The Game Dame

For those reading in RSS, here’s my new blog header.

Today I can only offer you this: “An Engineer’s Guide To Cats”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4]

Overheard at McDonalds

Grandma to Grandson: “Someone at church said you might like to try something called Web Kim’s. What is that? Some kind of web camera?”
Woman, explaining: “Webkinz. It’s a website where kids can adopt virtual pets and get stuff for them.”
Grandma: “Ohhh. Like pet rocks?”
Grandson: “Webkinz? My cats are better.”

Movie Recommendation

I watched Idiocracy last night. I had low expectations of it since I knew it had only been in theaters for a nanosecond, but we DVR’d it during a free HBO weekend, so it was a low risk proposition.

You can read reviews of it on Rotten Tomatoes, but all you need to know is this: if you like Office Space, The Simpsons (in its heyday), Futurama, anything done by Mike Judge, Trey Parker, or Matt Stone, you will find this movie HILARIOUS!

I loved it. It’s a brilliant combination of just stupid silliness overlaid upon biting, intelligent social satire. You can enjoy it on either level or — as I did — both at the same time. I won’t say it’s for everyone (it’s clear why the theater release was so short: it takes no prisoners with corporate America), but if you liked the list above, you’ll enjoy this movie.

Do you have words that you frequently use to mean something other than the generally accepted meaning? You know what I’m talking about. Not pet names or made-up words, but words that mean something to you (or your close friends and family) that an outsider would completely misunderstand? I know you do.

So, to honor the versatility of this amazing language we call English, I’m starting a new (non-daily) feature called Today’s Word. Today, the word I feature from my own idiolect is “stinky“. For whatever reason, I find this a very flexible word. I present some of the meanings I use it for:

• Cute. Talking to my cats: “Oh yer such a stinky doodle, I love ya.”
• Bad. “No fighting! Don’t be stinky!”
• Ornery. Must include the suffix “-pete”. As in, “Stop teasing me, you stinkypete!”
• General term of endearment. “Mommy’s home! Where are my stinky kitties?”
• Mild perjorative. Must include the suffix “-bait”. Weaker than calling someone a jerk. More of a loving razz, really. “I see you changed the channel while I was in the bathroom, you stinkbait.”

I have no idea how all these meanings came to be.  I just find it extremely amusing how English continues to evolve and thrive.  Do you have personal words to share?

This is WAY too cool not to post about. For those of you who are fellow bloggers, this is a totally awesome idea. You know how you can rate stuff on Amazon or BestBuy? Well, now you can add a 5-star rating gizmo to all your posts and get immediate feedback from your readers! How cool is that?

It’s called Outbrain and it is easy-peasy to install. Go, enjoy!

Seriously, this may be the Killer App that forces me to go to a Wordpress.org hosted site instead of the freebie version.

Oh, please forgive me. This was just too cute for me to pass up sharing.

moar funny pictures

Yes, LOLcats are like crack for me. Maybe even worse than WoW!  ZOMG!

Here’s a little help for my non-artist blogger buddies. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out which colors would look good together when you’re designing something for the web. Well, I found a cool online tool which helps you create color schemes for your website, blog, or any other electronic design that you might be working on. It’s called ColorJack and I’ve been fiddling with it for a few days.

When you visit the site, it presents you with a bunch of colored tiles. Look for a color you’d like to start with and scan the tiles for it. Hover your mouse over your chosen color and you get a flash preview of several other colors that would work well together with your base color. The image to the left here shows a color set I got when I picked the “Game Dame Yellow” tile. (There were many others with the same yellow, but I’m only showing one example.)

If you click on a tile, you’ll get a page which shows you all the colors in that scheme and allows you to tweak them a bit. Maybe that purple is too dark for you? Lighten it up or desaturate it a bit. When you’re done, you can even save your set for others to use. (Click the image to the right to see it full size.)

After you finish editing your colors, you can use the hex codes above each color box to accurately represent those colors in your blog design! Totally cool.

Like EntreCard, it’s been making me wish I had a self-hosted blog so I could make any color scheme I want. Of course, with as much time as I spend goofing around with the colors, I’d probably never have time to blog!

Well, it’s worth about half of Ratshag’s blog, but still a nice chunk of change. Too bad it’s fake money.

[digg=http://digg.com/software/Blogger_Botches_Again]Just tried to leave a comment on a Blogger blog and, guess what? They’ve once again STOPPED letting non-Blogger accounts log in to comments, like I had reported last month. In fact, you can’t even log in anonymously like you used to be able to. Check out the picture to the right so you can see what I mean.

Wow. I’m speechless. It’s beginning to look like Google doesn’t know what the heck they’re doing in the blogosphere. Comments, anyone?

Tee hee! I just had to share this site. (No financial interest, just thought it was funny.)