I got Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman’s latest, in the mail last week, and am about halfway through it. I love it. I almost don’t want to finish it, because that means it’ll be over, it’s so much fun.\
Yes, this is only half a review. If you liked the humor in Good Omens, you’ll like this one. If you liked the mythology in American Gods, you’ll love this one. So far, it doesn’t really feel like a fantasy or sci-fi novel. It’s slowly building the fantasy piece, while showing us some truly funny and interesting characters. It’s a story about fathers, sons and brothers, and feels a little bit like Big Fish to me, except that Tim from the Office is the leading man this time (if that makes any sense at all).\
Go get it. You won’t be sorry. Even if you don’t normally read fantasy or sci-fi (which I don’t), you’ll love it. Honest.
Month: September 2005
New Laptops
Work just gave me a brand new Dell laptop to replace my ancient Windows machine. What’s the first thing I do – even before installing Firefox on it? Put my MY MACINTOSH RULES sticker on it. Gotta declare your allegiances, man.\
It’s funny, but I’ve been a full-time OS X user for about three years now, and I don’t miss Windows at all. I don’t live in a Start-button world anymore. I don’t think in Windows. I think in OS X first. I know it’s weird to say that, but it’s true. My instincts have been honed. This is true of web stuff too. I had someone ask me to troubleshoot a page that was build in quirks mode, and I couldn’t do it at first. I don’t think in quirks mode anymore. I think in standards mode. My box model’s been fixed.\
I apologize to my family and non-geeky friends for the above paragraph.
I just can’t stop
From an article in the Toronto Star, Joss Whedon about Veronica Mars:\
“I was on fire. We had just watched the last five episodes in one day and I was just freaking out,” he says, wild-eyed. “I understand Buffy fans better watching that show and so does my wife. There’s so much pain and there’s so much humour and the stories are so tight and the characters are so well-drawn and you just. Care. So. Much. And to have all of that in one package is so rare. I was a junkie. I just had to share how cool it was. And I’ve realized if you do that, people notice. It’s nice. Somebody else will go, `I just love Veronica Mars.'”\
“When people said they’re calling this the next Buffy, for once I actually thought it was a compliment.”
Dear Internet
You are upsetting me. Please stop using crappy old browsers. There is absolutely no excuse for using Netscape 6, Netscape 4.x, Safari 1.0, IE 5.5 or IE 5.0. They are all old, insecure, out-of-date, feature poor and tired. They are so so tired. Please retire them and get yourself a new browser. You know, one that renders pages correctly, that won’t crash on you, that’s actually supported by the company that released it, etc…\
We should have a national holiday: Upgrade Your Browser Day. It could be a national day of nerd service where nerds go door-to-door offering to help people upgrade to the latest version of that person’s browser of choice. You want to use Netscape? Great! Let’s dump that ancient bug-filled copy of 6.0 and put you on 7.2 or 8.0! Opera lover? Please, let’s install 8.5! IE? No more 5.0’s or 5.5. Let’s get you a fresh (but still old, IE 7 can’t get here fast enough) copy of IE 6.\
Yeah, I think this could work. We need browser missionaries. I could see the door approach now:\
knock, knock\
“Hello, ma’am, we’re the neighborhood browser missionaries. Do you have any web browsers in the house?”\
“Yes, I think we do…”\
“Do you know what version you have? Have you checked recently for updates?”\
“Well, no, I just use it.”\
“Can we come in? We’d love to help you upgrade that old thing, and we’ll do it for free!”\
I think it would work.
I Love Information
So I needed a break from thinking about markup and decided to go check out the stats for lawver.net generated by my friendly web server. I stumbled on something interesting (to me):
- pages served in 2003: 67,492
- pages served in 2004: 581,041
- pages served in 2005: 1,003,530\
I think I joined Dreamhost in about the middle of 2003, so that’s understandable. But, still, that’s almost doubling the amount of traffic every year. I think that’s pretty cool.\
Some more stuff that’s probably only cool to me: - About 25% of the visitors to this site are Mac users.
- NetNewsWire is the most popular news reader among the RSS consumers of this site.
- Bloglines is number two.
- Search engine bots index this site more often than they probably should.
- The most popular search terms that get people here are:
- sick movies
- beautiful font
- maddenisms
- green snot
- chicken noises (holy crap, I’m number one!)
- nerd jokes
- Over 25% of my traffic comes from Google if you include all the localized versions.
- About 1% of my traffic comes from inside the AOL campus local network (which oddly enough, doesn’t worry me at all).
- According to Sitemeter, I went from about 2,200 “visits” a month in October of last year to over 9,000 last month (which was an aberration, but July was still almost 7,500).\
Told you I love information.
Fess Up
I know there are some of you out there that started watching Veronica Mars over the summer. So, come on, post a reply and tell me what you thought.\
At work one day, Kevin got an IM out of blue that read, “I am hooked on Veronica Mars and it is all your wife’s fault.” Hee.\
I also got several members of my book club watching it. Yay!\
I should be using my power for greater good though, like trying to change the NFL overtime rules (cuz they suck).\
But Veronica Mars deserves to be the beneficiary of my power right now. Need some convincing?
- Logan in the closet during “Return of the Kane” was heartbreaking. The music was great, the editing and camera work were great, and his acting there was outstanding. I will never be able to hear “Ventura Highway” again without waiting for the belt.
- The Camelot kiss was The. Best. First. Kiss. EVER. Even though there was barely any dialog, you could tell what the two were thinking and feeling. I loved the sweeping camera work and the selection of the literal music. I also appreciated the awkwardness that followed. Very in character.
- The scene where Aaron beats Trina’s abusive boyfriend was brilliant. Fucking brilliant, in fact. The music selection was inspired. Aaron fought perfectly in character, like a guy who is used to having choreographed, pretend fights with props. Loved it! (I honestly think I scared Kevin after this scene because of how much I loved it.)
The Perfect Milkshake
Jen decided that we needed pizza and milkshakes for dinner tonight. Since I’d recently scored a sweet blender from Woot! and we had lots of ice cream in the house… we were all set. They turned out so well, I thought I’d share the process (since milkshakes are kind of hard to get “right” at home… and I’ve tried).\
Makes three awesome servings.\
h4. Ingredients
* 1 ~~gallon~~ half gallon (or whatever their round regular container holds) of Edy’s (or Dreyer’s, or any other creamy ice cream – Breyer’s probably wouldn’t work because it’s too icey) Cookies and Cream ice cream.
* 3 cups of milk
* 3 small bags of Mini Oreos
* Some chocolate syrup.
* 3 straws
* Whipped Cream\
h4. Directions
- Pour the three bags of oreos in the blender and pulse on the chop setting until they’re broken up.
- Add about half of the ice cream into the blender.
- Pour in one cup of the milk.
- Liberally apply chocolate syrup (if you like that sort of thing).
- Pulse in 3 second bursts on the highest setting, about 10-12 bursts.
- This should give you a really think mess of wonderful, and it should have brought the ice cream down to a level where you can add the rest of the ice cream (whatever will fit and still give you enough room to add the rest of the milk).
- Pulse again in 3 second bursts until the rest of the ice cream and milk are incorporated – should take about 10-12 hits.
- Split it up among three cups, stick a straw in it, and douse it liberally with whipped cream.
- Enjoy\
I have never heard such happy noises from my family. We even let Brian have a little bit and he cried when it was all gone. It was awesome. It is the only milkshake that has made me want to cry. I think I might have actually shed a tear when it was all gone.\
Oh, and the measurements are all approximate. I don’t measure stuff… sorry if I guessed wrong, but you’ll still get a milkshake out it, so how bad can it be?\
Tomorrow night, mint chocolate chip.
Veronica Mars wrap up
How many of you actually watched Veronica Mars this summer? Hit reply and shoot me a message. What did you think of it?\
Season 2 premiere is Wednesday, September 28, at 9 pm on UPN. The show will have another season-long mystery with smaller mysteries sprinkled through out.
Look Around, See Anything Different?
I switched some things around this evening (because there was nothing on TV). I’ve split the main page into two columns so Jen and I can post without feeling guilty for pushing each others’ posts off the front page. We also have his and her’s RSS feeds in case some of you don’t like me and only want to see Jen’s stuff. I haven’t removed any feeds, so there are still the unified feeds.\
I never cease to be amazed at how comfortable Movable Type is to work with. The templating system is natural and it’s easy to customize how your blog looks, what it does and how it outputs and formats data. I love the developer community that’s come up around it that creates really cool plugins before I know I need them. I know I flirted with switching, but I don’t think I will. MT is just too comfortable.\
Now it’s back to my new microformat and writing more XSL (for a project you’ll all be hearing way too much about in the very near future). Thank you, internet, for everything. Good night!
He speaks!
Brian’s first word is officially “Max.” I am the mom, so I get to decide. Brian has mimicked sounds before, like “mama” and “dada” but we’ve never been sure if there was any meaning behind it. He has also done a breathy “hi” before, but again we weren’t sure if he intended to greet us or if it just came out that way. But we are sure that Brian uses Max correctly, pointing at his brother when he says it. He can’t say it correctly, but it is obvious what he is trying to say. Go Brian!