Nothing funny about feldspar

I keep trying to write something, but I can’t. Not that I’ve got writer’s block (one must be a writer to be blocked, I think), but it’s more like I’ve got situational ADD.¹

For instance, I’ve been composing a post for a while now on cultural appropriation. Well, not actually writing it down, but thinking about it, and about what the term means, and when is it different from cultural appreciation. I haven’t been able to get anything better than that last sentence though, so you see my problem…

I’ve been wanting to talk about how adding a third person to a household increases the dish-usage by more than 50%, so we are always out of clean flatware and bowls.

Lurking somewhere in my mind is a post about the changing attitudes towards buying in bulk. Remember about a decade ago, we were encouraged to buy big to keep from throwing away so much packaging? Now we’re being told to buy “just enough for now” (probably to keep us from overeating). And has anybody else noticed that while the container is the same size, a pint of “premium” ice cream is 14 ounces, yet costs more than the old 16 ouncer?

I wish I liked liquor. Sometimes I don’t want to open a bottle of wine or wait for the beer to get cold just to get a tipple.

I’ve been playing with Quartz Composer, and wow! let me tell you it is really easy to make bad screen savers. But I did it all by myself² and it was great fun! Putting the movie of Albite in his pool on one side of a rotating cube made me feel powerful! Or at least able to follow directions. Visual programming is fun, as long as the little boxes work like you want them to. When they don’t, I certainly have no idea how to fix them so they do. Hmm… much like my font experiment of the other day.

Recently I’ve been refurbishing one of my other sites. I downloaded a new WordPress theme, and started tweaking and adjusting and setting it up for my content, and I realized that it was so much like the theme that’s there that I just gave it up for a bad job. Not that the site couldn’t use some sprucing up, but I think it needs something more radical than just a font change (which is what I was down to) to make me more interested in maintaining it.³

What is the mechanism by which online fora get all their asshole posters to be active at the same time? I have a few that I frequent, and most of the time they’re civil, useful, amusing… but when one starts to get trolls and flamewars, they all do. Is it the moon? The weather?

I’ve managed, I see, to waste a few hundred words. It makes me feel like being in school again, when you’re told to write a 500-word essay and you have a little sheet where you count off the words in each line.⁴ But at least I don’t have to think about these things any more. Unless, of course, they sound better tomorrow or the next day, after they’ve percolated in my brains a little longer. Then I’ll probably be sorry I’ve told all my punch lines.

Ah well. Them’s the breaks.

1. This is like situational ethics, only instead of having excuses for immorality, one has excuses for inattention.↩
2. by following a tutorial in a book↩
3. I had stopped updating it for a while and nobody complained, so it’s just for my own edification that I do it at all. That and to prove to some people that Google will find you even if you don’t pay $20k to a “specialist” for SEO (search engine optimization), all it takes is interesting — or at least searchable — content.↩
4. Unlike many bloggers I read, I’m not doing this for writing practice.↩

Our bank is heavily promoting their points program — every time you use their debit card, or use their online bill pay or use their credit card, you get points. Like all such schemes, you have to amass a zillion points to redeem them for anything interesting, but get them at a piddling rate.

We get emails about it, we see it when we go to the site to do our online banking, we get postal mail about it… and when we went to the bank to open a new checking account, the guy just about rammed it down our throats.

He was honest about the whole thing: “We saw we looked like any other bank; we needed to do something to set ourselves apart, so we started this points thing.” I just wanted to slam my hand on the desk and say, “Just give me more interest on my accounts! That’d make you stand out pretty well.”

But I didn’t, because I knew it’d fall on deaf (and helpless) ears.

I know why the bank chooses to spend money on this program — it’s a marketing cost, not operations expense. Also, since not everybody will sign up, they only have to provide bennies to a portion of their customer base instead of everyone with an interest-bearing account. The program encourages people to use their debit and credit cards rather than cash and checks, so there is less need for ATMs or check-processing. It also encourages people to use their credit, you know, so they can pay interest to the bank.

So the bank wins all around, and all I can get is a $5 iTunes gift card. Hoo-boy!

This looks like fun.

Really! I wouldn’t use it to replicate old nameplates, but I could see some application to retrowork. How about a brass nameplate on your laptop? Not something every kid on the street is gonna have…

(via MAKE blog)

One of the revolting revolutions of desktop publishing was the proliferation of ugly family letters, as people figured they could choose funny fonts (remember “San Francisco” anybody?) to personalize their annual missives.

After the novelty wore off, everyone just stuck to Times or maybe Verdana (in Windows terms; Garamond and Lucida in Mac terms), or, if you’re a LaTeXer, Computer Modern. This is all quite dull, as all printed matter looks alike, and nobody wants their work to stand out anymore, for fear that somebody will laugh at them for their choice of typefaces. (Let’s not discuss HTML, because the lack of diversity is enforced by a desire to have one’s site look more-or-less the same for each viewer.)

Behind the scenes, however, the font bureaus and the printers have embraced the digital era with gusto, and have created fonts that have the ability to be used for commercial work that looks distinctive. Here’s an example (not that it’s a good example of design, as I am not a designer):

Apple Chancery, alternate set 2 (I think) with lots of individual modifications.

Look at how flourishy one can get, and it doesn’t take more than a willingness to pick out letters and apply existing styles (if the font face has them). This is cool, because the smartness is built in to the font. I didn’t have to tell it to make that fancy ff ligature, the designer did it for me.

But I’m hoping that everyone and their brother doesn’t figure out how easy it is to do this, or we’re going to get some pretty annoying Christmas letters…

I got up early this morning, after having a nightmare about my clothes, which I had piled in the shower to wash, vanished while I my back was turned getting the soap, and I tried to explain this to my dad.

So then I trudged downstairs, started the coffee, and decided to have broiled donuts for breakfast. Now, I only eat one (or maybe two, if they’re very fresh) donuts at any one time. Except for broiled donuts.¹ Those I can eat many of, and today, since Plagioclase’s mother only ever eats half of anything, she had one piece and I had seven. Glutton! (Normally Plagioclase is here to eat his share, but not today.)

And now all I want to do is go back to bed and sleep for a while. But I have all this stuff I’d like to do. But I have decided to stop taking the various medicines for my back to see what would happen, and guess what? I’m achy. So I’m not doing any of that weed-pulling or vacuuming or drawer-straightening that I had planned.

Phooey. I’m going to go back to bed. Maybe I can find those missing clothes.

1. Take stale raised glazed donuts and cut them in half. Butter the cut edges, stick ‘em under the broiler for a few minutes until they brown. Cool just enough so you don’t burn your mouth on the sugar.↩