Last night, Kim and I went to The Vampire Masquerade Ball. It was a swanky affair, in which I felt terribly under-dressed–not for lack of intention, but because we ran out of time to really get some good outfits together. It was a great event, although they probably could have picked a better DJ. And a better performance (Pure Cirkus, while high-spirited, sort of failed in the excitement and entertaining categories.) The people-watching was excellent, the drinks were good, and running into people we have not seen in a while was very nice. The location was awesome–not just because it is a few blocks from home, but because it seems custom-tailored to the crowd: a pair of elegant 1925 ballrooms, dark purple with white and gold trim, chandeliers, for a total of 8000 square feet. One thing I was not expecting was the vendors in the lower ballroom. Of course, there was a lot of clothing, masks, custom-fitted fangs, leather goods, and artwork. There were also a few totally unexpected things like Gothic Beagle.

Overall, it was a fun night. I can’t wait until next year, when we can get some nicer clothes and do it right. Being old folks, we had to cut out at 1am.

Last time, I talked about printing or stamps, but I caved in and simply made a smaller Sudoku grid. The previous grid was 2.75″ (on a 3″ wide card.) This new one is 2.5″ and should fall within the margin of error of consumer double-sided printing.

As I have mentioned here before, squirrels often hang upside-down from our eves, trying to fish sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder. Today, I was sitting around, waiting to be picked up, when a sudden motion caused me to look up. I saw, just in time, the bird feeder swinging violently and a squirrel plunging to the ground, bushy tail spinning around like a malfunctioning helicopter. This was followed up by the ever-present, ever-watchful-for-little-critters, neighborhood cat, Eve, chasing the grounded squirrel up the closest tree.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

A great article on Tesla in The Fortean Times. (last two pages, of five, require registration)

Instead of publicly posting my DS/Wii codes in my profile, I am going to do what all the cool kinds are doing and move them to a friend-protected post, linked to from my profile.

Please keep in mind that I play the Wii once every week or two, and I haven’t touched the DS since January.
Feel free to reply directly with your number(s) or to point to your own friends-locked pages.

This is another Hipster PDA report from the front lines. Previous ones are tagged hipsterpda.

A month or two ago, I picked up a shirt pocket briefcase from Levenger. It’s basically a leather wallet and writing surface for 3×5 cards. It’s a fancy Hipster PDA variant that’s useful for carrying around to meetings with clients. While I still use the ghetto binder-clip version for all of my own stuff–for that extra street cred, ya’ know–the fancy version is useful for work-related notes (and for keeping work at work, isolated from the personal Hipster PDA, if that makes sense.)

I noticed that Levenger sells 3×5 file folders that look like your typical manilla 8.5×11 folders, but put through the shinkotron. Because I did not feel like forking over the cash and because they are simple enough I made some myself (PDF forthcoming, if you’re interested.) This lets me jot down notes during meetings and brainstorms, then group similar notes together–like with regular paper and regular hanging file folders, but smaller. It’s also a useful long-term storage for “back of the paper napkin” style notes and diagrams. I ended up getting another cheezy plastic recipe-box style box to put them in, but only after spending a week trying to find a local place that sells nice wooden boxes of the correct size.

I’ve found a flaw in the Sudoko cards that I designed. The flaw is that the PDF is too accurate for consumer printers. I’m finding that most printers, when handling cardstock, get really finicky about everything. Depending on how much paper is in the paper feed and how carefully you try to feed it through, the results could be as much as a quarter-inch off by the time the printer reaches the other end of the paper. It’s that whole thing about small angles growing to large differences if you follow the angle out far enough. Trying to manually get everything to line up each time, then cut things exactly (even with a nice paper cutter), is starting to be a pain in the butt. I actually talked to a couple of local print houses about having someone else do the exact printwork and cutting, but over $100 for 500-1000 cards seems excessive to me. As much as I hate to do it, I may just have to shrink down the size of the grid to account for printer inaccuracies. Another thought was to have someone make (or make myself, if there’s a way) a rubber stamp to just put the grid on regular blank cards, but I have not had much luck in that department. Most stamp companies only want to handle text: return mailing addresses, check endorsements, inspected by #23, and that sort of thing, with maybe a piece of stock clipart. So shrinking the pattern might be my only remaining option.

In The Prestige, Nicola Tesla was played by David Bowie. How the eff did I not notice that?!

In other news, I’ve switched from BBEdit to TextMate. BBEdit isn’t even in my dock anymore and only comes up by accident because of file associations. No editor I found on OS X (including those two, SubEthaEdit, and others) had the tab-indents-a-selected-block-of-text feature that I was looking for (well, except Eclipse, but that’s not so much an editor as an IDE that takes 2 minutes to load), but TextMate has all of the features I use in BBEdit, plus some really great tab-completion and plugin functionality and keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING. It has a crazy number of keyboard shortcuts which, on the one hand, is a bit overwhelming but on the other means I never have to touch the mouse. There’s also a “universal keyboard shortcut” to bring up a search box of functions/keyboard-shortcuts so that I can learn the right keyboard shortcuts without the mouse. It was written by a Unix hacker, and it really shows. They got my €39. I just need to train my fingers to type “mate blahblah.txt” at a shell prompt instead of “bbedit blahblah.txt”.

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? As lolcats showed us before it disappeared, apparently, all pets speak in a combination of l33t and pidgin English.

People on my friend-list who are following the Year Zero thing know this already, but Trent has released four songs (one as a music video) from his upcoming album. They have all been released on USB keys discovered in the restrooms at NIN concerts (they’re on a European tour right now.) I’m actually quite impressed with these songs. When The Fragile was released a few years back, I gave up (no pun intended)–either I had changed or he had changed, but somehow I wasn’t connecting with the music anymore. (Even though I wasn’t too into the music, I still remained a fanboy and collected up the albums and singles, such that I continued to have everything going back to Halo 1 plus a stack of 20-30 bootleg CDs I got over the years from Bionic.) These new songs from Year Zero have changed my outlook of his music. They harken back to old-school NIN.

The official site has the Survivalism video as well as the source for that song in Garage Band format for you to remix as you please–similar to what he did with the previous album. It also has a short trailer… whether it is for the album or for the cross-media “game” thing, I don’t know, but it has a certain creepiness to it:

…and if you want to catch up on what’s going on with the game/experience/whatever, I have a nice write-up started at http://yearzero.netninja.com/notes/trail.html.

Kneeling chairs confuse cats. “How am I supposed to sit in your lap?” Though they do make great cat perches when nobody is sitting in them.

How is it that when polished metal gets worn from use, it becomes scratched, but when brushed metal gets worn from use, it becomes shiny?