Most of the articles I've

Most of the articles I’ve read about the Northern Alliance have some sort of Toyota truck/SUV product placement in them. If I’m Joe American and I want to be patriotic is it okay if I buy Toyota products instead of the equivalent American car?

Does Toyota have a great marketing team or are journalists taught to place product endorsements in their articles as best they can? I don’t see them noting the manufacturers of the guns, bombs and warplanes with the same fervor.

A timeline of clothing reveals

A timeline of clothing reveals a small detail that many of you probably overlooked. The invention of the wire hanger in 1903. This was the beginning of the democratization of clothing (along with revolutions in textile manufacturing) because it opened the door to mass production and thus lower cost hangers. This past summer when I visited The Biltmore Estate I learned that when hangers first started showing up they were for the rich. Setting aside the dangers of asexual hanger reproduction and the fact that the hanger has no known predator in the wild, I found myself fascinated by their impact on society.

I saw Silver Scooter and

I saw Silver Scooter and Death Cab for Cutie last night with Josh and Leia. After my last music experience with Built to Spill I was a bit leery of going to another show. While I enjoyed myself at that BtS show I felt like it was a musical deathmatch with the bands and I vying to see who would succumb to exhaustion first. I didn’t get home till after 2:10am and I reeked of an odor that would have made Grendel blush.

Okay, this is too cool.

Okay, this is too cool. My friend Porovaara had this in his latest livejournal entry.

Last night I made my own laptop case out of a blanket and some shoestrings.

Here are pics of the laptop case in question. I bet he could sell those things for a fortune on eziba.com.

Rolled out some new comment

Rolled out some new comment code. Still tweaking but it’s cleaner now. It should handle HTML tags and fake tags like much more gracefully. Although I still have a lot more testing to do on it. I will be adding the ability to have new comments emailed to you (thanks hymie) and the ability to delete your own posts if you posted in the last 20 minutes.

I've reproduced the web publishing

I’ve reproduced the web publishing environment from gnumatt.org on my machine at work. A few quick comments.

• There is a reason Cocoon 2 is still a release candidate, and not a release.- The reorganized automagic class loading in Tomcat 3.3 is confusing- War files are very cool- I wish mod_jk worked like good old mod_jserv did- Cocoon 2, when it works, is about the coolest thing since mitochondria

gnuhouse The limitations of housing

gnuhouse

The limitations of housing today do not fit well with the e-lifestyle. The notion that we should sign up for a six month or twelve month lease, or buy a house is ridiculous. Employers can fire and hire on a moments notice. Our housing needs to reflect the same flexibility that our ability to eat and work have. The e-lifestyle is not bound by geography and it’s about time that our notions of housing catch up to that fact.

I started building a list

I started building a list of movies that I own. I have a lot more work to do on this, also the list is quite incomplete.

It’s sort of funny how I feel cheated by movies like Clean, Shaven that I searched so hard for (found it in Philadelphia) on VHS. It came right out on DVD. However, Ridicule (cheated out of its Oscar by the way), was easy to find on VHS but still isn’t out on DVD. If that’s not proof of an arbitrary and uncaring God I don’t know what it is.

I went to my second

I went to my second ever Dallas Stars game last night. This time it was at the new American Airlines center. Leia scored two kick ass tickets and parking passes. I was about eight rows back from the glass, Row H, Seat 8. Sadly I got to see my team the Nashville Predators get blanked in a 3-0 whooping by the Stars. I gotta love the Predators though, they are one of the hardest working teams in the league and they get production from all four of their lines because they don’t have any star players. However, last night was not one of those nights.

Today was my first day

Today was my first day with corporate email and I already had 47 emails waiting for me. They all had to do with one message from Travis. Travis was looking for someone named Matt so he sent an email to all 194 Matt’s in the company across the nation:

A customer named Jacklyn ahem @ [some number] says that you have not returned her phone call and would like for you to do that as soon as possible. The only info she had was Matt and the extension 4194

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