Quirkblog

Not a headline you expect to see very often, eh? Ok, so the accident wasn’t all that horrifying, but the pictures accompanying the news article are pretty impressive.

A friend of mine recently gave a way a stack of CDs, part of his Musical Bottom-Feeding project, where he gets and reviews an armload of discs from the record store bargain bin. I’ve put a half-dozen of them into an iTunes playlist to listen to at work.

iTunes has a nifty feature where you can assign a 1-5 star rating to a track, and I got to thinking that it’d be nice if you could assign this rating without having to actually switch to iTunes from whatever you’re currently doing… iTunes is hugely scriptable, so I suppose I could write a hook into it, but that’s too much like effort. Especially when someone else has already written a huge collection of scripts, one of which does almost exactly what I want. Over at www.dougscripts.com there are scripts for pretty much everything. Well worth checking out.

Looks like the Transplant Games webcast is on track for this year! It’s going to be a bit different from past games. The venue is a college campus in Canada, so there’s no worries about plane tickets (we’re in driving distance) and we’ll be staying in dorm rooms instead of at a hotel. Should be interesting.
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Saturday was Rob’s birthday thing. We wound up learning how to play Texas Hold-Em poker, which was kind of fun. Of course, the big thing is that now I can understand some of the strange terminology that crops up in posts from Wil Wheaton, or in the thousand and one Spam emails I get advertising online casinos.
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The staring parrots have flown the coop (if that’s where you keep parrots). The new Michigan Theater marquee is advertising:

Hot Ballroom Ladies In Lavender

I’ve got one of those coffee cups with the sliding sippy lids, designed to keep you from doing a Stella Liebeck while driving. I mostly use it to make sure I don’t dump a cuppa joe on my computer by accident. For that, the lid works fine. It keeps the coffee inside unless it’s been clicked open. There’s even little air hole in the lid, cause you just can’t get the coffee out well unless there’s air flowing in to replace the caffeine that’s being sucked out, right? It clicks open when the lid is open, so there shouldn’t be a problem.

But there is.

The little air hole is spaced exactly the same distance from the coffee hole as my mouth is from the tip of my nose. So sometimes when I’m trying to drink, the cup sucks onto the tip of my nose. This prevents air from going into the cup, and keeps me from getting my coffee.

This is bad.

The solution is fairly simple. I need to tip my head back more while drinking. Unfortunately, this makes the cup useless for drinking coffee safely while driving. Sure, you won’t get a scalded lap, but staring out the sunroof is generally a bad idea while on the road.

This story from CNN:

Researchers: Dolphins found using tools
WASHINGTON (AP) — A group of dolphins living off the coast of Australia apparently teach their offspring to protect their snouts with sponges while foraging for food in the sea floor.

Reminds me an awful lot of one from The Onion:

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs
In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins.

I, for one, welcome our new aquatic overlords.

Nice little weekend of insomnia for me. Mostly due to the incoming summer and the fun changes in heat, air pressure and humidity. It’s happened before, so it’s not entirely unexpected, but it’s still not much fun to be sitting around at three in the morning counting sheep number 3587 and wondering if it’s a prime number. (It isn’t by the way, but the lowest prime factor is 17, so it took me a while to figure out in my head)