Very funny. My favorite part is the firey bush.
MacBook Reviews look promising
Via boing-boing, I came across this promising review of the new MacBook released the other day. My first thought was “Damn! And I just spent $300 on this laptop to get it fixed!” But the more I think about it, the more I will probably want more than the “basic” model, which is around $1100 (though there might be some kind of education discount). According to the review, the totally maxed-out version of this computer is around $2K. That might be too rich for my blood, but something in between those two extremes might be interesting.
In any event, unless something very unexpected happens, I think I’m going to wait another year….
Hippies win! Hippies win!
The Amazing Race, that is. BJ and Tyler just won the latest season of the only reality show that I watch with any regularity; actually, it’s kind of a family event around here. In any event, congrats to the hippie dudes, now $1 million richer.
Screencasting software for the Mac?
Check out iShowU. It’s still in beta and everything, but it looks like an interesting and free (for the time-being) solution to some screencasting things on the Mac. I figured out how to use it in about two minutes.
Oooo, I want one of these….
iPod covers from GelaSkins— so cool!
Worldmapper: a potentially cool "visual rhetoric" tool
For me– and maybe this is because I have an overly simple understanding of the concept of “visual rhetoric,” especially as it relates to writing instruction– few things explain how using slightly different visuals can make a big difference in meaning than maps. For example, in my English 328 class, I have a bit of discussion about this with different maps of the 2004 election, different versions of the “red/blue” states from the 2004 election– basically, this site right here.
Now another potentially interesting tool I found via boing-boing, Worldmapper. Basically, it’s a collection of world maps based on all kinds of cool things– population, tourism trends, railway use, moped owners, etc. Neat stuff.
The latest version of my home office
Millions of unofficial and loyal readers may recall that back in December 2005, I set up a basement office space with the ping-pong table. It worked pretty well, but it had a few disadvantages, not the least of which is that this set-up ruled out playing ping-pong.
A few weeks ago, Will was complaining to me about the lack of ping-pong table. I said to him “if you give up the play area you have in the basement, then I’ll move my desk stuff and set up the ping-pong table again.” This was an easy deal for Will because the play area consisted of stuff he hasn’t played with in years.
Anyway, after much rearrangement, I am back to the arrangement you see above. It’s a throw-back all the way to my Ph.D. days, a door desk set up on milk crates. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it has a lot of space.
There are other features not pictured here. In the foreground is the treadmill (I think I stood on it to take this picture) and to the left is a filing cabinet with a DVD and TV on it, mostly for viewing while on the treadmill. Be sure to click here to get the whole tour with the notes I left on Flickr.
So far, I think I like this set-up quite a bit. It has some advantages over the ping-pong table, and besides that, we’ve actually been able to play some ping-pong. Will has a long ways to go to be competitive with me, but he’s a lot better at it now than he was when we first got this table a few years ago.
I don’t know if I’d win this Lifehacker contest for “coolest workspace,” but it’s pretty nice. Of course, while I think the contest winner is nice enough, the workspace I really think is interesting is the “Treadputer” set-up, something I could kinda/sorta do here on the fly if I moved a few things around….
Top Web Domains (I guess…)
As reported in the Washington Post (I don’t know the date), here’s the top ten web domains by visits in February 2006:
- Yahoo.com
- Google.com
- MSN.com
- AOL.com
- EBay.com
- Microsoft.com
- Passport.com
- Mapquest.com
- Hotmail.com
- Myspace.com
Let’s assume this is accurate for the moment. First off, I personally only use one of these sites– google– on a daily basis. Six of these sites I almost never ever use. And I had to do a search (with Google, naturally) just to figure out that “Passport.com” is probably referring to a “Passport Network,” which I guess people use with Hotmail, one of the six sites I never ever use.
It’s weird; it would appear that my relationship (or lack thereof) with the “most popular” web domains is similar to that of my even weaker relationship to the “most popular” music right now.
Restaurant Review: Cafe Zola
What and Where:
Cafe Zola | 112 W Washington Street | Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (734) 769-2020
Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)
Comments (as of 5/14/06)
- Cafe Zola represents for me all that is wrong and all that is right about Ann Arbor. On the down-side, it is the epitomy of pretentious, yuppified, faux-boho, exposed brick, self-important Ann Arbor establishments which is frequented by upper-middle-class (and sometimes flat-out rich) locals who profess identity with the disadvantaged and who ally themselves to some sort of safe version of liberalism. And it is precisely the kind of place routinely mocked by web sites like Ann Arbor is Overrated. On the up-side, I identify with most of these values (for better or worse), I certainly prefer Ann Arbor to many of the alternatives in the area, and I tend to like the food and company. So that’s Cafe Zola in the nutshell.
- We’ve never been for lunch or dinner, mainly because for years and years, Cafe Zola only served breakfast. So I have no way of telling you much about that. Yet.
- As far as I can tell, Cafe Zola only takes reservations for parties of five or more. If you go during the week, getting a table is no problem. I will ocassionally go myself on a Sunday or Saturday morning, and when I do that, I will sit at the bar/counter. This is not a problem either, though you might be jostled about by people waiting for a table. But be prepared to wait quite a while on the weekends, and if you go on Mother’s day (which we did today), be prepared to get pretty pissed off at the shitty service from the hostess stand. We were told it would be 15 to 20 minutes when we arrived; 45 minutes later, this same person was telling new arrivals 15 to 20 minutes. Then someone has the nerve to call our names from the list and ask us uf we wanted to sit at the counter which we could have done 45 minutes earlier, and then some old lady came up to the stand after calling in for the waiting list, something I was explicitly told you couldn’t do. It’s funny though; after I started yelling about this with my booming voice and got some stares from the well-heeled upper-middle-class faux boho yuppified pseudo liberal locals, we got a table toot sweet.
- Our wait person today was quite good, but I have to say that the bad service does not always end at the front of the house at Cafe Zola. A few years ago, there was a time where we waited for 2 hours at the table to get our food, and there has been plenty of times in past visits where the service was pretty crappy.
- So why go? The food is really good, I must say. They have these pretty good crepe dishes, but I think they’re a little over-priced for what you get. Generally, I get an omlette (and generally the farm house omlette), though I sometimes get the “Turkish Brunch” (“An array of kalamata olives, feta cheese, havarti cheese, cucumber, tomato, grape leaf dolmas, hard-boiled egg and farm butter, accompanied by pastries, fresh bread and coffee or tea”). Today I got the excellent and low-carb diet destroying french toast. They make it with rasin bread and they get it just the right level of crispness on the outside and gooeyness on the inside. Good stuff.
- Oh, and I think I go again and again because, as much as I complain, these are my kind of people in my kind of town.
- The best coffee in town, though it isn’t really a good place to go and do coffeeshop-like activities (read, work on the laptop, etc.).
And ultimately, a fine Mother’s Day was had by one and all.
"After Apple," an insider's view of tech support for Mac
I’ve only had a chance to skim this, but it looks like potentially interesting reading later: “AppleCared: My Life Inside Apple and AppleCare,” a sort of “behind the scenes” look at the fast-paced and exciting world of tech support.
By the way, I’ve been pretty pleased with my now repaired iBook. I can even use it without it being plugged in– amazing! To me, it also looks like they did something to the screen because it doesn’t have any key impressions anymore and it seems a lot, well, cleaner. I don’t know if they would have actually replaced that though.
I also went ahead and wiped and then rebuilt my harddrive. The only thing I lost from all of that was my address book (oops, forgot), but that wasn’t all that important.
And on the plus-side, it just seems like everything is running better to me. Years ago, a computer geek/tech support person told me that it was a good idea as a matter of “spring cleaning” to wipe and rebuild computer hard drives about once a year or so. When I asked why, what difference would it make, he said something like this: “Computers are kind of like toasters in that, the way that bread leaves crumbs, software leave little bits of fragmented code all over the place. When the crumbs/code builds up, it can be a problem. With a toaster, what you do is every once in a while turn the thing over and give it a good shake over a garbage can. With a computer, you erase and rebuild the hard drive.”