Stuff from July, 2007
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on July, 2007.
Crane
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on July, 2007.
Zucchini buckled up - This is the largest piece of produce I have ever seen.
Cold brewed coffee - Apparently, this type of coffee is absolutely delicious because it doesn’t have the undesirable side effects that occur when you expose coffee to boiling water. The process reduces the need for cream and sugar to almost nill. The recipe:
Wardway Fuels, Inc. - One of Ars Technica’s writers was able to cram iPhone purchase and a wedding into one weekend. One of her pictures shows a sign: “NO I PHONES HERE BUT WE HAVE PLENTY OF PROPANE”
“The Line Experience” - Good observations about the Apple modus operandi, generally:
My old phone, one based on Windows Mobile 5.0, had almost every feature the iPhone has - point by point. The differences between the products (like the differences between their desktop cousins) have to do with how functionality is exposed to the user. In this matter, you’ll find that Apple’s product is almost infuriatingly superior.
Exploding clocks - Looking for the gift for someone who has everything? How about these one of a kind exploding/asploding clocks by Roger Wood. They look like cartoon clocks flying apart, yet they still work. Not a gift I could afford to give anyone in the next, oh, 10 years or so. Always good to keep on the back burner, though.
Coolest. Lamp. Ever. - Call it a stupid idea, but I feel that if we choose to spend our hard earned money on something, it should jive with our artistic sensibilities. Nobody buys curtains they hate—why buy other things whose appearance we loathe? This approach, however, quickly can become impractical.
Mortuary humor - The set-up here is quick: some random guy with questionable motives supposedly was responsible for a signed affidavit opened after his death, which disclosed outrageous details about the true nature of the Roswell incident. This comment followed:
If you look at them far enough away, trees look like big weeds.
50/50 Sheets - With a lovely red line down the middle, so you never have an argument about who is stealing covers.
Derek K. Miller and cancer - Stunningly honest and straightforward blogging from Derek Miller, a 38 year old family man with stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. When I read his writing, it puts my life, with it’s myriad “problems” and “difficulties” in sharp perspective. Thinking about what he’s going through, it makes me feel very sad.
“This is a Really Long, Pointless Story about a Shirt” - A prominent coder/software developer/owner of Delicious Monster in the Mac community writes about his experiences with the importance of wearing nice shirts. For example:
Torchlight 2007 Registration - Go! Register for the Torchlight Run! Go go go!
Whenever I tune into NPR, I inevitably hear the part of the program where they announce the “sponsored by” companies. I usually hear this:
… and brought to you by Medtronic. Medtronic, saluting graduates in the fields of science and health.
Cat returns home after 10 years - Thank goodness for microchipping. Imagine seeing your pet again after 10 years. Ridiculous.
Genius nutcracker - Put a nut on the stainless steel base, place the flexible rubber dome on top, and then mash the rubber dome with your fist. Tada, the nut is cracked.
(thx, boingboing)
I sat down next to Mykala on the Fourth of July, and casually asked her a question while I did a few trivial computing tasks. “Did you notice a difference in speed for tumbledry?” I was overjoyed to hear her response: “Yes, actually—I noticed it seemed a bit faster.” Her single comment made the struggle to resolve all of the lags in delivering tumbledry at high speed to you lovely readers worth it. Now, I have thought for a while how to make an analogy that will keep the attention of the non-programmer readers of this space. You see, historically, the problem is that these techy posts become so heavily jargon laden that they are neither digestible nor desirable to anyone who doesn’t develop web applications for a living. So, yes, I could ramble about PHP, gzip compression, query optimization, JavaScript libraries, and Dean Edwards’ amazing packer… but I would alienate many, and bore many more. So, I present an analogy that is a bit rough around the edges, but should still get the point across.
Free programming tips - Really great advice on programming, including waiting to optimize until after you find the slow spots.
And don’t write longer, more obtuse code because you think it’s faster. Remember, hardware gets faster. MUCH faster, every year. But code has to be maintained by programmers, and there’s a shortage of good programmers out there. So, if I write a program that’s incredibly maintainable and extensible and it’s a bit too slow, next year I’m going have a huge hit on my hands. And the year after that, and the year after that.
Joseph Bertolozzi Plays the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge - I don’t mean he’s playing at the bridge, I mean he’s playing the bridge. In a project not unlike Bill Fontana’s sound sculpture “Oscillating Steel Grids along the Brooklyn Bridge,” Mr. Bertolozzi is in the process of sampling sound using contact microphones from the bridge itself. Certainly, this concept would be cool on its own: if you listen to the movement Bridge Funk, a small piece played on the bridge used to gain approval for the project, you’ll find that the music sounds very, very cool—much more musically intricate than you would imagine a bridge sounding. However, this project will not simply culminate in a digital collection of sounds assembled into music. The composer is writing out an entire 40-60 minute score to be performed live and piped into a nearby park in 2009.
The Bounce - Stratospheric giraffe jumping makes for an entertaining short-form game.
The ideas for the following theory have been steeping in my head for a while. And since I’m doing something similar to kottke’s operation clear all browser tabs, you get to read my thoughts on the topic. See, the theory is about why we have a different density of hair on different parts of our body. To begin: evoultionary biology dictates that the different hair densities on our bodies must have conferred an advantage to individuals who had favorable distributions of said hair.
Scientific ignorance in the U.S. - The article, which is behind a registration wall (bugmenot to the rescue), talks about the classes not of economy but of knowledge in the United States.
Great desks and productivity furniture - Really useful for sometime in the misty future - I especially like their basic computer desks.
Amazing Grace - Why not watch Victor Wooten play Amazing Grace on a bass guitar, using only the harmonics of the instrument for the melody? Treeeemendous.
The Millwall Brick - Who knew newspapers could be weapons?
Giraffe in my Loft - “There was a giraffe in my loft / I didn’t invite it / It was stomping ‘round for days / And kept me up all night.”
Crudo, Italian Sashimi - Italian + Sashimi = Crudo, says David Pasternack. Hey Sagert, give this a try, won’t you?
Twins Separated at Birth - Parents say the doctors stole a baby, doctors say parents abandoned a baby. Either way:
The two girls, Andrea and Marielisa, are now 15 and were recently introduced by mutual friends.
Their biological parents say no-one told them they were having twins.
…
When they were introduced, they apparently burst into tears at the realisation that, looking so identical, they had to be twins.
I’ve written before about my extensive internal dialogue and my propensity to replay social scenes in my head, looking for ways I could have said the right thing. Shockingly, this character trait comes in handy sometimes, as recently evidenced at Lifetime Fitness. I was taking the weights off a bar on a squat rack, and I realized I did not have enough space for the remaining plates. To my left, a woman was using another squat rack, which had room for the plates.
Welcome to Dooce, everything I wish tumbledry to be - Her most recent post:
The only thing missing was a Google map of our house and a red pin sticking straight up out of Jon’s skull to signal HERE, HERE, HERE …
I thought this looked cool backlit like that.
Boring subject leads to dramatic angle!
For the back steps currently being built.
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Afternoon sunlight filters through the leaves of a Skyline locust (Gleditsia triacanthos inermis).
Well, tonight I run what is becoming an annual tradition: the Torchlight 5K in Minneapolis. It was rather funny actually, because this year I received a big email advertising the Torchlight, complete with fancy graphics and everything. Now, normally I don’t give a second look to these things (I was planning on running, anyway!), but for some reason I let this email load. Lo and behold, there was a picture of me from last year, at the starting line of the run!
Back in June of 2005, I said that in a couple of years, we’d have thin, transparent speakers. These would, of course, make our laptop monitors into big speakers. What happened? Where are my transparent speakers, Where’s My Jetpack?
While cleaning out my inbox, I got a chance to read an email from my Dad about a guy called Willard Wigan. Essentially, he sculpts on a mind-bogglingly small scale: almost all of his work can easily fit through the head of a pin. Wikipedia:
Comments weren’t quite working because every time you left a comment, tumbledry tried to send you back a copy of every comment that had ever been left here.
Then it told you that you weren’t connected to the internet.
These bizarre problems should be fixed.
Here are some random thoughts that, individually, would struggle to make a complete post. Together, they will become more.
#1
I had a #11 Country Club at Jimmy John’s. This is Mykala’s sandwich, and I tried it today. I loved it. Just loved it. It’s made of “fresh sliced turkey breast, applewood smoked ham, provolone, and tons of lettuce, tomato, and mayo.”
Rented the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 IS L to shoot Matt and Shayla’s reception. It is an amazing piece of equipment.
This Penny Arcade comic is something I’ve been searching for for a while (how do I get that double “for” out of that sentence?). Anyhow, it summarizes how internet commenting boards make people into completely offensive, babbling retards. It’s completely true.
The video of the “spider pig” part from the upcoming Simpson’s Movie is hilarious. Thanks, Mykala!
Evan Ferstenfeld has a home-run of a t-shirt on his hands with this Threadless shirt: I Listen To Bands that Don’t Even Exist Yet. Helps you take your musical tastes less seriously. Again: thanks, Mykala!
Give tumbledry the ol’ hard refresh, and you’ll find the newest, very centered, version of the layout. 50% of the people I’ve surveyed love it this way! That’s one out of two!
Dear Matt and Shayla,
I write to you both during a very exciting time: you two may not get a chance to read this missive until you return from your honeymoon to Hawaii, or even until you are moved in to your new home in Iowa… or perhaps, not until after you each complete your first semester of vet school. So many big changes! The entire thing hit me when I was standing at the back of the banquet hall at your reception: you two, just married, walked in for the first time, wearing the biggest smiles I’ve ever seen. It may sound cliche, but there’s no other way to describe it: suddenly, the years past came rushing back, and I swayed a bit, surprised at it all — the magnitude of this most auspicious day. I can only imagine what you two were feeling and experiencing: it must have been orders of magnitude greater.
I really enjoyed this comment about the changing place of email in today’s digital communication landscape.
“A ‘social network’ is next to useless for building professional contacts if it’s just full of other dumbass teenagers texting OMG WTF BBQ at each other all day.”
Behind the pay-wall at the New York Times, Paul Krugman writes about the sad state of United States broadband internet.
Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.
There are frequently crickets in the basement of my parent’s home, which nobody likes to kill. So, after accidentally amputating the legs off one too many crickets in attempts to remove them from the premises, my mother devised a system whereby a check box (remember checks?) is used to scoop up the crickets. Recently, my dad was trying to save a cricket, so he asked after the whereabouts of this box. He found it. It’s labeled in permanent marker: “Box for catching/releasing crickets.”
Mykala and I are currently riding a frighteningly violent relationship rollercoaster full of hairpin turns and terrifying drops. Three years: the stakes are high, very high.
They had custom wrapped Hershey’s, with Matt and Shayla’s wedding info on them!
This is the most stunning thing I’ve seen online in over a year. A certain Mr. Fredo Viola created something he calls the Sad Song Video, which was made only using 15 second clips from his digital camera. Incredible production, haunting melodies — today, I’m happy for the internet.
There are currently a few difficulties with the “what’s new since you last visited” script. Should be fixed soon. In the meantime, everything is new, all the time!
UPDATE: If new things are not updating, delete your cookies, and everything should work fine again.
“Now it’s only work
Each day bleeding into the next
Barely scraping by I tire myself out just so I can rest
But rest it rightly comes
And when it does I come out and go home
Because it’s much too quiet
Seems that I’m not suited to being in love
And everyone around me’s changed
But the garden that you planted remains.”
Katy is happy at the wedding reception!
I was listening to NPR’s program called Midday this past Monday, and the topic was the final Harry Potter book. One of the speakers on the show was from the Red Balloon Bookshop, and her name was Maureen Sackmaster-Carpenter. Sackmaster. What an awesome last name.
Here I am cleaning out my email inbox (responses from two different job applications today!), and I ran across an email I left in my inbox since February, from Nils. It depicts this fantastic circular parking garage, with an open air car elevator at the center, used to hoist cars up to little carports. It is 20 stories high.
Always useful for trivia and popular culture, here comes Wikipedia, about Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo:
Since the release of the film, the unusual title suffix “Electric Boogaloo,” a reference to a funk-oriented dance style from the 1970s, has become a running joke concerning movie sequels.
…
It has also been used to lampoon the actual name of a sequel when it is found to be ridiculous or disappointing.
An update from Metacritic, on the eve of the release of The Simpsons Movie: it is slotting in between Hot Fuzz and Knocked up, sporting a strong rating of “82.” This is high enough to merit the movie “universal acclaim.”
I’m happy with how this one turned out.
My parents, cutting a rug!
My favorite part of this video from Potter Puppet Pals is Ron’s courageousness. Oh, and bother, bother, bother, bother, bother.
I liked the color scheme.
The flash/lens combo worked beautifully.
Last night I was putting in a little time at Lifetime Fitness lifting weights. The pace was laid back, generally slower than I usually go. Despite the relaxed environment, there was still one man at the gym out to ruin it for the rest of us. I will call two separate transgressions committed by this man to your attention:
Linkin Park’s newest album Minutes to Midnight has what I consider to be almost perfect cover art. The band is presented in a graphically strong yet photographically interesting way and there is an absolutely stunning logotype set above their heads. Said logotype is constructed from a relentlessly powerful typeface, with a treatment reminiscent of the famous Metallica logo. It actually looks like the Metallica logo grew up, matured, got a job, and combed its hair but still has a solid core of attitude and rock.
I’ve been thinking about selling t-shirts for tumbledry, so I’ve been kicking some designs around in my head. In case anyone is curious: the shirts would be American Apparel style 2001, color: “up in the air.” I recently put this together:
I still haven’t tried this.
At first glance, the Andrew English wedding band collection looks pretty normal. Then, you notice something:
Commissioned bands are delicately hand-engraved with the fingerprint of your partner and therefore completely unique to each couple.
