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People do the oddest things

I occasionally like to post polls on my food blogs. Polls are an easy way for the comment-shy reader to express their opinion. So, I recently put up a poll on Just Bento, What kind of recipes would you like to see more of on Just Bento? , just to get a general idea of what people wanted. Now, the way Drupal polls work is that they restrict votes to one per IP address. Simple enough.

What Thing-a-Day taught me

Something I learned about myself: I am somewhat obsessive, like to show the finished article, and hate time constraints. But still, there was a bunny.

The sartorial bunny (no. 4)

Thing a day

I'm going to try to get back to the drawing-or-something-a-day habit. I signed up on Thing-a-day, which hopefully will kick my butt back into gear. (If you want to do something creative for the month of February, there's still time to join up there.)

I know that all the writing that I do is creative, but I still feel the urge to do creative things that are not digital. I spend far more time with my computers than I do any human being, or anything else, and there's something profoundly dissatisfying about that.

I also want to loosen up and do quick sketches, rather than obsessive multi-hour drawings that I was doing last year.

Canadian students come to the same conclusion as I did on the Wii

According to this Reuters story, it seems some Canadian university students did a similar Wii experiment as the one I described previously, and came to the same conclusion:

Random links

A Happy yet sad web comic, NetNewsWire is free!, and more.

The day I was mistakenly charged $27,500 on my Amex

Now I can chuckle at it but back then, it wasn't nice. One of the big brouhahas yesterday was that Dreamhost, a popular web site hosting service, made a pretty stupid billing error that caused their customers to be erroneously billed millions of dollars.

Macbook Air and other new toys

I can remember a time when just the thought of an ultra-thin, light, elegant laptop like the Macbook Air would have had me running for my wallet to pull out my credit card as fast as possible. But since I'm saving up for a Big Lifechanging Event (which I'll write about here when I'm ready to) and have been watching my spending, I only had a mild upwards blip of the heartrate.

It's sexy, yes. That it supports Touch technology is what made my heart flutter a bit (besides the form factor), though I guess we have to see how well applications will utilize it. It has no Firewire which is a bummer. It would be great if I spent a lot of time hanging out at coffee shops or on grassy campuses. (I can see it doing great amongst students.) I'm going to stick to my plans for a new Macbook Pro soon though.

Really not as cool as you think

In the things-that-made-me-chuckle department, from this page:

Dear person in their 20's who thinks that having a tattoo, listening to Imogen Heap, wearing Converses, and collecting Absolut paraphenalia makes you different:

You're not. Everyone under 30 has a tattoo. Everyone listens to Imogen Heap. Everyone wears Converses. Everyone loves the Absolut bottle. When I go out at night, I can't spit in the air without hitting a Scene Kid who wears his mama's leggings and flat-irons his hair for the sake of "indiviuality." Imagine a kid in the 1980's who thinks that his moussed hair and loud neon shirts make him stand out in the crowd. That's you--you're the 2008 version of him.

And as another poster says on the same page, it's not just people in their 20s either.

How to cancel something on the phone in minimal time

It's the 10th day of the new year, and I'm deep into a satisfying process of decluttering my life. Besides getting rid of two jumbo bags of unwanted clothes (those funny conference giveaway t-shirts must multiply like bunnies in the closet) I've also called up and cancelled a number of subscriptions and services that I don't really want to continue.

It's quite annoying that so many places want you to call them to cancel, when they let you sign up oh-so-easily online. But of course they do so in the hope that the customer service rep can try to talk you out of cancelling.

When I make the effort to call a number to cancel, my mind is firmly made up that I am not going to renew or whatever under any circumstances. On the other hand, I don't want to get into a protracted argument with the rep person, who is after all only doing her job.

Getting fit with Wii Sports is a big fat delusion (updated)

If you're thinking of getting a Wii to get fit, think again, for now anyway.(See updates at the end.)

For Christmas, I finally got a Wii. Yes I'm quite behind the times, but I'm not really one who likes to jump on new stuff as soon as it comes out. I prefer to get the version 2s.

This is the first gaming console I've ever gotten. I've never been tempted by other consoles, ever. I do play the occasional PC game, but a dedicated machine for gaming? Nah.

What lured me to the Wii was the promise that somehow, it would help me to exercise.

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