I need to get back into posting… things have just been crazy with moving/job interviews/6 cross-country roundtrip flights in the last month/drama. On the plus side, I have lots to say once I have the time to say it.
Just a quick note though, if you’re a member of the Apple group on Facebook, there’s a free 20 song sampler. It’s all electronica, but there might be a few good songs in there.
So I know that I’m dating myself here, but before music came in tube-delivered mp3s, it was bundled with other songs on a piece of physical storage called an ‘album’. You can still see the vestiges of this archaic practice by glancing at the lower-left corner of the iTunes window and seeing a little piece of art belonging to the song that’s currently playing.
Anyway, especially in light of that actually-surprisingly-entertaining-fake-album-creation-craze on facebook, I thought it was worth linking to Urlesque’s list of the 20 weirdest album covers. Some rather disturbing, a couple clever, and a couple just weird.
I don’t know who at Disney came up with this clever plan, but geeks have renewed hope next week when DWTS kicks off next week. The “Big-Bang Theory”-inspired pairing?
Not sure if I’ll actually manage to catch his episode, but it’s perhaps something worth putting on the calendar.
So this is a little late in the posting, but things have been busy (though not as busy as GMoney-busy) recently… but anyway, a couple weeks ago there was a big firestorm on slashdot and elsewhere sparked by the announcement that Windows 7 Starter Edition would allow only three applications (excluding antivirus apps) to run simultaneously.
To review, three is not a large number. At last year’s Professional Developers Conference, MSFT said that that “70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time”… but that’s a pretty useless empty stat given the vagueness of “windows”. This year, the MSFT monkey asserts that
most users wouldn’t be affected by the three-app limit. “We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time],” Painell claims. “We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn’t affect very many people.”
This is all stupid, and may not even happen due to the EU’s legal team.
But… a clever post buried in the slashdot thread got me thinking – this is actually a good thing for linux and Mac users! This way we get a cheap(er) version of Win7 to run via Parallels/VM/etc, and the app limit constraint is meaningless.
Finally, some humor:
A Microsoft study has shown that users seldom use all 26 letters during a session, and so the economy-priced Windows 7 Functional Illiterate Edition will only support A through W and the numerals 0 through 7. However, the software will be endorsed by Sesame Street and today is brought to you by the letter “/”.
I don’t think this is small-personly-offensive, but then I’m not a good one to judge. One could argue that corn-fed beef is inherently offensive, but that’s another matter. Anyway, my favorite line is “herding cows the size of Schnauzers – but they’re cattle” and the cow face-to-face with a prairie dog.
(Note: this is a pretty dull post, but would be way more interesting if I’d had a phone with a decent-quality camera. Sorry y’all.)
Yesterday we took a trip to the County Clerk’s office to get a marriage license, our second attempt after encountering an out-the-door-and-down-two-blocks line a couple weeks ago. This time, armed with an appointment, we were more/mostly successful.
Really, the whole thing was simultaneously both easy and frustrating. The DMV parallels were obvious in terms of long lines and lots of people just hanging out, filling out paperwork then waiting in another line, etc – except that it was a much more positive and more cheerful kind of clientele. Almost half of the couples there looked to be getting married on-site, including several girls/women/brides in pretty fancy-looking dresses and an entertaining mish-mash of suits, sport jackets, one tux, one blue-on-white pimp-stripe suit with blinged-out baseball cap, and a cute little 2-year-old in a tux with light-up LA Gear sneakers. Had we not had an appointment I suspect the entire process would have taken all afternoon – as it was, we were in-and-out in a little less than an hour.
Without getting too much into the politics of marriage and how they shouldn’t be mixed, it’s a weird experience. Cali does not require a blood test, nor is CA residency a requirement; you just have to show some kind of ID and list your parents and their state of birth. K had been planning to add one of my last names to her middle name, but apparently that’s not allowed – you can change/add something to your last name, or replace your middle name with a last name of your spouse, but apparently that’s it? dumb, I say, but oh well.
The parties may choose any of the
following middle or last names as the name they wish to be known as after marriage [FC § 306.5(b)(2)]:♦ Current last name of the other spouse
♦ Last name of either spouse given at birth
♦ A name combining into a single last name all or a segment of the current last name or last name of either
spouse given at birth
♦ A hyphenated combination of last names
I am told that Philly is due to get hit with 8-14 inches of snow this evening/tomorrow morning, with the Upper Valley getting almost that much tomorrow. In honor of the frozen stuff, I give you two Alexander Ovechkin vids:
This is the kind of thing where YouTube quality sucks… seriously, check it out on NHL.com or something. What’s really amazing about this one is not the goal (though that’s pretty sweet) but the way Alex goes from skating forwards to backwards to frontwards at full speed. Seriously, many a figure skater would wipe out trying that.
Secondly, a great hockey smile, and a great reason for smiling:
