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  • New Section

    This weekend my mom was going through boxes of books from when my grandmother’s house was sold. While doing so she found lots of crazy old cookbooks that look like they belong in The Gallery of Regrettable Food. My favorite of the things she found was a book put out by Ballantine beer on how to throw a party. I decided I just had to scan it in to share and realized there were one or two other things I’d been planning on scanning in and so decided to make a project of it. The end result is a new section on my site called: fun stuff. I’ll toss pictures and scans of funny things that catch my eye. To start things off there’s the party book and the worst rave flyer ever.

  • Catching Up With Blogs

    I’m catching up on a few days of blog reading while I switched to a new machine. Here’s a few things that jumped out at me:

    • Goodbye TechTV. Leo writes about the last day of Call for Help and leaves some thoughts on the merger. Personally, I have no idea what kind of crack Comcast/G4 is smoking. From all I can see they’re doing their best to alienate most of the TechTV audience. One thing I always liked about TechTV was that they had stuff for everyone. G4 feels like it is targetted towards the 15-25 year old crowd. At first I thought it was kind of charming, but it quickly got on my nerves. Biggest missed opportunity? Not bringing over a Call for Help and not bringing over a Tech Live, a daily tech news show. Rumor has it their own weekly news show will be going daily, but not until July. I dunno, I’d think if you suddenly owned a network like TechTV, which has been experiencing strong growth in the past year, you’d want to keep some of that audience.
    • Kasia talks about The Day After Tomorrow. This is one I kind of want to see just for the special effects. From everything I’ve heard the movie itself was pretty lame beyond that.
    • Neil Gaiman talks about Fred the Unlucky Black Cat being sick and inspires a small poem.
    • Derek has found that Alpha-Bits may be no more. Dammit, I used to love those (even though I’m more of a Special K guy myself these days).

    That’s it for now, time to get out and get some fresh air.

  • The Great Flood of March 1936

    Flood of 1936 pic 1
    Flood of 1936 pic 2

    One of the projects I’ve been working on lately is scanning in all the old pictures my parents have collected over the years from various relatives. My grandparents in particular had a lot of old photos. While scanning pictures in this morning I came across a number of them that seemed to be of a flood. I noticed two of them had the processing date on the back of the photo and decided to do a little research. I googled for ‘Hartford Flood 1936‘ and actually came up with a fair number of hits. From one page:

    On March 12, 1936, rain began falling across Connecticut. The state had already been covered with a blanket of six to eight inches of snow. Rains poured down for the next nine days and dropped up to fourteen inches on already saturated and frozen land. These incredible forces of nature unleashed on Connecticut the greatest floods in its history to that date. The Connecticut and Farmington Rivers and all of their tributaries became raging torrents. Ice flows added to the destruction. Water and ice tore out bridges, highways, roads, and railways. The dam at New Hartford burst, and homes and buildings were washed away or destroyed. Fourteen thousand people were left homeless, several were dead or missing, and epidemic disease threatened the population. The National Guard was called to action as the ravaging floods paralyzed business, traffic, communication, and home life, as the cities and towns along the rivers became the principal centers of destruction.

    I think the thing I’m boggling at the most is how easy it was to dig up all this information. A few words into a search engine and I was greeted with gobs of information about this event. I still find it amazing, even after being online so long.

    Flood of 1936 pic 3
    Flood of 1936 pic 4

  • They’re Squirmily Delicious!

    This is pretty fun. Design your own cereal box!
    wormy

    [via lonita.links.log < Cynical-C Blog < J-Walk Blog < collision detection < jenett.radio]

  • D’oh

    I seem to have had comments and trackbacks turned off for the last day or so. Oops.

  • If I Ever Even Consider Buying Something Like This, Kill Me

    hikari_f

    Gainax has announced a life sized, poseable Hikari doll from Konomini. I’m not sure what frightens me more. The idea that things like this exist, or that there are people out there who are probably anxious to own them. The dolls are made by Paper Moon, who offer a number of other dolls (including Sakura and Ryoko). Words cannot begin to describe how wrong I find this. What’s next? Real Anime Doll?

     

  • If I Ever Even Consider Buying Something Like This, Kill Me

    hikari_f

    Gainax has announced a life sized, poseable Hikari doll from Konomini. I’m not sure what frightens me more. The idea that things like this exist, or that there are people out there who are probably anxious to own them. The dolls are made by Paper Moon, who offer a number of other dolls (including Sakura and Ryoko). Words cannot begin to describe how wrong I find this. What’s next? Real Anime Doll?

     

  • Cool Screen Saver

    We would like to provide mysterious suites constructed by random matching of the words and pictures. Enjoy yourselves in the surrealistic world spun by strange coincidence and eternal imagination.
    And run your meditation on what “meaning” represents.

    For those folks with OS X, here’s a very cool looking screen saver called Hotel Magritte. It’s quite nice. He’s also got some other ones up there that look pretty cool.

  • Hardware Hacking

    The most recent i, cringely is about how people are making new versions of the firmware for some of the new Linksys 802.11g boxes, specifically the WRT54G. I’d noticed the other day that the access point I’d gotten recently, the WAP54G seemed to be running linux also, so did some searching to find out if they were similar. It seems that they are and Sveasoft had just recently released new firmware for it too. It’s pretty slick being able to connect to your access point from the command line. The only real issue is that it doesn’t have as much memory as the WRT54G, so it doesn’t have quite as many features, but the important ones are there, including some bandwidth management tools (something I think these boxes should have anyways).

    What I’m thinking about now is getting a WRT54G for our gateway, this will give wireless to the back of the house and the back porch, and using the new WAP54G as a repeater for the front of the house, just to get complete coverage.

  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced

    Phew. After quite a long time I finally finished Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. I’d zoomed through a bunch of it a while back, but hadn’t had as much time to play recently. Overall it was quite fun. At times it was a little challenging, but never so hard that I felt frustrated by it. Definitely one of the better games to get for the Gameboy Advance.

    Next up: Advance Wars 2