all a-Twitter

Saturday, 9 February, 2008 at 2:52 pm

I got a Twitter account. Yup. Found out about it through InsaneJournal. (Found IJ through GreatestJournal… GJ through Livejournal… LJ through message boards and friends… EZBoard through C… Don’t know why I’m recounting references all of a sudden…)

I got it mostly to stick on my blog so I won’t go without updating my blog in some fashion, but won’t deluge my blog with short, fairly pointless entries.

I’m disappointed that I can’t tweak it more than it is now though. (Well, if I took out the ul navigation from the sidebar I could. Or if I bloated my CSS with specific styling for each, which I hate.)

I don’t understand how Shari (sharii.com) got hers the way she did. How’d she get her updates inserted into p tags?? And how’d she insert those special characters?? And how’d she get the updates to show up regularly in code instead of using Javascript and a blank ul??

:( I don’t like my Twitter code.

quarter life

Thursday, 7 February, 2008 at 4:05 pm

Over the weekend I remembered when my brothers and I were young, grammar school or middle school. We were out with Grandma and Grandpa for some reason or another, and Hidek asked them for a quarter for the machine that dispenses little toys or candy. They gave him one, but he asked for another one to spend because this one had his birth year on it and he didn’t want to spend it. (If you get a coin with your birth year on it, it’s good luck!)

Later (maybe a week or two) Grandma and Grandpa dropped by with a whole container full of coins that were minted in the years we were born. They said we had to separate them and we could have them. After we thanked them and got our coins, we didn’t know what to do with it all. The specialness was in randomly getting a coin with your birthyear, not collecting them and hoarding them. With all those “special” (to us) coins, they lost their fun.

(It was very sweet of my grandparents to do that, don’t get me wrong. Whenever they found something that we liked, they would tend to deluge us with it though. Too much grandparent love!)

I don’t know if we deposited them in our savings or if we turned them in for bills. But after I thought about those coins it dawned on me that as I get older, coins from my birthyear will become more and more rare. And I still want that specialness! I want that this coin is as old as I am feeling. So right then and there I decided to find coins with my birthyear and save them. I have a penny and a dime. Still need a quarter and a nickel. But no one better find these coins for me!

thanks, All

Saturday, 19 January, 2008 at 5:42 pm

I’d just like to thank All for thinking of the environment. In relation their product, at least. (3x more concentrated! Requires less plastic for smaller bottles! And less cardboard for shipping! And fewer trucks for transportation!)

They did not think of the environment, however, when they built their website. All-laundry.com, thank you for bringing my browser (Firefox) to its knees and making it unresponsive or really very slow with your pointless use of humongous Flash animation. A few extra minutes required to power my computer to load your website, to get the information (very slowly) in the intro, which I could not skip because of aforementioned speed, more power required to transfer that whole big Flash animation to my computer from your servers, more energy required to run the servers your site is hosted on.

Thank you so very much.

B Is for Buy

Thursday, 17 January, 2008 at 9:42 pm

I couldn’t help myself. I bought Neil Gaiman’s M Is for Magic. I was browsing the children’s section of Borders (research for book design class) when I saw it and started staring at it and the “First Edition” line on the copyright page, and trying to figure out which stories I had and which ones I didn’t.

I think I have almost half of them. Which means that almost $9 was technically wasted. But I spent more than $9 on new Neil stories! woot! Should tide me over until his next book comes out.

(I wonder what it means that I don’t go more than a few months without buying something Neil has written. Is he prolific? Am I obsessed? Both? I bought The Absolute Sandman vol. II and Stardust: A Visual Companion [where he is quoted or something, and Maddy shows up too :b] within the past, I’d say, three months.)

decomposition rates

Wednesday, 2 January, 2008 at 9:23 pm

This is from my old “binder reminder” (1995–1996), just wanted to save the info:

Length of time for items to decompose
hall pass: 2–4 weeks
cotton rag: 1–5 months
gym sock: 1 year
tin can: 100 years
aluminum can: 200–500 years
glass bottle: undetermined