As PZ Myers says, this could be shameless blog-whoring under the guise of doing science, but Scott Eric Kaufman is doing an experiment over at Acephalous to measure the speed of a meme through the blogosphere.
My blogging friends are hereby ordered to link to Mr. Kaufman’s page and get this puppy spread. In the name of science. SCIENCE!
Aaron Newton over at Groovy Green has an excellent article about growing your own luffa sponge. Regardless of whether you spell it “luffa” or “loofah” — I’m of the latter persuasion — you probably didn’t know that they’re actually a vegetable akin to a zucchini (or courgette for my British and Kiwi friends). And I’ll bet you really didn’t know that to get the luffa “sponge”, you have to “milk” the seeds and flesh out of it, leaving the sponge-like fibrous material we all know and love as our favourite exfoliant.
Given he says that they require a long growing season of frost-free weather, I have to wonder if they’d do well in Hawaii. Growing them here is one thing, getting seeds through Agriculture is another…
This week’s Bad Baby Name listing is ripe with contenders, but one stood out amongst the crowd. And unlike the five-for-six Y action week, this week we actually bat a thousand — every name has a Y in it!
We start off with Zayvin, Dayshell, Jhayden, Shaelynn, and Chyler. Each one of these names is horrid. Each one of the parents deserves to be slapped. Zayvin? Dayshell? What the hell kinds of names are those? Shaelynn is almost as bad as Shylynn. Hopefully someone with one of these names can comment on this post and look like an idiot like some other unfortunate Shylynn did.
And then we move to the hyphens. You knew the hyphens were coming. Hannah-Lynn is the first to poke her head over the wall, followed closely by Rylan-Jay. But their Commander-In-Chief in the Hyphen Army is A.J.-Isly-Ander-Brown.
That’s right, three hyphens, two initials, and a Y. All those hyphens aren’t a typo, because little A.J.-Isly-Ander-Brown actually has a middle name. I know that the parents are just going to end up calling this kid A.J., but why not call him that to begin with? Why saddle him with the triple hyphen name of doom? I have only one answer:
A.J.-Isly-Ander-Brown’s parents are idiots.
Back in July I wrote a rather harsh review of an OS X application named iPiece. Shortly after that Joseph Wardell, the founder of Old Jewel Software, contacted me and asked if I could answer some questions regarding iPiece. I said sure, but he didn’t get back to me.
He didn’t get back to me because he was busy improving iPiece, somewhat based on my prior review. To be fair, I downloaded the new version (it’s at 1.1 now) and gave it a shot.
I was originally annoyed that you could only turn on magnification by double-clicking the menubar icon. No longer. You can assign a hotkey to toggle magnification. Good change.
I was originally annoyed that you couldn’t change the zoom level or the size of the zoom box without going to the preferences. No longer. You can assign hotkeys to both of these. Good change.
I was originally annoyed that the icon had too much transparant space. This hasn’t changed, but to be fair, people who routinely use this application aren’t going to be starting it up manually, they’ll have it run up when they login. And besides, who double-clicks application icons to start them these days? That’s what Quicksilver is for.
I have to change my initial rating of iPiece from a half star to four stars. I can see the utility of being able to see the rest of the screen when you only want to magnify a small section, something that OS X’s built-in zoom functionality doesn’t let you do. Although I probably won’t use it very often, neither will I delete it from my Applications folder. iPiece is no longer an iPiece of crap, it’s a Cool OS X App that does one thing and does it well. And kudos to Mr. Wardell for not flaming me out for my previous inflammatory review. :-)
iPiece is developed by Old Jewel Software. It is shareware, and a single-user licence costs $9.95. Four stars out of five.
The holiday spirit has taken over the CanSpice household. Yesterday we kicked things off in the proper American fashion by hitting the mall for Black Friday deals. Mrs. CanSpice hit the jackpot, picking up a $95 silk dress for $35. Mr. CanSpice hit tilt, picking up a $45 pair of shorts for $45 and a $45 shirt for $45. Clearly Mrs. CanSpice has better shopping skills.
Today we picked up a tree. After about half an hour of getting it onto the stand without falling over, we got it up. No decorations yet, that’s for tomorrow.
Most of our Christmas shopping is already done because the majority of it we have to ship to Canada. The goal is to get it all off by December 1, but given it hasn’t shipped from Amazon yet… Of course, gifts for local people don’t have that time constraint, so we haven’t started that yet.
Happy month to Christmas, everybody!
