Absquatulate

4th Jump

Two old colleagues and friends of mine have formalized a partnership and have created 4th Jump.  I couldn't be happier for them, as each is outstanding in her area of expertise. 

On a side note, it makes me realize how happy I am that I am no longer doing this kind of work.  Their website is great and obviously filled with enthusiasm for what they do.  I hope once I become certified I can bring that kind of knowledge, confidence, and interest to speech-language pathology.

Congrats Naava and Amanda!  If I need a website, I'll let you know.

AFK

I'm going into self-imposed internet-less exile for a few days. I'm so going to miss you internet, giver of life, savior from boredom, and provider of Tay Zonday reimagined by Darth Vader videos.

(I wish I was making that up, but it's simply so awesome it HAS to be real. I hearts you internet tubes!)

How Massachusetts are you?

Not too bad, seeings how I've only lived here for three years (18 years in RI does help though. I should get extra points for having enjoyed cabinets rather than frappes. )

You Are 68% Massachusetts

You're pretty Massachusetts, but you're starting to slip. Go eat a bulky roll and flip off a New Yorker.

How Massachusetts Are You?

Utterly Random Thought on the Nature of Internet Fame

If I ran across Sarah B., or Emily M., single guy chef, or Chez Shoes in real life, say, in Super Stop & Shop, would I introduce myself as "K" or "Absquatulate"?

Say what you mean!

You will begin receiving our monthly e-mail newsletter soon. The newsletter will be delivered to your inbox twice a month.

Well then, that's not really monthly now is it? Psst Cooking Light copywriters: It's called semi-monthly.

Map of the Online World, As We Know It

In case you get lost in the Sea of Memes, or unexpectedly find yourself stranded in the Viral Straits, here's a map to help you get to QWGHLM: online communities map.

Mnemonic MonKey Pirate

Mnemonic MonKey Pirate
Originally uploaded by Ape Lad.

Not much else to say, really.

Ten Servers that Changed the World | The Remarketer

Link: Ten Servers that Changed the World.

How not to earn my business

Dear Hotwired: Don't promise me a fare of $174 three times in a row for three different flight dates and then when I click "more info" on each of them immediately change the fares to $248. It makes me distrust you. I'm off to find a site that doesn't play bait and switch.

Living Logos

The Max Plank Institute in Dresden is full of smartey scientists. Don't believe me? This article explains how Michael Schmitz (German website) created a "living logo" that represents the state of the Institute based on employee voting, funding, number of articles published, etc. Makes sense as they are interested in how cells organize themselves into systems.

Courtesy of Mr. Kottke.

Observation

When I hear my cellphone's electronic signal interfere with the speakers of my computer, I no longer jump in anticipation. I just let it slide past with hardly a second thought because I know it means nothing. Pavlovian deconditioning Negative reinforcement at it's finest.

For Future Reference

Go here for all my geek shopping needs. In particular, I think the baby alien bib would be great for a brand new N40m1, and the kids t-shirts great for her big brothers N8r and b3n.

For me? How could you go wrong with the Alert! tshirt? Or Moof? Or the perennial watch? But Susan Kare can do no wrong and any of those would be fabu.

The Tao of Spam

very mentioned across letters? evening companion love black development side?
money immediate next similar.
latter explain whom? profession across here wife corner next,
sandwich goes profession different.
rich pride filled raise miserable wrong. happened already sugar bad prison.

Freelance Bitchslapping

Anil gets it right about pricing your services for freelance work, provided you don't mind not getting work for a while.

Where am I?

Wondering where I've been? Not here but over here.

Yahooooo...oooo....o. *yawn*

So. Yahoo! finally picks up on the idea that DISK SPACE IS CHEAP and offers 100M of email storage and an updated interface for their Yahoo!Mail service. All in all more space is good, an updated design is good. Google raising the bar for free email services is good (hey, got a GMail invite you'd be willing to send me? Let's negotiate!)

Update: Thanks, Heather!

Howerver good ain't good if the server is so.slow.I.could.chisel.words.in.cuneiform.faster. Honestly. More than once I've been met with DNS errors (which, okay, could very well be on my end), connection refused messages, refresh requests that just sit... and sit... and sit some more, until I give up in frustration and hit "reload" three or four times before my request goes through. Come on people, I can't imagine they're getting hit *that* hard with this new announcement.

Okay let's quantify shall we? Clicked on "return to mailbox" from a message I was reading. Time to refresh screen? 30 seconds. Click on Compose? 27 seconds for the composer to pop up. Click on cancel? 30 seconds.

Now some among you might say, "Hey, ungrateful jerk, why don't you STFU? This *is* a free service you know." To which I reply: Yeah. You're right, it is a free service. The problem here is a matter of expectation. Yesterday I didn't have these long waits to perform these same tasks. Click and response was almost instant, maybe a few seconds lag time. To have those expectations dashed with 30 second wait times (which is unacceptable in any computer environment) is disappointing. It's also disappointing to think that Yahoo was surprised by the traffic such an announcement might generate. Here's hoping this is a temporary problem, and not a permanent one because if it is, I guess I'll be shopping around for a mail server.

Update: Apparently the sluggish response times was due to a DOS attack on Akamai and probably not due to Yahoo! sleeping on the job. I retract my statement. :^)

Linky Goodness

• Fonts that look good together (if only they had actual examples)
• Also from Will Harris Esperfonto
• The Morning News has a short peice on Martha Nussbaum
• From Salon.com (requires viewing of short commercial to read whole article:

  So what's a girl to think when she opens up the special Fleet Week section of the New York Post on Monday and finds a full-page ad for Madame Tussaud's wax museum that makes the place look a celebrity call-girl service for necrophiliacs?

  I think the answer is "!?"

Aaaaaand.... we're back!

Holy moly was that a pain. Sorry for the few days of no service, it took quite a long time for TypePad's DNS to update.

DNS changes

Ah crud, I transferred my domain but I completely forgot about custom DNS with TypePad, so the site might not be available over the next few days. Thanks.

Apple Help Me: Testimony of a Late Early Adopter

In what can be deemed one of the stupidist things ever written on a blog, I am a self proclaimed late early adopter. I love new technology but I hate buying it; at least on the first pass (okay the first few passes.) New VW Beetles? Loved them! Do I own one? No. TypePad? LOVE THEM. Did I sign up when it first launched? No. Palms? LOVE THEM. I only bought it when it reached Palm V (despite being intrigued by an Apple Newton owner and which I still own and use every day.) iPod?

Sweet Moses, iPod. For a long time I managed to convince myself that I didn't own an iPod yet because it's new technology. I loathe being let down by new technology. Somehow to me, it's DOUBLY disappointing when something new, shiny, and promising elicits even a modicum of disappointment. I want it (whatever it is) to work perfectly, without fault, without stupidity (and regardless of my OWN stupidity.) I've studied enough cognitive science to know that the first iteration of anything is bound to be fraught with bugs and so I wait, like a snake in the bush as an unsuspecting mouse goes by knowing full well a fat rat is on its way.

But only now do I realize that I shun new technology for fear of being washed away in it. I can't get over how WONDERFUL the iPod is. I know, I'm supremely late to the party and 1.5 homemade margaritas into Cinco de Mayo so perhaps my exuberance is unfounded. But it's the same passion I feel for the web (adopted in 1997), or cds (adopted in 1994), blogging (adopted in 2000), or Neverwinter Nights (I can't remember when, but it was several months after it was released).

But what can I say? It's wonderful! It's easy! It's... it's so supremely dangerous. I see iTunes store, tanuting me, flirting with me, flashing me a peek at her pink ruffled underwear. Oh yes, iTunes store, you practically mock me with your availability. "Go on, take a look, down load a...," she pauses, "... free song. You know you want to." I feel the strings tugging at me already. Oh look! Tito Puente. And over there, Carl Orff and Nelly Furtado. I am hopeless. I'm wrapped in her charms and will succumb, along with my bank account, to her wily ways.

Damn you Apple.

Surprise present, for MEEE?

The Good Book says, "Thou shalt not covet" but I also think the Good Book says, "Ask and ye shall receive."

I'll be at the GEL conference in NYC. If any absquatulators are going let me know, I'd love to catch up.

Content is King

Jeff Veen has a very telling graphic up on his website. Do you deal with marketing departments for portals? Do you buy or sell online advertising? Then you should listen very closely to what Jeff is saying here. Advertising is okay in my book. I've always thougth Google had it right, and I don't mind when an advertisement is labeled such. Despite all this, there comes a point when enough is enough; take a look at Jeff's example. I think it's one of the seven signs of the internet apocalypse, right? (Zeldman has started writing in the first person, I think that's the first sign.)

Updates

Sweet Moses do I write alot of CRAP. I've taken the time to update some old Absquatulate entries from sites past into TypePad: now select blatherings from the past year are available for you to peruse and trash. What an excercise in narcissism!

Who's Got The Rubber Chicken in the Senate

One thing I love about the internet is the ability to share good natured practical jokes instantaneously. It's good free press for the senators who go along with it, and big ol' raspberries to those who didn't.

An Open Letter to Internet Users

To all those folks who received an iMac for Christmas from their well meaning children or cousins:

Stop. Please, enough with the email addresses like 'mikeysMom02132002@excite.com', or "jordys_aunt@hotmail.com', or 'iluvmybabybrian@home.com'. Just, spare me your Freudian laden problems that your email addresses proclaim to the online community. Can't you define yourself some other way than by your relationship to the newest generation in your family? I'm certain they are very cute, but aren't you a person too? Do you have any other qualities that can be used to formulate an email address? For example: catLuvr7890, machineheadrox, or even rocknrollmama. All those are better than using your relationship to the child in your life as an online moniker or email address.

Thanks

Btw, Ms. Swallows? you might want to consider changing your email address to something other than your last name@cox.net. Just a suggestion.

Best. Email. Evar.

Our phone and fax numbers changed 2 years ago !! Please tell your computer !

Will Do!

Hail, absquatulators!

I've been thinking alot about this blog and what you, dear readers, would be interested in reading about. Comment participation is low if existant at all so I thought I'd ask YOU what you like or dislike about this site and whether you'd want to engage each other in a conversation about it. What topics would you like to see more of? What would you like to see LESS of? More rants? Recipes? Personal tales of hand-searing? Borderline truthful accounts of everyday activities? Do you want the ability to comment on posts or could you really care less about them? Tell me what it is you like about the site, and I'll try to put MORE of that up here on a regular basis. You can put your suggestions in the comments on this post, or email them to me (Link is below on right hand side of page.)

I SO want a stuffed bacon!

I can't decide between the hammie or the 'mato.

Mozilla/FireFox Extensions

Color me late, but I just came across a whole gaggle of Mozilla extensions. I haven't tried any out yet but if I do I'll post commentary here. If you're an IE user you're SOL until whenever Microsoft decides to release Longhorn (2005? 2006? who knows!) Next on my list of downloads is FireFox. Faster page rendering? Even more modules? Smaller size? Giddy Up.

Again.

I'm starting to wish I had a Mac. If only they were cheaper.

Beware of the Designer's Revenge!

For all my friends who've done design work for idiotic clients: Here's your chance for revenge.

Using IE? Good luck.

As if anybody needed another reason to NOT use IE, the government (of all places!) issued this statement regarding the security of Internet Explorer.

I hear there are some other nice little browsers out there that won't get you infected with virii.

Yes Naava, you are in my blog!

Everyone, give Naava a round of applause. My very first guest blogger on my site. I <3 you, Naava!

Privacy for the rest of us

On the tip of K-Roz I went to a Proctor and Gamble site that allows you to get a free sample of Olay's new face moisturizer. I'm one of those people who always read the privacy policies because I like to see what they'll be doing with my information, and more often than not, tucked way down on the seventh page and nestled in with other grossly confusing lawyer speak is a sentance that usually states that they have the right to do whatever the hell they want with your information whether you want them to or not. I was suprirsed to find a privacly policy on their site that was written in plain English rather than in Lawyerese *and* that was relatively consumer friendly. They plainly spell out what they do with your information, where it is stored, and how you can opt out of any further contact from P&G. Holy smokes! Another astonished hurrah from me.

TypePad

I've been checking out TypePad and noodling over collaborative blogs and whether or not I should migrate Absquatulate over. Things I like:

• Categories. Now all my recipes can be in one spot
• Automatic archives
• Comments when I so choose
• Trackback links, when I feel like testing the waters
• Ability to directly edit html/css &tc. for layout, so I'm not locked into one of their templates
• Photo albums. 'nuff said.
• WAY more for my $. I pay an embararssingly large amount for hosting now, TypePad is half the cost and a kajillion times the service. Yay!
• Password protection if I want it, and it only applies to individual blogs, not all of them.

Things I am not sure I like:

• having to edit html, css, &tc. around TypePad tags. Which won't be too hard once I get it figured out, but it seems like it'll be a pain to make changes and see them almost real time.
• No search. Not that I have it now, but I thought that was an option? Maybe I missed it somewhere?
• relying on someone else's code. It's no different than hosting your site on a server at FastNet of course, but at least with traditional hosting you get...
• ... email. I really wish there was some way to keep my domain email active while using TypePad. Is there any way to do this withouth resorting to Yahoo?

Good Vibes

Okay, internet break over.

So, today DogStar gives me a big warm fuzzy shoutout on this blog today. And man, can I just tell you, I SO TOTALLY CRIED when I watched Beaches in 8th grade.

Can anybody recommend a good spam blocker that resides on your machine (rather than your mail server, for example?) that is easy to set up, preferably free, and effective? I am very, very tired of deleting 400 spam messages every few days. Also my absquatu email is fux0red, so until I can get it fixed, please email me at kristina[underscore]curro[at]yahoo. Thanks.

Nestled inbetween Viagra offers, illicit sex, lonely housewives, and special offers there was an email from a very old and dear friend, Gandu. And he wrote a lovely email which really made me smile and more or less made my day. I won't go into the details, but this is for him: Thank you so much for that letter. It truly meant the world to me because I wasn't quite sure what was going on when we last parted. I thought to myself, "Well, that's the last time I'll ever see him." I really do appreciate your thoughts and sentiments. Email forthcoming, but I hope you are doing well. Thank you.

Oh, and BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

BEHOLD the power of the internet!

ibid. ::

Tonight I get home for a productive yet ordinary day at work. I pet the cats and give them some food and relax with some Simpsons and a light dinner. I then trot upstairs to check what new marketing scammers left messages on our answering machines. This is usually merely a formality as we hardly ever get any phonecalls at all. So you can imagine my surprise when I hit "PLAY" and got... a real person.

And this time it wasn't a woman looking for Joan to tell her that someone had a stroke. It was a crackly message in which I could just barely make out my name.

My full name.

Strange. Not too many telemarketers know my full married name... who IS this? Repeated listening didn't reveal the caller or their location and lacking all that super 733t technogadgets you see so often on CSI or whatever I couldn't "Run the message through the computer" and then look serious and punch lots of keys on the keyboard while neat important looking graphics do neat and important things on my computer monitor, then hit a button and KAZAM! hear the call perfectly. I'm simply not that rich people (or the NYPD.) So I went about my evening and hoped that maybe the caller would call back.

Half way into dissecting Leto when the phone rings. I usually answer the phone hesitantly, because if it's long distance or another such ring and nobody says hello right away I hang up because it's a telemarketer (note: if I ever hang up on you, call back!) When the man on the other end asked for me by full name, I had to stop myself from saying my trademark, "She's not here right now, can I take a message?" and actually think to say, "This is she."

It turns out a friend of his was googling for him too, and found this here site. Mentioned it to him and he found my name in a UofR alumni directory.

It was the guy I mentioned in an earlier post here on absquatulate!

We're meeting for lunch tomorrow and I am still dragging my jaw on the floor.

So I thought that given this strange bit of internet karma I thought it would be nice if I in turn passed along to you a quick message from Sars of TomatoNaion fame: Sars is looking for a man named Don. The two of them were disaster buddies as they took refuge in a bank in downtown Manhattan two years ago today and she's trying to find him. If you are Don, know Don, or have friends who know Don, drop a note her way.

It's all about Karma, baby.

No More Netscape

Zeldman is daily reading for me, and he should be for you too. Today he posted that Netscape was finally kaput, AOL having laid off the rest of the Netscape staff. What surprises me is that it hasn't really registered on other sites such as MetaFilter, slashdot, boingboing, kottke.org, textism.com, megnut, &tc. &tc. &tc. Why is that? Is this such a non-event that only idiots like me are taking note? I know it's been more or less known that this would happen when AOL partnered with Micro$oft but still, it's an event worth noting isn't it? I can't help but feel a slight twinge upon hearing this news. Netscape 2.0, with it's cute little navigation themed design and spinning stars was my introduction to the web. It's a shame it is gone. To bastardize a popular quote, "Netscape is dead. Long live Netscape."

UPDATE 11:00am: I posted this at 10:30 today, and as of 10:57, Slashdot has a fresh post on this topic. I assume perhaps this will happen in the days to come. Just goes to show you that I'm ahead of the curve! Or something...

Non Profit Profit

Sometimes I forget that the Internet is a fabulous place. Where else can you read about Pakistan's World Cup prospects, hop on over to the UK, and then over to the Star Tribune, all in about 5 minutes?

Speaking of the Star Tribune, they had this little gem nestled in it's electronic cockles. And I was thinking: What if, IF, the Salvation Army stages petty thefts to increase donations? Think about it, they ask someone to rip off a few kettles, and promise to split whatever the take is. Then, the story gets out, and the public, rather than wishing to shove that tiny bell up the nether regions of the ringer so that every time they jump a distinct jingle is heard, prompting any cat within a 500m radius to claw at their bowels to get the bell to shut the hell up, instead smile warmly, pity the poor Salvation Army, and give twice what was reported stolen.

If we do the math (experience tells me that people always believe numbers, and that by "doing the math" you make your hypothesis truth):
$1000 reportedly stolen.
- $500: take of the thief, split with the Salvation Army.
$2000: donations from well meaning but naive public:
Net: $2500.

Not a bad racket, if you think about it.