Thinkgeek now offers a t-shirt with a live display. Pretty soon, there’ll be t-shirts with programmable slogans and graphics, maybe even downloadable ones. Imagine what wirelessly-networked t-shirts could do for a flashmob.
Now it starts getting fun
November 10th, 2006A word to the wise
November 10th, 2006Young women who flash their breasts should be aware that claims of privacy won’t always keep them from wider fame.
Looking for a job?
November 10th, 2006Here’s some concise advice on resume cover letters. Would the corresponding salary negotiation advice come from “Treasure of the Sierra Madre?”
Via INDCJournal.
I may be tied up for a while …
November 10th, 2006with some tricky reading.
Take this, kid!
November 10th, 2006My daughter admitted to me that she has eight versions of the Numa Numa song in iTunes. I’ll bet she doesn’t have this one.
Well, that’s over with
November 8th, 2006I voted this morning. It was a less pleasant experience than I’ve had before. Denver used to have precinct-based polling. My polling place was two blocks away. There were usually four or five voting machines, and I seldom had to wait in line more than 15-20 minutes before voting.
This election, Denver is not doing voting by precinct; there are 55 polling stations scattered throughout the city, and you can vote at any one of them. I was in line for two hours before I got to vote, and the line was longer when I left than when I arrived. There were 20 voting machines, but verifying voter eligibility was the bottleneck – I never saw more than about 5 or 6 voting machines simultaneously in use.
Since anyone could vote at any station, the election workers didn’t have books with listings of people who could vote there; they had laptops that connected to a central server. With 20 voting machines, we had 4 laptops. Verifying a voter took about 3-4 minutes, thus, the bottleneck.
Another innovation was that people voting absentee could drop off their absentee ballots at the polling station. There was a large red wooden box with metal straps and padlocks and an insertion slot sitting near the voting machines. When I got to the head of the line, shortly before 10am, the box was overfull, with envelopes sticking out of the slot. I have to admit that I’m not pleased with that situation.
The only good part was the young woman behind me in line – she borrowed my pen to fill out her signature card. When I filled out mine, she said, “Oh, we’re neighbors.” I asked her address, then said to her, “Oh, you’re just the other side of the highway. If you hear banjo or ukulele music drifting north some warm evening, it’s me.”
Her eyes got large, and she said, “I know who you are! I work for Marion!” So we had a nice discussion while slowly shuffling forward.
I knew that I lived in a liberal stronghold, but I hadn’t realized quite how much. Diana DeGette is my congresscritter, having taken Pat Shroeder’s spot. The last time I looked at the election results, Ms. DeGette was the projected winner with about 78% of the vote. Her opponent had 21%. He’s in the Green party. There was no Republican running … I don’t think any Republican could be elected in my district.
I’ll have to keep track of this
November 7th, 2006While doing web searches on judges (so I can be better informed for tomorrow’s election), I ran across this site devoted to reporting on the Denver Election Commission.
Now, where to hang them?
October 31st, 2006MileHiCon 38 was this past weekend. I spent too much at the art show, but I got a few very nice pieces. They’re by an artist named David Fisher. I was unable to find him in a web search, although I found a few other artists by that name.
I got three originals of his (not prints). Two I got on bids, one by purchase. The way the art show works is this: each piece has a bid sheet attached, marked with a minimum bid price and a quick sale price (or NFS, not for sale, if the artist wants to keep it). One or two bids by the close of the show, and the high bidder gets it. Three bids, and it goes to voice auction. If the first bidder goes for the quick sale price, no other bids are accepted.
As I said, I bought one at the quick sale price. I did it Friday evening about half an hour after the art show opened – I didn’t want to chance being outbid for it. It’s a marvelous pen-and-ink drawing called The Syndicate. There’s a city skyline in the background. In the foreground, there’s the boss in the center, being clung to by two slinky beauties. There’s a tall goon in wifebeater t-shirt, hat, and trenchcoat, a fat cook, someone with an enormous grin and a striped shirt, and the whole grouping flanked on each end by a gunman with flowing trenchcoat and fedora. Just absolutely marvelous.
Another one, Splinter in the Wind, is effectively a multi-panel comic of a vaguely-human ninja thing leaping from a cliff to attack a dragon. I outbid someone for that one.
For the third, Shodoku and Shodoka, I was the only bidder. It shows two of the vaguely-human ninja things, who appear to be searching for something from a high vantage point with purplish evening light behind them. When my daughter saw that one, she said that if she’d made it to the convention in time, she’d have tried to outbid me for it.
I guess I’ll have to contact the convention art show staff (luckily, I know them) to track Mr. Fisher down – I’d like the option of acquiring more of his work in future.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, BANG!
October 31st, 2006Last Monday (the 23rd), I replaced my desktop with an iMac – it had locked up about four times in the preceding week. I invited my daughter along on the trip to pick the iMac up, because I figured that she’d enjoy the trip. She did, partly because I indulged her request to look for the boxed set of season one of the new Dr. Who series. Apparently, she has a crush on the Doctor.
Well, Tower Records by Cherry Creek Mall is going out of business, so she got it at a discount, and was so excited that she was “blushing so hard it hurts.” (She’ll be embarrassed that I’ve quoted her on this, but it’s part of the job requirements for parents.)
A few days later, she asked, “Did I tell you the universe hates me?”
I got the explanation from her, and you have to know some of the backstory of Dr. Who to understand. Basically, the Doctor is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. One of his capabilities is to regenerate into a new body and new personality when near death (conveniently allowing replacement of the lead actor). She had done a marathon session to view the entire boxed set, and, unfortunately, the Doctor on whom she is crushing is not the one featured in season one; he appears at the end of the last episode and has exactly one line of dialog. Season two is not yet available on DVD.
Ah, well. Points to anyone who can identify where the post title comes from (you’re disqualified, Paul).
A cat in a goldfish bowl
October 18th, 2006This is pretty strange.