Sillybean

April 25, 2008

Barcodes as art

Barcodes as art from Japan and Russia — brilliant stuff. (via Jeremy Tolbert)

April 23, 2008

The 20 Worst Foods in America

The 20 Worst Foods in America — Chili’s and On the Border are conspiring to kill you.

OH JOHN RINGO NO.

OH JOHN RINGO NO. — I think I just ruptured something. (via the other Steph)

Maureen McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters free to download

Maureen McHugh’s collection Mothers & Other Monsters free to download from Small Beer. The more I read on my iPhone, the more I appreciate plain text or HTML versions of free online things. PDFs work, but they scroll oddly. (via GalleyCat)

April 22, 2008

Open Source Idiocy

The Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project and the Open-Source Knuckle Sandwich Project are both excellent reactions to the Open Source Boob Project. As Harlan Ellison has taught us, SF cons are rife with unwanted groping. Publicizing what should have been a private party, and recommending that it be extended to other cons, is ill-conceived and inconsiderate as hell.

April 21, 2008

stuff

My sciatic nerve is angry again. I do not like it when it’s angry.

It’s the Week of Birthdays around here. Happy birthday (in order): Mike, Ryan, David, Lisa, Wendy (UPDATE YER BLOG, GIRL), and Sarah. You are all far too damn old, but it’s better than the alternative.

This week on Shadow Unit: the WTF BBQ, part 3. Good. This week on Saltation: chapter 12. Double-plus good.

Last week, there was a meme going around LJ in which authors were posting lists of the novels they’d completed, including those that hadn’t sold. I thought about my own craptastic teenage writing — and I thank God that most of it was either lost or destroyed — and remembered that I still haven’t finished transcribing all my old notebooks. As I flipped through them looking for the story I wanted to type up, I found the long-lost opening chapter of another book — which has been lost for so long that I actually thought I’d hallucinated it. But no, it’s there, with a note in the margin telling me exactly when and where it was written. Thanks a bunch, Younger Me! You knew our memory would be complete shit by age 30, didn’t you?

April 20, 2008

Signet drops Cassie Edwards, reverts book rights

Signet drops Cassie Edwards, reverts book rights — In retrospect, it’s not at all surprising that it took them nearly four months to comb through all her books.

April 17, 2008

Important note about the WordPress 2.5 media manager

If you don’t want your thumbnails to get distorted, you need to change WordPress 2.5’s default setting before you upload your photos into the media manager. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous and UNcheck the “Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions (normally thumbnails are proportional)” box.

I really can’t believe they have that box checked by default. It says right there: “normally thumbnails are proportional.” So why did they make the abnormal setting the default? It is to weep.

In other news, the discussion over the 2.5 Write screen continues.

Listen to this

Jane Vain and the Dark Matter, C’mon Baby Say Bang Bang. (Also on MySpace, if you prefer.)

Tales from Redesignland

Tales from Redesignland — “Where Web developers live and wish they could die”

April 15, 2008

Pacific Northwest: tell us where to go

We’re thinking of visiting Portland, Seattle, and/or places in between next month. Where should we go? What should we do?

Possibilities already on my radar:
treehouse hotels
chocolate cafes
Powell’s (*rapturous sigh*)
ETA: and Seattle’s University Bookstore, home of many fine author events

What else?

'round here

Writing & Publishing 101

Paged Media: Web Design for Authors

elsewhere

The Minority Report hand-waving computer interface is now real. Its users will have the best toned arms in the office.

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The Matrix runs on Windows. Ow. It hurts to laugh that hard.

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Google flu trends — doing something useful with all those searches for “flu symptoms.”

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I’m addicted to the NYTimes maps this morning, especially the county bubble view. Hello, population distribution! It’s fascinating to compare this year to 2004.

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LibriVox — “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain”

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