bloggie blog

I joined Twitter 1,000 days ago in January of 2008. When did you join? Oh, I see — after I did. That’s okay, don’t feel badly. We couldn’t all be Livia’s co-workers back in the day.

Anyway, in honor of my longer-than-thou time on the Twitter, I post a few favorites, a handful of Tweets Gone By.

I like a nice, clean tweet.

Burgers and more!

When people encounter new information, facts may not be as important as beliefs.

I don’t #MM, #WW or #FF. But I might start doing #TT and #SS just for the ambiguity factor.

Okay. Facebook knows I’m a man, Facebook knows I’m single and Facebook knows I’m interested in women. Therefore, Facebook knows I am attracted to women with balloons in their shirts. Not well-endowed natural goodness, but actual balloons. The evidence is the looping image to the right of some ads I’ve seen recently on my profile.

(If your web browser is set not to show the loop of an animated GIF image file, you’re missing out on 5 out of 6 pairs of balloons in the animated image to the right.)

To be fair, once in a while the ad will have a normal woman and simply say Attractive Single Women. Once in a while. But I have posted this because it makes me laugh, and because I want Facebook users with different profiles from mine to see what ridiculous photos are being used to entice me to some lame dating site.

Single men can’t surely be the only target of laughable ads. What weird stuff do you see in your Facebook ads that I might not know about?

In the last week or so, Google downed my quality of life. They used to up it with changes, but now they are downing it. I’m refering to the change in Saved Locations within Google Maps. Google used to remember addresses, and allow you to label them with such words as “home,” or “fff” (which is easier to type). Suddenly, last week, that feature is no more.

As the Googledouches explain on this page, it’s a thing of the past. Their new approach of using personalized suggestions is faster, they say.

Ba. Lo. Ney.

Is it worth complaining about? Yes. I signed up for the Google support forum and in one pertinent thread I posted my opinion. I urge you to do so, too. Let’s keep it short and simply write, I want Saved Locations back, now.

For a few years now, the size of fonts on my web site has been what it is as you read this, and that size is just that much larger than most other personal sites or weblogs. Just that much larger than most WordPress templates, as one shining example. And a whole lot larger than the trend to mini fonts that was taking over the Internet when I started this site. (Remember the mini fonts? You don’t see those much these days.)

Now, I believe there is a place for small fonts — in captions, in secondary data like dates and tags, etc. But I believe in making main articles easy to read!

Here are a few things I’ve noticed lately along the lines of type size.

1. Google has upped the size of the font you type into the search box. It’s been a week or two, now. Nice.
2. Newsweek has a font-size selector next to its articles that slides! Love it. See this article as an example.
3. If you disagree and think smallest is bestest, use this crazy font with an x-height of 3 pixels. (Typophile is awesome.)

Goodnight!

The other day, I quickly ordered a few items from drugstore.com and the message I got the next day saying my order had shipped told me that the items got sent to my parents’ house. Which kind of worried me because (1) I don’t know how they got that address and (2) did I order anything that might raise an eyebrow? A very quick check told me that there were no worries regarding (2), and a phone call to their 800 number ensured I’d get my items. But still!

Have I ever sent to my parents’ address before? I have from Amazon or others, I’m sure, but I checked my drugstore.com orders and that address didn’t come up. Furthermore, they had lost my current home address — and I just ordered from them two months ago. So, maybe I should be worried about their servers and privacy issues and stuff? And if they didn’t have my current address, why did my credit card company let them process the charge? Man oh man.

Anybody else have technical problems with drugstore.com lately?

Possible Facebook status update for the first day of 2009: “Kevin predicts chicks, flicks, pics — and Styx! — in MMIX.”

If you pronounce the Latin right, that sentence really kicks. Otherwise, nix.

For about as long as I’ve had this site, I’ve used Textpattern as the software that controls it. I log in, make changes to the site, or more commonly, post an entry. All well and good, but it requires being logged in and having a live internet connection for anything at all to happen.

Well, I’m experimenting now with MarsEdit, software that you install on your Mac, a way to access your blog not via a browser like Safari. So I’m typing this now on my Mac, and it doesn’t matter if I have an internet connection. This could be a big improvement. We shall see. This is a test. This is only a test.

In my quest to be sure to select the best photos of my 1,019 headshot options, I decided to get prints made of 116 that I like. Digital deciding needed to give way to analog analysis of the details. Thought about going over Walgreen’s, but instead I clicked “print” in iPhoto to get it done.

The iPhoto print process is easy, of course, and straightforward except for one thing — when will the prints arrive? Well, let me tell you.

I started my order on Thursday 12/11 at 3:20pm, it took a couple three hours to upload (some internet issues on my end included), the shipment and confirming email were sent to me some hours later after midnight, and now it just arrived today 12/15 at 2pm. This was with me paying for fast delivery (which bumped up the effective price of each 4×6 to 21.6¢). My photos originated in the Bay Area and came via the kind of UPS that doesn’t keep moving over the weekend.

Like many other things I’ve posted on my site, I post this in part because I could not find out this information from Apple before I ordered. They were vague on how long it would take, where it would ship from and via what method. But now you know what to expect, if you live in LA. Now that they’re here … I’m off to stare at photographic details … till I go blind.

UPDATE: Filenames don’t appear on the back side of the photos. And they don’t arrive in the order you sent them, but at random. Sigh, and sigh.