My Archives: March 2006

Next Tuesday, April 4, it's the East Side Weblog Meetup! Start time is 7:00 pm, and location is Crossroads Mall Food Court, NE 8 and 156 Ave NE, Bellevue WA (map). We'll be sitting between the stage and the giant chess board -- look for the sign! Free WiFi courtesy the King County Library branch. Weblog folks who live and/or work on the east side meet to chat about weblogs and more. See you there, and let's spring into blogging!

(tags: , , , , )


Posted by Anita @ 03:42 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Local bloggers (Michael Hanscom, Samantha Mastridge of the Kissing Booth) are recommending The Stranger's coverage on the Capitol Hill shooting, especially this story titled Saturday Mourning. "Upstairs, Chavon woke to what she thought were fireworks, but when she heard the first scream she knew they weren't. Between the gunshots she heard a voice say, 'I have enough caps to kill all you fools.'"

Posted by Anita @ 04:51 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Monday, March 27, 2006

Alterslash is a sensible filter for Slashdot, showing the five top-rated comments for each post. I was reading it in 2002, but stopped somewhere along the way when they stopped pinging weblogs.com (source of data for my Daily Crawl blogroll). But now they are pinging, so I'm reading again.

(tags: , )

Posted by Anita @ 04:13 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Friday, March 24, 2006

Two big compilation blog posts by Heidi Harley, chock full of linguistics- or grammar-based jokes from the Simpsons, via Naked Translations.

Posted by Anita @ 02:35 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Monday, March 20, 2006

My friend David Levine (me and David) posted some details about a Rocketeer costume he made some years back. Make-worthy, I think! "Front view, normal light. The two main tanks are a couple of crab floats, made of high-density plastic foam, spray-painted silver. The lower half of each float is wrapped in sheet aluminum, which forms the curve at the bottom. You can cut the aluminum with metal shears. The tricky part was getting all the pieces to be the right shape. I did it by creating a life-sized paper pattern for each piece in MacDraw (this was a few years ago and I don't have the files any more, sorry) and making sure it worked in paper before cutting it out of metal."

Posted by Anita @ 03:44 AM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

Thursday, March 16, 2006

We had a good group show up at last night's Seattle Weblog Meetup. Those present:


There was lots of intense talking about tech and blog topics; so intense that most people remained standing up when they could have been sitting! Grandson R---- had fun, too. "I like being in the middle!" -- the middle of the four comfy chairs where the leather ottoman is, he meant.

(tags: , , , , )

Posted by Anita @ 04:33 AM PST [Link] [3 comments]

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Madison fan Jae Leslie Adams has been picking up trash and stuff on her daily walks, thereby making her environment a bit better every day. "I am walking for my health, and I am picking trash because I hate looking at that shit. Today I decided I have to limit this to fifteen minutes of my daily walk, because there is an awful lot of trash out there, and I cannot spend enough hours bending over repeatedly to pick it all up. Today I picked all kinds of trash for fifteen minutes along Wingra Drive, left that bag in the park trash barrel, and then kept on picking up recyclables all the way around. Emptied my bag twice in recycle bins along the way that had been left on the street (because the student renters often haven't quite figured out how our new wheelie bin pickups work), and arrived home with two more full bags. The plastic bottles and aluminum cans aren't so bad, but the beer and liquor bottles weigh more than I want to be hauling around. I scouted a great many more stray plastic bags waiting for me to fill them. It was a beautiful day well into the fifties! The snow is not yet gone! so there is plenty more to come! A group of Canada geese were standing on the ice in Wingra Creek, reflected in the open water nearby, and it was such study in grayscale and browns that I stopped to look."

Posted by Anita @ 04:25 AM PST [Link] [1 Comment]

Monday, March 13, 2006

Wednesday March 15, it's the Seattle Weblog Meetup! Start time is 7 pm; location is Ralph's Grocery and Deli, 2035 4th Ave (map), in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, diagonally across from the Cinerama. Free WiFi, food and drink available (you can buy anything in the store and consume it in the deli area, so that includes wine and beer if you want). Local and visiting webloggers talk about blog topics and lots else. I hope to see you there! Parking can be tight in the neighborhood but I usually find a space on Sixth or pay to park in the Warwick Hotel garage across the street for five bucks.

Posted by Anita @ 03:32 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

A complete set of meetup reports this time. Collect 'em all!

We had fun at last night's East Side Weblog Meetup! I stopped at the Party City store at the far end of the mall on the way in, to get more nametag stickers. Every time I'm there I have to ask where the nametags are, because they are always shifting their stock around. Grandson R---- was very tempted by the balloons, but I reminded him that we still have two big balloons floating in our living room, a "one" and a "five" left over from Potlatch 15. He took the disappointment well.

Jack (his report) arrived shortly before Tommy Williams (his report) and Alex Barnett (his report), so I showed him where the electrical outlet I usually plug into (because of bad battery on my laptop) had been removed. Should we move? No, we decided to just go with his laptop if we needed a sign-in list. Turned out we really didn't; all attendees were known to me. Dennis Hamilton of Orcmid turned up next (his report), and Ram arrived (his report) while I had taken R----- to go ride the small rides at the other end of the mall (merry-go-round, fancy car, and train).

Lots of geeky neep-neepery tonight, about new computer languages and old. We learned that Dennis got a job as an engineer's assistant at Boeing in the fifties because he had two semesters of calculus in high school, at a time when the space race was starting and such skills were rare. People hung out almost until nine -- a good night!

(tags: , , , , )

Posted by Anita @ 03:50 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, March 7, 2006

One of my favorite directors, Whit Stillman of Metropolitan fame, hasn't made a movie since The Last Days of Disco. Where did he go and what has he been up to? Josh Horowitz of Better Than Fudge has interviewed him recently.

JH: The time period in Metropolitan is never specified and I think that's helped the movie not become dated over the years.
WS: Mostly it was that we had no alternative. It was supposed to be in a different period but we really couldn't create one. So we just tried to exclude wherever we could things that seemed terribly up to date. Also I think when a period is absolutely specified and locked in a film it sometimes creates an artificial airless feeling. In Disco we were criticized. People presumed that the way people looked in the early 80s was very different from the way they looked in the film but I went through fashion magazines and tried to find a picture that would justify everything I wanted to do.
Via Grumblebee at Metafilter.

Posted by Anita @ 03:47 AM PST [Link]

Monday, March 6, 2006

Diane Duane of Out of Ambit tagged me. I skipped a few questions.


What were you doing ten years ago?

I was a perma-temp at Microsoft; I think that was the time I was running the entire MSDN website: six pages! Or it might have been the run-up to ship for the Microsoft Gardening CD where I was lead text-prep person and did the product website, also six pages but including multimedia!

What were you doing one year ago?

I was at Potlatch 14 in San Francisco. We went to a Brazilian barbecue restaurant and had a blast!

Five snacks you enjoy:

skipped

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics:

skipped

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

skipped

Five things you like doing:

Hmm.... Lindy hop (sadly in abeyance for the past few years), knitting, reading, watching opera on video, gardening

Five things you would never wear again:

skipped

Five favorite toys:

skipped


I won't tag others, but if you choose to participate, leave a link here!

Posted by Anita @ 06:59 PM PST [Link]

My favorite person to live-blog any awards show is still the Mighty Kymm. And this year, her mom actually acted in one of the fake commercials, the one against Judi Dench! "This is a pretty funny beginning, introducing all of these other people as though they are the host, Whoopi Goldberg slamming the door in the camera's face, 'Aw, hell no!' I think the Mel Gibson joke might have been funnier had I seen that trailer for his weird new movie, but it was still pretty funny. Okay, Jon Stewart waking up in bed with Clooney was very funny. So far, it's off to a good start."

Posted by Anita @ 03:40 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

This Tuesday, March 7, it's the East Side Weblog Meetup! Start time is 7:00 pm, and location is Crossroads Mall Food Court, NE 8 and 156 Ave NE, Bellevue WA (map). We'll be sitting between the stage and the giant chess board -- look for the sign! Free WiFi courtesy the King County Library branch. Weblog folks who live and/or work on the east side meet to chat about weblogs and more.

Posted by Anita @ 06:28 PM PST [Link]

[Archive Index] [Main Index]

Powered By Greymatter