Competing with Baseball’s Best Burger for “optimum method to cheat the executioner,” my brother tells of a visiting salesman who raved about the deep-fried hot dogs at Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, NJ. If they installed Internet slot machines or offered quick and easy stretch mark treatments, maybe I would stop in the next time I’m […]
Archives for March 2006
March 17, 2006
Not So Much To Release The Sorrow As To Embrace It
Dave Pollard posts a letter from organizational development consultant Roger Harrison, “A Time For Letting Go” – parting thoughts on the occasion of his retirement. Via Jon Husband.
March 16, 2006
Oil Barrels Price Translation
This is freakin’ awesome! A web browser plug-in that converts all prices from U.S. dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. When a user loads a webpage, the script inserts converted prices into the page. as the cost of oil fluctuates on the commodities exchange, prices rise & fall in real-time. ‘OilStandard’ […]
March 16, 2006
From The Mailbag
Another classic: Dear notio.com, My name is Chris, and I manage a web site about “Stretch mark” at: [URL removed]. [Holy crap. You wouldn’t believe how many ads come up if you Google that!] I recently found your site http://www.notio.com by searching Google for “Stretch mark treatments”. I think our websites have a similar theme, […]
March 16, 2006
Short-Term Economic Future
If you want to know what the big driver in the upcoming recession will be, start here, and then read the follow-up. Summary: During the next 20 months, over $2 trillion of adjustable-rate mortgage debt will be up for interest rate resets. And those rates will go up. Consumer discretionary spending will be cut by […]
March 14, 2006
Me want, not.
Baseball’s Best Burger: “A thick and juicy burger topped with sharp cheddar cheese and two slices of bacon. The burger is then placed in between each side of a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnut…. ‘We are excited to work with the Grizzlies this season on Baseball’s Best Burger,” said Tina Bryan, Vice President of Marketing […]
March 14, 2006
Diss’n Chris Bliss
You may remember the Chris Bliss juggling video I pointed to a while back. From the comments I learn the juggling community is annoyed that a simple routine has gotten so much attention. And, in modern re-mix form, there is an even better routine set to the same soundtrack. In a gymnasium. With five balls […]
March 14, 2006
Lunch Menu
Went to the Co-op to have lunch with some friends. While foraging, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen for a year or more. “How are you?,” I asked. “Eh. [Someone]’s father died, so I’m getting lunch for him and going over there.” I had heard the week before that a key person had quit […]
March 13, 2006
Usefulness and The Banality of Business
Umair hit one out of the park with his post on Usefulness and The Banality of Business. There’s this curious notion in America: everything must be useful. This is why, at heart, there’s little, if any room, for thinking; for the long-term; for the creative. It’s the naive culture of the market taken to an […]
March 13, 2006
Hot Tip For Online Electronics Buying
I ordered a new CD/DVD player this weekend. I’ll spare you the ridiculously obsessive materialist consumerist research process, even though it might make for a good blog entry. The bottom line was, once I knew what I wanted, and the eBay bidders outbid the value of a used one, and the authorized B-stock eBay sellers […]
March 13, 2006
Tour Tickets
According to the folks at GDTS-TOO, I will have an extra ticket for each of the following Ratdog shows: * Thursday March 23, Northampton, MA. * Friday March 31, Hampton Beach, NH. * Saturday April 1, Boston, MA. If you live in the Northeast, or want to fly in for the shows, and you’d like […]
March 13, 2006
First Things First
Consider: 1) If your shoelaces come untied at an inopportune moment, that could spell trouble. 2) People like choice. Hence: Ian’s Shoelace Site. A critical resource for people who want choices and also wear shoes.
March 13, 2006
Server Down?
That’s the sort of email subject line people like me dislike seeing first thing in the morning. After verifying that, in fact, the servers are unreachable, suddenly you have a fire drill. Whatever morning plans you had are shot. Yoga? I don’t think so. Finish that systems diagram from last night? Maybe later today. Instead, […]
March 12, 2006
Mail Bombed
Notio is getting emailed bombed, or something. In the last couple of hours I’ve received over a thousand emails like this: From: Philomena Astle (Every return address is different.) Subject: Re: POtharamacy news (Lots of variations on this.) Hi, Do you want to j O l V f E d R r P k A […]
March 10, 2006
Secret World
Seeing things that were not there On a wing, on a prayer Rediscovered Peter Gabriel’s Us recording. Beautiful, powerful. Especially the last song, quoted above. It reminded me of this (unretouched) photograph I took in Austria, at the Vienna State Opera House, in September, 2005: When I took this photo, I was seeing things that […]
March 9, 2006
ActiveSalesforce
Wow. Salesforce.com is now offering a connection adapter for Rails. ActiveSalesforce (ASF) is a Ruby on Rails framework connection adapter that provides direct access to Salesforce.com managed data via AppExchange Web services API and Rail’s ActiveRecord model layer. Standard and custom objects, standard and custom fields are all automatically surfaced as active record attributes, simplifying […]
March 8, 2006
A New Kind Of Showerhead
I’d like to make a new kind of showerhead, one that has more impact. As a simple example, who decided that showerheads are useful only for cleansing the body? There are many other things a showerhead could do for you. For instance: * If you never wanted to shave your legs again, or somewhere else […]
March 7, 2006
A Good Example Of A Dilettante’s Progress
I Googled “dilettante” to find the correct spelling (used in the phrase above) and in the right column I found a sponsored ad that eBay purchased for that word!! They don’t think their customers are dilettantes, do they?
March 6, 2006
Ultimate Insight Is The Booby Prize Of Life
A variation of the above phrase wandered past me in email today, and I wondered if the writer had made it up, or if it was one of those long-lived Internet-revived quatable-quotes kinda deals. A review of Stephen Yenser’s “The Consuming Myth, The Work of James Merrill,” provides the title quote: The est people used […]