Updates from July, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • rajbot 10:19 pm on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Amazon Subscribe & Save: Enabler of the Tiki Lifestyle 

    I always wanted a service that could send a box of razor blades, a bottle of rum, some cocktail umbrellas, a few pineapples, and a single black sock to me every three months. Finally, Amazon has stepped up to the plate with their Subscribe & Save service. Well, they only have razor blades and a few grocery items right now, but I’m sure they’ll add the rum soon enough.

    You get 15% off when you add an item to your Subscribe & Save list, even if you remove the item after a single shipment.

    • automatically receive a new shipment of the item in intervals you select–every one, two, three, or six months
    • get a discount on our everyday price
    • get free shipping on every Subscribe & Save shipment

     

    • may 8:05 am on July 6, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      oooh, i want something like this for trader joes!

  • may 9:42 pm on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Playing cards 

    playingcards1.jpg

    Check out these neat illustrated playing cards. I ordered 3 different decks so we need to have a poker party when they arrive. You can order them here if you want a deck too.

     

  • rajbot 5:58 pm on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Zara Vs Annie 

    Zara: Will you sniff my belly?
    Annie: We’ve been playing all day! Don’t you ever get tired??
    Zara: Yes, but I really like getting my belly sniffed when I’m tired. Will you sniff my belly?
    Annie: OK, but I’ve already sniffed your belly 1025 times today. Just *one* more time!!
    Zara: YAY!!!!!!
    (20 seconds pass)
    Zara: Will you sniff my belly???

    http://www.archive.org/download/ZaraVsAnnie/ZaraVsAnnie.flv',}"/>

    You should see them playing when they aren’t tired..

    Higher rez version here.

     

  • may 3:09 pm on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    The Marvel of Manga 

    marvelofmanga.jpg

    For a friend’s birthday yesterday, we went to see The Marvel of Manga at the Asian Art Museum. The exhibit features the work of Osamu Tezuka, who created characters like Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and is also known as the father of manga. An interesting thing about Tezuka is that he had no official art training but actually graduated from Osaka University with a medical degree. The breadth of his work is amazing and it’s worth checking out. The exhibit runs through Sept 9th and the museum is free on the first Tuesdays of the month.

     

  • rajbot 12:50 am on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrind! 

    I spent *ALL DAY* installing this garbage disposer. It was supposed to take an hour, but like all my projects, it took forever, and I had to run to the store half way through. To top it off, I just found out that most dishwashers these days come with food disposers built in!!! ARG! The whole point of getting a disposer was so that we could later get a dishwasher! It seems that dishwashing technology has advanced since the eighties… The last time I installed a food disposer, Regan was still president.

    On the bright side, it seems that no Bosch or Miele dishwashers have built-in food disposers, and we’ve been considering getting one of those. Plus, we already had a circuit and switch wired for a disposer. Here are some pics!

    Before:
    IMG_0179.JPG

    After:
    IMG_0194.JPG

     

    • ken garrett 6:37 am on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      who is your photo stylist? The lighting is perfect! Nice job. Ken

    • Q 8:26 am on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      Amazing install. How do you keep it so clean under there? My under-sink is kinda gross, though I do clean it out whenever I change the Reverse Osmosis filters.

      I hear you about making a parts run in the middle of the project. That’s such a pain. Glad you made it through. Grind away!

    • may 11:11 am on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      i have to concur…that is one fine looking garbage disposal! :-)

    • rajbot 2:05 pm on July 5, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      It looks clean because Jess does a great job keeping it that way :)

      Also, in that second picture, all the trap work is hidden behind the disposer, which helps give it a clean look.

      The more I think about it, the more I realize that disposers are made for people who don’t compost.. We certainly could have done without one.

    • Mitch 11:53 am on July 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      In May, I installed the exact same unit (I think, looks the same) chez nous after we killed our old one with artichokes (don’t ask). I’m not handy. Really not handy. This one hour project took me all day too and I had scrapes to prove it.

    • William Hertling 10:10 pm on July 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      The Miele dishwasher is great (read my review and comparison between the Miele and the Bosch), but it doesn’t need a disposal. (It doesn’t have one, and it doesn’t need one installed.) We don’t have a disposal, and it’s never been a problem. The Miele completely pulverizes every particle of food using only the water pressure. I’ve never found even a speck of food inside the dishwasher, and never had any problem with the drain, in about five years of Miele ownership.

    • rajbot 10:17 pm on July 19, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      Wow, thanks. That is the best dishwasher review I have ever read! I can’t wait to get the Miele :)

  • peliom 12:10 pm on July 4, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Sent From My iPhone 

    “Sent from my iPhone” … That’s the somewhat snotty default signature that iPhone tacks onto your mail messages. So what’s it like?

    I’m typing this post using the I screen keyboard I safari in horizontal mode. Making a blog post on my sidekick caused me convulsions, on my iPhone it’s slightly less painful. Punctuation is a pain. You will note there is no picture for this post: the file upload button is disabled I safari despite the fact that this is an 8GB iphone. And the is no select/copy/paste in the text system, so I can’t even paste in a URL from google images. But I’ve successfully reached the end of this paragraph. I would guess I could have typed this in about 5% of the time on my macbook. I don’t thing mobile devices are ever going to he better than a computer.

    the biggest annoyance is the lack of a system-wide on screen “back” button. Clicking a link in your email takes you to safari. The only way to get back is to go the the main screen and then mail. And getting to the main screen involves pressing the only mechanical button on the front of the iPhone which for some reason requires about a million pounds of force. Dancing your fingers on the multitouch screen and then havinf to slam the home button is literally painful.

    so does the iPhone live up to the hype? In a word, hell yes. Antialiased fonts. Animations everywhere. Nifty one finger scrolling with auto-dampened deceleration. This is a phone that makes it *fun* for me to scroll through my contacts. For those of us that were wondering what the heck was the point of LayerKit (CoreAnimation) last year, iPhone is the answer.

    Even rickety old QuickTime gets an iPhone makeover. Much fuss is made over the lack of flash support. And yet there is YouTube right on the home screen. And the YouTube videos are somehow higher quality on my iPhone than on my $2000 MacBook. How do they do it? Apple is taking their classic walled garden approach here. The message couldn’t be louder: dear web 2.0, you will not get jack on the iPhone unless you partner with us and re-encode all you video. Oh and you have to use QuickTime. Not a bad strategy. With 99% penetration on the web, flash appeared to be the hands down winner of the web multimedia race. Now with Microsoft and Apple entering the consumer electronics arena, we can expect to see a genuine rematch between Flash,Silverlight, and QuickTime.

    unfortunately this also means i won’t be able to make a decent blog post without custom iphone apps for wordpress. This post took me about an hour.

     

  • rajbot 10:48 pm on July 3, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    First Edition Principia Discordia Recovered from JFK Assasination Archive 

    This is highly weird. In April 2006, a First Edition copy of the Principia Discordia was recovered from the John F. Kennedy Archives (see routing slip). Here is a bit of detail on how it was found:

    I stumbled upon knowledge of the Dead SeePresident Scrolls purely by chance – a reference number on a scan of a copy of something I did not believe I was looking at: so much so that I passed over the title page of the first edition of the Principia Discordia (How The West Was Lost) many times before it dawned on me what it was before my eyes.

    On that sheet was an Accession Number. And that number pointed to a secret which has lain hidden for over 30 years, trapped unseen in a musty, dusty vault in Maryland.

    As luck would have it, the Rev. Karl Musser happened to be in the neighbourhood of that very vault, and willing to do me a favour, All Blessings Unto Him.

    But how did these papers end up in the Assassination Archive in the first place?

    In the late sixties, founding Discordian Kerry Thornley, who had been in the Marines with Oswald, found himself under the microscope of those investigating the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Such Official Investigations generate a Paper Trail – evidence proffered is indexed and stored… preserved against the erosion of time. (Well, mostly…)

     

  • may 12:42 am on July 3, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Weird Fish 

    weirdfish.jpg So, I don’t think there’s really anything weird about this restaurant, but I can tell you that it’s quickly become one of my favorites. This place specializes in all things deep fried! but also has plenty on the menu that’s not deep fried for the health-inclined.

    I had dinner there last night and boy did it hit the spot. We ate deep fried oysters, deep fried green beans, calamari, jamaican catfish and then a chocolate torte for dessert. Pretty much all of my food cravings were satisfied :-)

    Here’s a link to their menu!

     

  • may 12:42 am on July 3, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    Giro Di Peninsula 

    girodipeninsula.gif

    On Saturday, I did the Giro Di Peninsula which is a century ride that takes you from the race track in San Mateo to Woodside, down to the coast, back to Woodside and then over to the Los Altos hills. It was pretty and we covered some roads in Los Altos that I hadn’t been on before. I almost missed the ride because my alarm clock didn’t go off in the morning. or maybe it did and I accidentally turned it off. In any case, the ride started at 6:30 but I didn’t roll out of bed until 6:15 so I started at 7:15. Not a big deal, but it meant that I had to pick up my pace a little in order to get to the rest stops before they closed or ran out of food. It was my first long ride in 3 weeks and it felt good to be back in the saddle.

    Here’s a map of the route someone created on Bikely. The person who created this map apparently finished the ride in 6 1/2 hrs. I finished in 9 hrs. Still, I’m happy with my time because it’s faster than the first century I did 3 months ago and there was much more climbing in this one (7,000 ft)! one day though, I really would like to be speedy. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to ever be speedy given that I’m a small person with short legs. maybe if i grew wings!

     

  • rajbot 11:46 pm on July 2, 2007 Permalink | Reply
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    How the Pentagon Papers Came to be Published by the Beacon Press: A Remarkable Story Told by Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Dem Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel and Unitarian Leader Robert West 

    http://www.archive.org/download/dn2007-0702_vid/dn2007-0702.flv', }"/>You should watch this episode of Democracy Now.

    Thirty-five years ago this weekend, Beacon Press lost a Supreme Court case brought against it by the US government for publishing the first full edition of the Pentagon Papers. It is now well known how the New York Times first published excerpts of the top-secret documents in June 1971. But less well known is how the Beacon Press – a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association – came to publish the complete 7,000 pages that exposed the true history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Their publication led the Press into a spiral of two and a half years of harassment, intimidation, near-bankruptcy, and the possibility of criminal prosecution.

    Today, we hear the story from three men at the center of the storm: Former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst, famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Mike Gravel – the former Alaska Senator who is now a Democratic Presidential candidate – who tells the dramatic story of how he entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record and got them to the Beacon Press. And Robert West, the former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association which owned the Press and agreed to risk publication of the Pentagon Papers. [includes rush transcript]

    This is a story that has rarely been told in its entirety. Last weekend I moderated an event at the Unitarian Universalist conference in Portland, Oregon commemorating the publication of the Pentagon Papers and its relevance today.

    (via Tracey)

     

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