A laugh for a friday. I’ve been working on my site off and on over the past couple of weeks as time permitted (regulars will recall I migrated to a new server and from movabletype to wordpress a couple of weeks ago). Yesterday I finally got around to putting a real homepage in place, and whilst so doing I noticed someone had posted the unhappy sentiment that serves as the tagline for this post, along with some more unpleasantness. Check out the rest of her comments in my photo gallery, hers is the 4th comment. What’s most amusing about this is that the woman in the picture is my friend Marcia, who’s married to my friend Kevin (there’s a link to their site in the right-hand column of this site). Poor Heidi must have had a really bad day.

Now here’s something cool to consider for our next AGCW. It’s a raft some enterprising folks built from 2 liter soda bottles, duct tape, and scrap wood. Imagine this as our own floating platform off the coast of our site next summer. It would be a bit easier to build than the kayaks built from tarps and saplings I linked to earlier in the year, too.

An amusing aside also – I checked the link from make, was scoping out the photos and suddenly realized hey, that’s the Skidmore campus where I work! It’s a small world, even on the internets 😉 The pond they have their raft race on is one I bring Soolin to often.

[via Make:Blog]

As most will note, I changed the templates for the weblog one last time. I’m not fond of the color scheme this time around but I do like the layout otherwise and the utilities on the top right (font size changes and whatnot). It’s down to a choice between this one and theme wuhan, the first one I experimented with. If you have an opinion drop it in the comments. Figure one way or another I’ll choose this week and then roll out the theme to most portions of the site. Also figure I’ll be playing with the color scheme of whichever one I choose, so if you’re going to comment, keep in mind that the colors are likely to change. For Andrew’s sake, I promise no lime green will be involved.

I also added the old ‘about’ and ‘contact’ pages back into the site – an old flame found me through google then had trouble figuring out how to get in touch with me. Embarrassing, that. Anyway the links to those pages run across the top and can be found to the right as well.

[edit]
Two more to consider:

Twilight
http://themes.star-shaped.org/2005/10/28/twilight-theme-for-wordpress/

Copperleaf (which looks nothing like what it sounds)
http://www.copperleaf.org/

I’ve posted the pictures of our epic hike from last weekend, where Soolin and I almost spent a night in the woods. You can check it out by clicking this link, or you can find it in my gallery in the Lake George Hiking album

For reasons that go back to my college days and my love of drink, I’ve developed a passing interest in Absinthe, and I’ve written about it here a few times. If you’re not familiar with it, it was a liquor that was very popular during the latter half of the 19th century. It was pretty much globally outlawed in the early 20th century because of fears that some of the compounds in it cause addiction, dementia and other ills. I was at a cocktail party this summer where the host brought out a bottle of it and this led to some controversy around the table – the host was under the impression he had purchased an actual bottle of it, whereas others (including myself) were convinced that what is sold as Absinthe in Europe these days bears little in common with the Absinthe of the 19th century beyond the name. Wired is running a pretty interesting article that sheds light on this – it turns out everyone was in fact partly right. Much of what is being sold as Absinthe is pretty much junk but you can actually buy some decent vintages, thanks in large part to the research of Ted Breaux, the subject of the wired article I linked to.

It’s still illegal to buy or consume Absinthe in the US, unfortunately. It’s also easy enough to find an importer willing to sell it to you though, a quick example being absintheonline.com, who happens to carry the vintage discussed in the wired article for ~$100.00 a bottle plus shipping. Their FAQ claims they’ve been shipping to the US for years with no legal problems. As before I am sorely tempted to order myself a bottle but I worry about the potential legal consequences, something the Wired article fails to cover. Any thoughts from my readers? Anyone interested in an Absinthe fueled New Year’s eve this year? $100 a bottle plus shipping sounds expensive but what price a unique experience? To me it seems pretty damned cheap when you think of it in that context. Any takers?

If you get frustrated with ebay’s clunky search tools you might like the-winning-bid.com’s approach. The site provides you with sliders and drop down menus that let you tune your search and it also provides keyword suggestions based on what you’re looking for that you may find helpful. Honestly there’s not much here that you won’t find in ebay’s advanced search tools aside from the decent keyword suggestions but the interface is much improved over ebay’s setup. There’s a small tradeoff in that they’re paying for this by adding google adwords on the right side, but chances are most folks have already learned to tune those out anyway if you spend any significant time browsing the web.

Check out krazydad’s coverpop.com. This has been making the rounds but it’s cool enough that I figure I’ll mention it here, plus browsers for more genres (graphic novels, Mad Magazine, and more) have been added since folks first started talking about it. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s a flash app that gives you a view of ~1000 covers to various genres of print works. Roll your mouse over a cover and it shows you a larger view, click on it to go a webpage (amazon.com for some of them for example) or just to an even larger view of the cover. Loads quick and is fun to play around with, especially if it covers a genre or two you’ve read a lot of. Check it out.