Category: Life

I attended friend gimlet‘s birthday party and provided him with a rather pedestrian birthday card.

Here is the card he should have gotten, arrayed so you, gentle reader, can download it and print it for your own friends:

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To save it, right click and save the image to your local drive. Print it centered on your page and fold. Wah-lah!

Kudos to whomever designed the label for the new Gillette Clinical Strength Antiperspirant:

Yeah, let’s go with the hexagons and make it all scientific and stuff. If anyone noticed something amiss or astray with that initiative, that person was overruled. Too bad, too. When you’re going all scientific and whatnot, you’ll find that the hexagon is the chemical representation of benzene:

No, branding experts, benzene is not the cheaply photocopied collection of angst-ridden poetry and inky vampire drawings that Ben publishes. Benzene is:

Benzene exposure has serious health effects. Breathing high levels of benzene can result in death, while low levels can cause drowsiness, dizziness, rapid heart rate, headaches, tremors, confusion, and unconsciousness. Eating or drinking foods containing high levels of benzene can cause vomiting, irritation of the stomach, dizziness, sleepiness, convulsions, and death.

Fortunately, the target audience is probably just as clueless.

Rachel Lucas is right; anything with a British accent is funnier.

Here are 18 Stunning Bridges From Around The World.

(Link seen on Dynamist Blog.)

As a public service, I present to you the Apple II Video Display Worksheet for Graphics (GR) Mode:

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That should help make your design work go a little smoothly. Press your face against the screen. Can’t you just smell the mimeograph ink?

Additionally, I post for your amusement, the beginning of the source code for a game entitled Spies. No non-disclosure agreement required!

Click for full size

It’s not that we had to write the code by hand and put it through an optical scanner, you damn kids, it’s that we in middle school only got access to a computer during seventh hour but spent much of the other six handwriting the code because it was so exciting.

And just so you know, the schools had the Apples, but my first computer was a Commodore, so that’s where I turned off the path of geekanati and into the real world.

Sorry if I draw your mind to Barbara Ehrenreich; have a little toke or two to clear your thoughts. It’s what she would do.

Now, let’s reflect for a moment on how big service-based corporations suck the small change out of you every month for “fees” they made up to add to your bill.

My mother recently switched to digital cable because she mistakenly thought that analog cable (instead of analog broadcast) would be out the window next year. When she spoke with a sales person about getting a couple of aw-cute channels like Hallmark, the sales person told her it was included in the basic tier of digital service.

The technician shows up several hours late (and back times his service log to show that he was on time), and my mother, now digitally cabled, discovers she does not have the channels she was promised. A call to the consumer inquiries line indicates that they’re not really basic tier. But just because my mother took an extra effort, the company gave her what she was promised in the first place.

This anecdote led your humble narrator into a rather complete Leo Getz style They, erm, screw you with the customer service rant that touched on these fees.

Techdirt led me to this story that indicates that average consumers (according to a survey) spend almost $1000 a year paying little fees (regulatory cost recovery fees, number portability fees, and so on) that companies add on to their advertised prices.

If you’re making $40,000 a year, that’s 2.5% of your income, brah.

It irks the heck out of me that as the content and the Army of Davids thing makes the content cheaper and whatnot, that the people who control the infrastructure continue to combine and coalesce into large corporations that can levy these absurd and unethical surcharges leaving their customers, often contractually-bound customers, bound to pay the price since they have no alternative.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that the corporations often have a legitimate beef with the increased costs of regulatory compliance and the added costs of government layering on a couple more taxes. But we consumers give them too much latitude to slather us with additional costs when the last quarter came in a little light on Wall Street, too.

If someone gives you red towels for Christmas, that person is not your friend.

I’ve washed this set twice using the color-lock vinegar method, and they still bleed red. Also, the manufacturer has used a special dye-as-binder method so that the actual washings are taking out as much of the linen as the dye.

So when we put these special towels out when our “friend” comes by next year, she’ll think we need more new towels. Red. And the circle will be unbroken.

One of these is not like the others, I hope:

You know as well as I do that some athletic cat owner is going to find himself or herself bonking miles away from civilization and will have to decide whether to eat a pouch of this instead of the granola or power bar he or she thought he or she grabbed from the cabinet this morning. He or she will.

All of them will.

Finally, Andrew Sullivan has a reason to blare. Glenn Reynolds has publicly acknowledged his support for waterboarding in this post:

SINUS PROBLEMS? Wash them away! Can it really be that simple?

What’s he talking about? Nasal interrogation:

Nasal irrigation is a personal hygiene practice which involves flooding the nasal cavity with warm saline solution. The goal of nasal irrigation is to clear out excess mucus and particulates and moisturize the nasal cavity.

That sounds like waterboarding to me.

As one of our biggest home improvement projects in our previous house, sadly enough, we put drawer liners in our kitchen drawers. Surely that added $1000 to the selling price of the home and recouped more than 100% of our investment for the improvement in the sale price–if the purchaser opened the drawers and didn’t rip out the marble-looking liner as part of a complete remodel.

Because I prefer to err on the side of too much, I bought a little more than a roll and a half more of the contact paper than I needed. I injected the complete roll and the partial roll into the second-hand contact paper market through the underground economy, meaning I sold them for a buck or something at a garage sale. However, I found some scrap in my basement that represented some cuttings from the partial roll.

Throw them out? What kind of miser would I be then? I mean, sure, I don’t have a a drawer or two of suitable dimensions to use this contact paper as nature intended it, but I could find some use for it.

And I did:

Now that’s Christmas wrapping paper you can reuse.

I didn’t remove the adhesive backing, so the gifts’ recipient can line two small drawers or wrap gifts herself. Given that she’s a miser, too, I wouldn’t put it past her. However, since it’s my inheritance she’s protecting, go, Mom!

You trained me well.

When we get to the L in The Alphabet Book (Bright & Early Board Books™), I get creeped out:

There’s no reason for that lion to wink that doesn’t cause me disquiet.

Just like Andy Williams, but in medium res graphics:

Courtesy of Rob Preston of Information Week:

If you long for a Leave It To Beaver world where life is simple and jobs are secure, watch Nick at Nite and take the civil service exam.

Word.

How many of you can say what you were doing the exact day when Google Maps snapped your house? Well, in my case, I was moving out:

That’s our old house with the moving truck backed into the driveway; the second moving truck sits at the edge of the cul-de-sac, awaiting its turn at carrying away the Noggle library. Heather’s car and my truck are parked out on the main street to make room.

As a matter of fact, I do own a shoe horn.

Jack, of Jack in the Box restaurant fame? His wife’s name is Cricket.

From some commercial probably 5 years ago, I remember this.

What a waste of brain cells.