Wow, talk about a buzzkill…

A non-profit group has constructed a billboard in second life to let people know how many preventable child deaths they could have done something about while f’ing around in the non-real-world.

Second Life escapists told to wake up | The Register

In this case, I can sorta see both sides. It seems kind of trivial to be spending zillions of hours and some dollars in a role playing game when you could be fighting injustice in the real world. Yup, absolutely right. However, having an outlet from the horrors of real life is sometimes a necessity for our information-overload, news-drenched, overworking lives. I guess there is always a happy medium, isn’t there?

Rumsfeld wanted to “change the course” and “cut and run” right before he was canned.

The timeline (at least the one presented by the Seattle Times) doesn’t support it, but it could be possible that Rumsfeld issued a memo suggesting that the Iraq war was falling apart and was fired immediately. It is also possible that he got wind of unhappiness and was trying to prove that he was flexible. Either way, it was too little too late.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Rumsfeld urged big changes in Iraq strategy

Cafe Campagne (Pike Place Market)

This isn’t directly about Cafe Campagne, I just happened to come up with this rule while leaving there with a meal half-finished.

The Rule? If you enter a low-ceilinged restaurant and you see a party of 8 or more seated (or waiting), just leave immediately.

On Friday, we sat down to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants during my favorite time of the year to eat there (Cassoulet season). We had our favorite table. Perfect for a romantic dinner. There was a group of around 10 middle aged women seated a couple tables over from us. They were well dressed and seemed nice. Soon, the volume level from that table was near airplane-engine-roar level with the occasional laugh-squeal or scream making me want to put a fork into my eye. They drew angry looks from all around the room, but the usually very attentive staff ignored the situation. I don’t think the ladies were trying to be rude. I don’t even think they understood how insanely loud they were. They were just trying to hear each other over the din of a busy restaurant with no soft items to absorb sound and low ceilings and tons of mirrors and windows which amplify it.

That kind of thing makes eating at any restaurant feel like eating in the bar at TGI Fridays.

Cafe Campagne on Urbanspoon

The way the kids talk

I heard the phrase “Peace… Out” used as a verb a couple weeks ago, as in “If I show up and they ignore me, I’ll just Peace Out, ya know.”

This was coming from a guy who must have been under 25, and it honestly blew my mind a bit.

I hadn’t heard “Peace… Out” even ironically for a few years and only ironically before that. This was a phrase that was dead when this guy was in high school.

Weird.

Google doesn’t use Google Docs

I was reading the following post from Niall Kennedy: Google Mondrian: web-based code review and storage, and one line stuck out: “Recently some design reviews have moved onto an internal version of Google Docs.” The thing that interested me about that is I’ve heard Jason Calacanis and others on The Gillmor Gang talk about using Google Docs for coporate data. Now maybe Google isn’t using the public docs because they are dogfooding new features before they are unveiled to the public. More scarily, maybe they are using an internal version because the public version isn’t secure or stable enough to host their important documents.

AppleInsider | Parallels preps major update to Windows virtualization software

(this is cross-posted on Digital-Motion, my new digital media blog, wish there was a nice way to do that automagically with wordpress)

AppleInsider | Parallels preps major update to Windows virtualization software

This is oh-so-very-cool. I have to run bootcamp on my mac book pro because I need to be using the full power of the GPU. This won’t completely obliviate that need, but it will mean that I won’t need to install XP twice on my little MBP so that I can pop into Outlook or IE if I need to without restarting. With the new version of Parallels, you can use your bootcamp partition as the root drive of your XP Parallels session. Also cool is that they’ll support other OSes nicely, which means you can drop a linux install on there too easily. This will be awesome for web designers because they won’t need to buy extra machines to validate stuff on. This may even get me back to installing some windows or liinux audio and video stuff again. There is a lot of freeware we mac folk miss out on.

I think this virtualization stuff is progressing exactly the way I want to see it. Next step is to find out how well the Macintels run Vista…

I wonder how long until either Apple or Microsoft buys Parallel Inc. The fact that they are located in Redmond probably speaks more to the fact that they are probably well staffed by former Microsofties than that they made their plan to be acquired at the beginning.

I would have loved this a couple of years ago.

In our last house, we had a neighbor who was pure evil. Since I am good at heart, more or less, I never gave him the rich thrashing he deserved (with the exception of calling the cops when he would destroy our property or peep in our windows). I did dream of having something like this though:
ThinkGeek :: The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron

Something like this is perfection for that person that deserves no joy in their lives and that can be driven slowly insane.

Holy Crap, I love WordPress!

I used iBlog for so long because I wanted total control over my content, and I wanted to own the database. I was hesitant to give over my blog to a site like blogger or whatever, because my words are my own, ya know? Also, I wanted to be able to move my blog wherever I felt like it. iBlog is a client side app and generates web pages that get ftp’d up to your server. It works great if you are always blogging from the same machine and you want to mess with your pages later. Of course it is a very web 1.0 way of doing things. When I switched to dreamhost, I added WP and now I’m supa-happy. I’m still messing with my templates and will be for a while, so if you are reading this, expect some evolving visual weirdness…

Situation:Terminal » My Xbox Live HD Video Rental Nightmare

Situation:Terminal » My Xbox Live HD Video Rental Nightmare

I love posts like this (I’ve written several myself). It is one of the joys of our interconnected age that when companies give bad service, it is now our duty to tell the world.

(Can you tell that I’m digging the “Press it!” button too much?)