This article in the Onion is pretty funny – “Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation.” The surprising part of the article is that it mentions my father’s company:
“I think Ron was the only guy at W+K who understood the importance of running the Gretag-Macbeth Eye-One Beamer on presentations.”
Greytag-Macbeth is the company that acquired my father’s company – Sequel Imaging.
I was planning on writing a post not dissimilar to Fil’s except I realized that I probably only bought a dozen albums this year. So, it would be a little disingenuous for me to say “these are my top 10 albums of the year” – it makes it sound like I bought hundreds of CD’s and these rose to the top. Anyhow, there was a bunch of stuff that came out this year that I really enjoyed and purchased.
Albums I really liked:
– The Killers – Hot Fuss
– The Twilight Singers – She Loves You
– Ray LaMontagne – Trouble
– Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News
– Tom Waits – Real Gone
– Interpol – Antics
– Badly Drawn Boy – One Plus One Is One
– Bobby Bare Jr. – From the End of Your Leash
Albums I found to be pretty good:
– The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come For Free
– The Zutons – Who Killed The Zutons
– Grant Lee Phillips – Virginia Creeper
Albums I wish I’d bought:
– Arcade Fire – Funeral
– Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
– Magnet – On Your Side
I just found this picture on yahoo. It’s awesome that the Patriots won the Superbowl this weekend, but this fan shot is just classic. It features such encouraging signs as:
“T.O. Has B.O.”
“474-270-0334 Call Me Tom”
“Single + Looking” (with phone number)
and
“I’ll Show you mine if you show me yours!”
What a great group Patriots fans are.
Here’s a picture of my balcony from inside my apartment right now. It’s still snowing.
Good times. I’ll post again if it accumulates significantly higher, and I remember to take another picture. I went to the grocery store yesterday and it was a madhouse. I just wanted some laundry detergent, but I ended up having to leave and go home. Shopping carts were wrapped around the building. People were yelling at one another about their place in line. The whole thing was a disaster. It appears that some parts of Massachusetts are even in a “State of Emergency.”
Yesterday, January 19th, was the first day of the winter season that I had to turn my heat on. I has dropped below zero several times this season so far, but I guess the recent culmination of consecutive cold days pushed my apartment’s temperature down so low I actually had to turn on the heat.
This year, with the addition of a new computer (for a total of 5 running full time), I thought I could finally heat my one bedroom through the winter on the power of consumer electronics alone. Between that and the fact that I live on the top floor, and thereby get heat leaking in from the people below me, the unit generally keeps itself warm.
There’s really no reason for me to want to make it through the winter without turning on the heat – heat’s included in the lease. It’s more of a nerdy challenge to myself. Well, we’ll see how it goes next year. Making it 2/3 of the way through January in Massachusetts wasn’t too shabby.
After seeing a co-worker with one and deciding I had to have one too, I bought the TomTom GO GPS device. It told me how to get to work this morning, because of course finding my way to work has been a continuous challenge. The thing runs Linux (in fact you can download the source here) and it’s about the size of a softball, but a slightly different shape. The coolest part about it is the 3D view of where you’re going. You can see streets ahead of you on this map before you actually see them out the windshield, and points of interest (restaurants, gas stations, etc) are laid out as well.
So, while en route to somewhere, you can call up a list of nearby restaurants or gas stations, touch one, and then it will tell you (in a normal, spoken voice) how to get there – turn by turn. It’s very cool, and very hackable. Hooks up to the PC via a USB port, and takes regular SD cards for map storage. I’m looking forward to using it somewhere where it could actually be useful. Tomorrow I’ll have a chance to try it out in Boston, and this weekend in Vermont.
Compulsive gadget-acquirer that I am, I nearly purchased the newly announced Mac Mini yesterday. The reason I didn’t is because I couldn’t really fill in the blank in the sentence “I would use it for ______” with a good answer. It’s to underpowered and unexpandable to be my primary machine. Because it can’t take two network cards, I coudn’t turn it into a router. Because it runs an Apple OS, I couldn’t run MythTV on it. It’s just so damn pretty.
Then I received an e-mail today that pretty much summarized why I wanted one: The Apple iProduct (it’s a joke). I’m not really a huge Apple fan, but their products definitely draw this kind of appeal.
I’ve never actually seen this magazine but it sounds hilarious.
It’s barely 3 p.m., and Frank Kelly Rich, who edits the bimonthly homage to getting soused, is draining his gin and tonic and eyeing a whiskey bottle on the top shelf. Moments later, he’s drinking that as well.
Don’t let the United States Mint fool you. As Schulte revealed to me, this is the real Louisiana quarter. Now, how they got it to animate is a real mystery.
I started using Flickr last night because I’d read so many good things about it. Fil and I had started writing something like this back in the day, but then we moved across the country from one another and found better [paying] things to do.
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