revealing plans to boost maximum capacity in its 1.8-inch drives to 120GB; two such drives could be combined to offer iPods with 240GB capacity.

The company has developed a prototype 120GB drive which improved on the perpendicular magnetic recording technology used in the current generation of drives.

Nice. The mind boggles, really — I still haven’t filled up my old b&w 40gig iPod with music/audio books, and I was kinda drooling over the new 160gig iPod classics that were recently announced.

The mention of perpendicular magnetic recording, though, reminded me of the animation that Hitachi did to describe what the heck that tech is all about, in the style of the SchoolHouse Rock:

And if that makes you jones for the SHR version (”How a Bill Becomes a Law”), yes, that’s on YouTube, too:

… annoying, cold-calling vendors.

phone rings

me: Hello, this is Beth.

Them: Hello, may I speak with <insert name of woman who has been retired for 18-20 months and whose phone number I have apparently inherited>?

me: I’m sorry, she doesn’t work here any more, she retired.

Them: Are you the person in charge of email security?

me: . o 0 (been in the email-admin bizniz, no way in hell I’d do that again) I’m sorry, no I’m not.

Them: In that case, could you forward me to the person who is in charge of email security?

me: . o 0 (NO WAY IN HELL am I foisting you upon our email admin, even though he’d win and would be much less gracious about it than I am) I’m sorry, I don’t know who that would be. Could I take your name and number and when I find out I can have that person call you?

Them: No, how about I call you back in a couple of hours so when you find out you can tell me then?

me: . o 0 (tricksy bastahd. Why don’t you just save us both from this back-and-forth crap and go to our website — surely you have that information — and look for the email admin there? His name and contact info is public.) To what is this in regards? . o 0 (why o why am I unable to just hang up?)

Them: I’m from <insert name of company here> and I’m calling around to invite email administrators to our webinar on email security.

me: . o 0 (in other words, you’re looking to beef up your e-rolodex so you can spam contacts with content they really don’t care about, just like <insert name of other company that keeps spamming me just because I’m in their db of ppl who attended a webinar>) Yeah, well. Hurm. I don’t think there’s anyone in our department who would be interested.

I have big feet, and have since I was a child. It was small consolation to a self-conscious 7th grade girl that her size 9s were actually appropriate for her height, since being the tallest girl (and often tallest kid, period) in junior high in and of itself was a source of significant angst. My mother’s assertions that “if you had smaller feet, you’d fall right over! It would look funny!”, while they stuck with me, didn’t do much to alleviate the distress over having feet at least two sizes larger than those of my friends.

I eventually got over the whole size issue (though feet in general, still yuck), especially when a college roommate pointed me to catalogues where I could order my size 11s (and above). These days, size 11 is practically commonplace, and I can even go in some shops and buy them right off the shelves. They’re actually pretty stylish, too (unlike some of the clothing styles marketed to larger-sized women, but that’s a whole other rant).

This afternoon I wandered into one of the local shops looking for a last-minute pair of shoes to wear to a semi-casual function this weekend; I’ve had reasonable luck at this place this summer — relatively inexpensive footwear, several styles in my size, many of which I’ve actually liked. Finally, after scanning most of the aisles, I found exactly what I was looking for, and in the size I needed. But… the store completely ruined it for me by placing a big, bright red sticker on the box labeling it OVERSIZED.

Sigh, wtf?

Though size 11 is generally the largest size this store carries (and in many styles they top out at 10), these days it really can’t be considered “oversized”… and even if it could, what kind of marketing brilliance is it to use that term on any women’s fashion (or fashion in general)? It’s not flattering (it calls to mind those signs on trucks transporting half-houses or huge boats on the highway: OVERSIZED LOAD ), and if the intent was to highlight the size, the same large red sticker could have been used to simply state SIZE 11. Obviously the labels were created by someone not familiar with image-angst. Fortunately, I like this particular “boat-of-shoe” (and they don’t even look that big) and will happily don them this weekend, but please, these places need to get a marketing clue. :-/