This weekend in dark fashion and gothic bellydance! Don’t forget!

La Mode Macabre

http://www.myspace.com/la_mode_macabre

East:Meets:West

http://www.myspace.com/eastmeetswestpdx

I mention partly because they’ll be really fun and partly because the illustrious Kim Sakkara will be vending/showing at these events.

How to derail the Engineering department in 2 easy steps:

Step 1: Have one of your coworkers announce publicly that he stealthfully gave his 2 weeks notice two weeks ago and has been keeping it on the down-low. He’s moving on to bigger and better things (going back to school) and he’ll really be missed by all. Long lunch, party with cake, great words spoken.

Step 2: Post a printout of the WeRobot shirt image so that everyone can help identify the robots:

I signed up for Color Wars today as part of Go Team Pants! My first submission is part of the “make your own merit badge” challenge. I present to you my submission: the Photoshop merit badge.

I forgot to mention it when it was first listed, but my OLPC Laptop is for sale on eBay. The reasons are many and varied, but primarily have to do with the fact that I originally got it to write code for, but only ended up turning it on a half-dozen times. The iPhone has a larger installed userbase and is much easier to code for. And I actually carry it around and use it.

A while back, I looked at some of the online library websites–you know, those sites like Last.fm, but for books. You tell it what books you own and what you’re currently reading. It’ll make suggestions, show you what your friends have read, and all that good community stuff. I never got around to signing up for any of them because I didn’t want to manually add all of my book information. Every book I own (565, as of this writing) has been cataloged by barcode scanner and loaded into Delicious Monster. With no way to upload that data, there wasn’t much point in wasting my time typing in (or even copying and pasting) each ISBN.

Recently, something prompted me to look again. I examined LibraryThing and Goodreads, as I know people on both services. I settled on LibraryThing because it has an importer that works with Delicious Library. I exported to a text file, then uploaded that file to the website. Quite quickly, I discovered that LibraryThing has a cap of only 200 books without paying for the service. It’s doubtful that I’ll get enough enjoyment out of it to justify $10/year. After all, I can get recommendations from Amazon or directly from friends.

Because of the above limitation, I probably won’t be using it, but if you want to check out my account (containing, alphabetically, about the first third of my books), it’s at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/BrianEnigma.

EDIT: I may have to backpedal a little bit, as I’ve just been informed that GoodReads can import from Delicious Library, so I’m checking it out now.

EDIT2: Everything seems to have imported, but a few books got imported incorrectly for some reason. I’m pretty certain that I’ve never heard of, read, or own a novel called Cold Target, but it is now in my library, according to Goodreads. I’ll probably leave it because trying to reconcile the differences may be like finding a needle in a haystack. Because there doesn’t appear to be a cap on the number of books in a library, I think I’ll be sticking with Goodreads. My profile is http://www.goodreads.com/profile/brianenigma.

$750,000 in three days and it only took 10 weeks to produce? I’d say Trent is doing pretty well these days.

There is a new NIN album out today…

…It’s pretty easy to buy. It’s proving less easy to actually download the purchase. I think someone needs to be schooled in caching, load balancing, and services like Akamai and Cachefly.

Two words: bacon cups

Holy cow! It’s a blog devoted to handwritten signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L. Who’da thunk the phenomenon was prevalent enough to support such a blog?

See also: countless blogs that feature examples of extraneous “quotes” and apostrophe’s

There’s a new You Suck at Photoshop, the Liquify tool. Unfortunately, I feel they’re getting a little less funny over time. There also seems to be some kind of game or Chaotic Fiction wrapped in with the videos (see also: this Unfiction thread for more detail.)