10.30.08
Halloween at Microsoft
Today I stumbled upon some very strange pumpkins in my workplace, courtesy of the SkyDrive team. This was my favorite.
(Don’t get it? Click here.)
10.20.08
Dinner Club, Part 1
My [just-out-of-college] friends and I have decided that in order to mitigate our collective failure to cook anything other than freezer food and pasta when we’re cooking only for ourselves, we will take turns hosting Monday night dinners for the whole gang.
Tonight was the first night of the Dinner Club, and I cooked. Now, I have a copy of the joy of cooking and everything, but it seems to be targeted at a different audience. I mean, it seems to assume that I know what kind of dishes exist and just need to know how much x to stir in with the y. This is not a great assumption, especially since I’m new to cooking on a regular basis.
As usual, the internet came through for me. After browsing Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes for a few minutes, I had easy recipes for guacamole and cheese enchiladas, and Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen popped this wonderful (but slightly more challenging) pumpkin swirl brownies recipe into my RSS reader yesterday.
Anyway, the cooking was fun and everything went over very well. Thanks internet!
Now I just need to learn to cook without completely wrecking the kitchen - it took me about an hour to clean everything up after my guests left, which was a little bit fail.
10.19.08
The Big Picture
Since May, The Boston Globe has been publishing an amazing photo blog. Since I found out about it a few months ago, it’s rapidly become one of my favorite RSS feeds. In their own words:
The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.
Recent topics have ranged from the Special Olympics to Sapphire mines in Madagascar to the first ever Formula One race held at night.
Check it out: The Big Picture
10.13.08
Blogspeed fail
Hey guys,
One blog post a day until the end of 2008 was too ambitious given my other obligations (ie, the xbox I bought recently. Hey, just being honest). I’m scaling back a bit, but the blog will stay active. Seriously, I mean it this time.
Rachel
10.12.08
YouTube meme family tree
Interested in seeing exactly how video memes spawn their progeny on YouTube? Look no further:
TimeTube showing search results for “don’t tase me”.
It runs pretty slowly, but it’s interesting enough to be worth it: TimeTube
10.11.08
Creative Anti-Piracy: Adobe Space Monkey
I stumbled on this very awesome anti-piracy measure (or easter egg?) near the end of an all-nighter in college. I was trying to get some results charts cleaned up for the paper I’d been working on, and I launched Photoshop. The splash screen appeared, and…
Very disconcerting at 7am, let me tell you. The screen stayed there for about 15 seconds, then the app quit.
Thanks for having a sense of humor, Adobe.
10.10.08
Tequila ad targeting citizens of the internets
I was in downtown Seattle with redirect tonight and we saw a billboard advertising some brand of tequila. In block letters, it said:
KNOW LOL
KNOW : D
KNOW WHAT REAL
LAUGHTER SOUNDS LIKEKNOW YOUR TEQUILA
…ouch, right? The best thing about this is that the ad itself is pretty lol, in that it’s funny in a not-entirely-intentional way.
I looked online for an image of the ad, but the third comment on this post was the only mention of it I could find (btw, google found nothing relevant - I found this using the same query on live search). That comment did tell me that the campaign was for Don Julio brand tequila, but their site doesn’t contain the image either.
Internet fail. Please comment if you find it, its lolness deserves to be shared.
10.09.08
The most important internet of all
I had some other ideas for a post for tonight, but then I checked my email and saw that Youth Guardian Services (an organization that I have been a part of since I was 15, and that I now have the honor of leading) received a generous and completely unsolicited donation today.
The note included was very short: “I fondly remember my time on the Youth lists and how much they helped me. Thanks for saving my life.”
I read it, and read it again. It’s not that this is news - we actually get this kind of feedback pretty often at YGS - but repetition doesn’t lessen the impact of this kind of thing.
I wrote a few days ago that I am “from USENET, and from some early web BBs, but mostly I’m from LiveJournal.”
That was true, but let me be more specific: where I’m from on the internet is caring communities that are in the business of saving lives, every night, just by being safe and being there. I’m from BrainTalk, which was a wonderful community before the project got abandoned by MGH and Harvard, and from ssyglb, whose tireless moderators carved out and defended a safe(ish - it is USENET, after all) space on USENET for GLBTQ teens. Finally, I’m from the YOUTH lists, a project of YGS that has helped nearly 10,000 GLBTQ young people reach out safely and anonymously and get the support they need to survive.
So that’s where I’m from. And that’s why I’m so interested in the ways that technology connects people, why staying involved in the life of the internet has been so important to me over the years.
Anyway. Internet saves lives - that was my point. And if you want to get involved, well, YGS is looking for a web designer to revamp our website, which is starting to show its age. Please contact me if you or anyone you know is interested in helping us with this.
10.07.08
Seattle buses, mobile internet, and me
It works like this: I get to the bus stop, I check the time on my cell phone, and I wait nervously. When’s the next bus scheduled? Is it on time? Will I be waiting 2 minutes or 20? Or forever? Most of the time I have no way of knowing.
Ok, sure, I could find this information on my iPhone. But it would involve visiting two separate extremely fugly websites that are even worse on a small screen: Trip Planner and MyBus. On MyBus you can save frequent queries, kind of, by bookmarking search results - but no such luck on Trip Planner. I have to type in my start and end addresses each time, even though 95% of the time they’re both in the top 5 addresses I enter.
In short, it takes several minutes of fiddling. And several minutes of flashing an iPhone around while standing at an unlit bus stop is not generally regarded a great plan.
I was about to post a plea that someone write an acceptably mobile-formatted web app that pulls data from both of these sites, or perhaps an iPhone app that does, but then I thought to check the App Store (crazy, I know).
Sure enough, I found Seattle Bus [iTunes Store link], an iPhone app that does some of the above. It looks like it pulls from MyBus, but doesn’t have trip planning functionality… yet? But it does locate the nearest bus stop based on your location, which is sweet. I’ll just hope that trip planning comes along soon. In the meantime, I’m buying this baby ($9.99) and checking it out.
Another contender is OneBusAway, a free iPhone-optimized web app with MyBus-like functionality, which I’ll also be checking out.
Let me know if there are other solutions, especially ones that integrate trip planning. Efficiency in my daily travels is kind of… a priority for me.
10.06.08
Hiveminder, my one true (task-managing) love
I know that the first rule of getting organized is to find a system that works for you and use it. I know this. But I am also a complete sucker for shiny new organization tools. As a child, one of my favorite places to go was the school supplies section of UW’s University Bookstore. I would examine all the Trapper Keepers and backpacks, imagining the system each might create.
Of course, every time I used one of these items, whatever system I had designed would inevitably break down into appalling messiness: while I really, really liked organization systems, I was really, really bad at sticking to them.
This trend followed me into the digital realm, and online - I make systems and then I cut corners, and then everything goes to shit. Over and over again.
Until I found my soulmate.
Hiveminder has three key features that run my life:
- Braindump. Hit enter between tasks and just keep typing until you don’t have anything else in your head. Great way to relieve that “omg so much to do I’m screwed” feeling - I may be screwed, but at least it’s all in the system.
- Task Review. Takes you through all your tasks one at a time, giving you limited options: mark as done, say you’ll do it today, say you don’t want to see it until Saturday, until Monday, or for a month. Then it congratulates you on making it through the review (”That wasn’t so bad, was it?”) and shows you the tasks that you said you’d do today.
- Ability to hide tasks until some date. This “safe procrastination” feature is crucial for me, because otherwise I practice unsafe procrastination (and forget things I’m avoiding).
Now, while Hiveminder and I have a solid relationship, I have strayed occasionally. Never for longer than 3 months. But about once a year I’m drawn in by some other, shiny new organizational toy. But Remember The Milk had too many options to fiddle with and I found myself fiddling instead of actually doing tasks. In Nozbe, processing tasks was too time-intensive, plus they hit me with an upsell. I tried a series of text files syncing across my devices, but I was much less effective when I had to manually move things around. And none of them had any safe procrastination support, so they ultimately failed me.
In the end, I always come back. I wonder if I’ll ever learn? Probably not. As long as there’s a new shiny, I can’t help but check it out. But I do so knowing that Hiveminder is waiting for me with open arms, ready to get my life back in order and let me get back to getting stuff done.
Check it out: Hiveminder
