March 2005 Archives

Reaching 200K in a car is a magical moment. Unfortunately, as I've experienced twice now myself, it's also an easy moment to miss. I think that car makers should make it more obvious when you reach this milestone and give you the reason and means to celebrate. With the advent of "carputers" and On Star, it should make it easy. Some ideas:

• Someone from car HQ calls you up and gives you a notification that the magical moment is there (kind of boring). Maybe they sing "Happy Birthday"?
• A small explosive releases a shower of confetti from the head liner
• A jack-in-the-box doll pops out from the dash and screams, "HAPPY 200K!"
• Dash board printer ejects a coupon good for a free ice cream cone and oil change at the dealer
• A greeting card get printed by the dashboard printer
• Dashboard cooler opens up and ejects a cold bottle of champagne with glasses

I'm kind of surprised there aren't more people taking pictures of their dashboards with 200K

p.s. if I haven't already mentioned it to you personally, I'd like to mention now impersonally that my favorite blog these days is Girls Are Pretty, from which I kind of took the "Happy ... Day" format. Yesterday's entry was even about cars!

1. The Better Driver, Inc.
They need to have a driver education company that
caters to couples. both are evaluated independently
and the reviewers determine who the better driver is.
phase two would consist of additional education, and
in the end you'd try to make the relationship stronger
by getting the two to admit their weaknesses and
recognize the other persons strengths. give the
weaker driver "good navigator" techniques. actually,
now that i think about it, they should develop a "how
to get along in the car" curriculum.

2. Online Copy Editor
somebody needs to have a business editing rough drafts
of email messages, word docs, and garauntee a 1 hour
turnaround time. charge by the word. pay once a
month or slightly more for a one-time use deal.

Curses! I'm torn between cousins: My cool city cousin Shane is having a super fun fundraiser party at Mississippi Pizza on April 3rd for the documentary he and his friend Arne are making about Girls Rock camp. It's going to be super plus cool!! But it's happening the same weekend my sweet country Mormon cousin is getting married in Salt Lake City. So, I can't go.

But you should! Go!!! Support this fun, laudable project and tell them "Little Mary" aka "Cousin Mary" sent you with oodles of her red hot love. Well, you don't have to say that if it embarrasses you. Actually, you can pretend you don't know me and I won't even be there to insist that you do. I'll be in the back of a Temple somewhere (actually, I think it's in a park) drinking from a flask and muttering, "bullshit" during the vows just loud enough for my mom and maybe the person next to her to hear. (Just kidding: I love weddings. Ask anyone.)

Rock out, rock on, tell your friends, and tell me all about it when I get back!

Details from Cousin Shane

Girls Rock Documentary Benefit

Events starting Sunday, April 3rd, 6PM

10 minute Trailer for "Girls Rock!" movie.

Two Live Bands from the camp:

Fringe
The Ready

Location:

Mississippi Pizza Pub
3552 North Mississippi Ave

Admission: Free

The amazing girls at Rock 'n' Roll camp for girls have opened up their lives to have a documentary made about this life-changing place. April 3, come see a long-form trailer from the inspirational movie, as well as live performances by The Ready and Fringe, two of the featured bands, in an event that puts "fun" back in fundraiser. By helping us raise money for the movie, folks will help us get word out about the important work being done at the camp.

The Rock 'n' Roll camp for girls provides empowering music and life guidance year-round in North Portland for young women aged 8-18 years old. Through its after-school Girls Rock Institute and weeklong summer camp, this Portland institution has changed the lives of hundreds of girls from all over the world. The movie will follow several girls as they confront all the challenges and joys of rocking in a world where girls who rock aren't always welcome.

There are two movies at the center of the trailer who will be playing--The Ready is an indie rock band fronted by ten-year-old Una Rose, and features no girl older than 13. The Fringe is a high-school-aged band that will rock your bobby socks off. Both bands have played venues from the Crystal Ballroom to the Memorial Coliseum.

The filmmakers, Shane King and Arne Johnson, are both Portland natives who are currently making movies in San Francisco. The event is free, but we'll be asking for donations and selling credits in the movie, as well as copies of the trailer.

Come enjoy some pizza, live music and movies all in one event!

www.girlsrockmovie.com

I think slashdot should have a personal ads section.

The nerd chic factor is definitely visible in the world of internet dating. In a lot of the personal ads people will say they're looking for hot girls in glasses (preferably ones with tattoos although not necessarily a geek tattoo) or girls will say they love nerds, or geeks, or whatever -- hey, I'm one of them, so I Am My Own Target Demographic (I did that in title case just because it sounds like a good name for a book -- maybe the autobiography of an ad man?).

You also seen people in real life wearing I heart nerds t-shirts and there's a car in my neighborhood with the bumper sticker and in fact -- jesus -- now that I'm looking for it, there's all kinds of I heart nerds paraphanalia. If I still smoked dope, I'd definitely get an "I heart nerds" bumper sticker and put it on my bong.

(btw: I've already broken my own rule by linking to something already linked on boingboing ... but it was indendently -- that is, I didn't find it via boingboing. I can see this rule is going to be impossible to enforce).

No doubt, it's only a matter of time before nerds start feeling exploited. But in the meantime, they might as well start exploiting back and get laid out of the deal, right? So, I'm just saying, slashdot should have a personal ads section. I don't even think they should just put up a link to Nerve -- they've got all those coding skills, they could make something much better! One where profiles get scored by moderators, for instance. Actually, it seems like every guy I've dated over the last 5 years has had a plan for building a better Nerve -- I'm surpised there aren't more out there. Another possible site for nerd loving personal ads is the American Nerd Association -- actually, there are a bunch of sites where nerds congregate (not all of them porn), and they could all link back to the mother-nerd-personal ad database which, I'll say again, I think slashdot should do since it seems to me to have the best nerd credentials and popularity combo. Granted, a lot of the people commenting there sound like assholes and tools, but that's true of many regular personals, anyway.

Or maybe this already exists and I'm just not nerdcore enough to know about it. Maybe nerds are hooking up in online multiplayer forums or something? Didn't I read about that in the New York Times Circuits section? Maybe people are finding love through World of Warcraft?.

Speaking of WoW, another idea I had the other day is that they should offer Bugdom as an online multiplayer game (they just brought out a 3-D version). If they had it, then I'd get to play with and talk to my friends via the little IM channel screen thingy and I'd be like, "OMG! It's a blueberry!" and they'd be like, "WTF?! bonk it!" and I would and then I'd be like, "W00T!" and it would rule.

I need a nerd to heart.

I had a realization this morning while listening to NPR while half asleep that blogs and the "mainstream" media suffer from the same problem of constantly feeding off one another -- because I was half asleep, it probably seemed more profound that it really is, but I'll blog it anyway.

I've complained a lot in the past about how NPR the NYT and the New Yorker et al. all cover the same damn stories -- not just the big stories (which makes sense, after all -- I'm not upset that Abu Ghraib got coverage), but with the cute little human interest stories it's boring and redundant and lazy. Of course, I'm not the first to observe this and the problem extends to all media. Anyway, my half asleep revelation was that there's a fine line between a meme and lazy reporting. Since I've been reading a lot more of the mainstream, high visibility websites and blogs lately I realized that they all tend to cover the same things and it's kind of ... well, boring. Especially when the blog or site doesn't itself add much in the way of content or commentary while linking. How many times do I need to see a link to a wooden laptop? I mean, it's cool, but really.

I think that this redundancy is a legitimate part of the point of linking and how the web functions -- that if you don't have a certain weight of interest giving a website google visibility then you won't be able to find the trees for the forest. But if everyone continually covers the same stories, media consolidation or media democracy doesn't matter -- you get the same result.

I may be wrong on this philosphicaly or moral or what have you; I'm just thinking. It's probably one of those slippery slope (I almost wrote "slippery slop" which would be more appropriate!) things -- a little bit of repetition/memery is good, too much is lazy. Actually, I think it's more like the mapmaker's dillemma, but I can't seem to find a link for that (which is weird ... maybe I'm calling it the wrong thing?). It's my favorite paradox: a good map represents reality accurately and the more detailed something is, the more accurate it is. But the more detail you get, the harder it is to use and the most accurate map would just be a recreation of reality but that would be useless for actual mapping purposes. So, you need something that's pretty accurate, but also interpretive (I like it as an analogy about writing history).

Maybe the deal with linky websites is, I'm not so excited about the ones that don't have an interpretive theme beyond "this is cool." I mean, I love them, I read them, but I think they aren't doing much of a service. I don't apply the same principal to smaller blogs like my own, of course -- (although, ahem, I do have a theme). And everyone gets some latitude in their theme. And the NYT/NYer/NPR cabal -- well, I'll deal with them later.

So I guess my conclusion is to renew my commitment to not pulling links from other blogs and only posting links I find through my own searching or whate have you -- realizing that anything I find through google may well have higher visibility if it was already linked in someone's blog. (Is there a word to distinguish between someone's little semi-invisible personal blog [i.e., mine] and something like wonkette or slashdot? probably but I don't know it. tell me!). If I see something I think is interesting to my non-blog-reading friends on one of the megablogs then I'll send it to them the old fashioned way -- in an email.

So maybe that's where I'll leave it for now. Time to make the donuts.

This is less a great idea than a business I'd like to patronize: a mini golf course where you could drink and eat hors douvres and ideally, dress up in fancy evening gowns and tuxedos. It would be an opportunity for structured socialization slightly more physical than Ticket to Ride or Scrabble, but not quite up there with badminton or, god forbid, softball (actually, I like softball ever since I was the mascot for the Seattle Rape Relief softball team). Partly it's inspired by a mini golf experience I had with Ian in Stuttgart ten or fifteen years ago. There was a really cute mini golf course on top of this tall hill/small mountain near our house. We celebrated Ian's birthday there with a party and it was really fun -- beer, wine, cake, etc. as I remember it.

Anyway, drinking on mini golf courses already exists (I may add "already exists" as a category). I'm not so sure I'd want to be on any of theirleagues, but it looks like they're having a good time, so maybe?

But I don't see elegent mini golf courses for people in evening wear, so there's an opening. If I did this myself, like on the top of the Laurelhurst Theater (my original idea -- but I offered it to Woody and he declined), there are people out there who would be happy to help me create my own mini golf course. They have some lovely courses, including this mini golf biodome. I'm tempted to send away for their video!. Mt. Tabor would actually be a nice place to have it.

Or I could just buy this mini golf course for only $589,000 (Canadian!!).

I could collaborate with Jim to use minigolf as a showcase for landscaping

I learned a little about the history of mini golf here -- wow, and it turned me to a nice article: SIMPLY PUTT: MINI-GOLF IS AN ART FORM. Way to go, Jonathan Haeber!

As well as this (warning: it talks).

As usual, Halfbakery has something to say.

OK -- enough about mini golf. Time to make the donuts.

No ideas here -- just links.

I've been going on job interviews lately (I'm keeping the old job -- just adding on) which makes me appreciate this Bullshit Job Title Generator. The only problem is, about 2/3rds of the job titles that come up are totally reasonable-sounding. So far, my favorites:

Future Intranet Technician
Dynamic Directives Developer
Corporate Factors Facilitator
Chief Identity Orchestrator (I could do that!!)

Speaking of office culture, I've also been enjoying Overheard in the Office, especially the very first entry on or so -- the one where the guy says, "Dude, whatever the fuck you've been reading, stop it."

(Tim and I came up with this idea last night – I'd welcome suggestions for a better title):

Genre: Misogynistic Comedy
(I wonder if VideoHound has that as a category? it should, there are enough of them.)

Plot: Nerdy, homely but lovable looser Martin falls in love with blonde suicide hotline hottie. Attempts suicide multiple times in order to spend time with her. Hilarity ensues.

Subtext: Women make you want to kill yourself.

Talent: Saturday Night Live actors

Pitch: Something About Mary meets Harold and Maude

I'm kind of getting into this pitch/proposal genre - it's perfect for me! (short and probably pointless). Maybe I'll write a query letter for this and the Patent Pending porno script.