Archive for May, 2009
Bad Timing
I thought about why starting a blog would be a good idea. I thought about where, and how, and what.
I did not think about when. When turned out to be in the weeks leading up to a move to a new city. Bad Timing.
This will be, by rough count, my 10th move in 8 years, although easily the largest since most of those were either for college or the Peace Corps (the latter being long distance moves, but you don’t exactly pack up a whole house when you go to the Peace Corps). It’s an intrastate move, only 70 miles, but there’s a very narrow time window to do the actual moving, plus the amount of junk my wife and I have accumulated since those first moves is just astounding. I can’t actually fathom how all of those stuffed animals, board games, juice glasses, fake decorative flowers, Hannukah candles, crappy end tables, bean bag chairs, and ice cream makers fit into our little two-bedroom apartment. And there was no way we were going to cram them all into the next one. Let’s just say the Goodwill drop-off center was a little more crowded this year, and that I’ve had a little less time than expected for extraneous web musings.
Once the move is completed, I’ll follow up with some thoughts for anyone else preparing for a life-upheaval. Until then, why don’t you all enjoy the weather for me while I’m taping boxes.
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I installed my ProClip phone mount in my car today and absolutely love it. ProClip makes custom mounts and holders for pretty much any car and mobile device out there. I emailed them shortly after getting my new HTC Evo because they didn’t have a holder for it yet, and was told that it was being worked on and I’d be notified when it was available.
Sure enough, I got an email yesterday letting me know they were in stock and could be ordered online, along with links directly to the product. I immediately placed my order.
Literally one day later, it was here. Yeah, it only shipped from Illinois to Michigan, but it was sent via ground (FedEx), and we’re talking about an order for a brand new item that was processed, fulfilled, and sent-out same day. Consider me seriously impressed.
And of course, the product itself is awesome. The mount for my car is designed to go on without damaging, marking, or even requiring any disassembly of the dash. It’s on there really solidly (I drove over some rough roads to find out), and the holder for the phone fits perfectly and is covered in a felt-like fabric so it won’t ever scratch the phone and dampens any vibrations even further.
Point is, if you use your mobile phone (or mp3 player) in your car for music/navigation assistant/stoplight entertainment (no texting while driving!), you should just buy a ProClip now. They’re not even expensive.
Dammit, tumblr
I want to like you, I really do. But seriously, this is getting frustrating.
I put things in the queue, and they don’t get posted.
I post things, and they don’t get forwarded to Twitter, or they do - twice.
I put things in the queue, they don’t get posted, so I remove them from the queue and manually repost them, and then they inexplicably show up in the queue again, where I delete them, only to have my manual post deleted as well. WTF?!?!
This kind of reminds me of Twitter’s growth phase (which is maybe still ongoing), where there’s random downtime, and sometimes some things are working while others are not. But look, you’ve been in the news recently for reaching the 1 Billion Posts milestone. I think we could all live with a little downtime here and there, but let’s fix the blatant and obvious bugs, k?
Editing tumblr themes
I just now figured out that you can directly edit the html/css of any tumblr theme. So that only took me like, what, two months? Progress people, progress.
In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
Hitchens on battling cancer. (via cajunboy) (via soupsoup)
Brilliant and jarring… For as long as it takes to read this essay, you will have his cancer. And when you are done reading it, you will not have it anymore. (Hopefully he won’t, either.) But what you will be left with in your newly-minted “still hopefully cancer-free” state of health is a better appreciation of your life.
(via jhnmyr)
Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, “How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?
Man did this hit the nail on the head for me.
