doodledee

If you came here looking for insightful post-game analysis of tonight's presidential debate, you're in the wrong place. Sure, after I got done watching my tivo'd Survivor I flipped over to PBS to gawk for a while, but seriously, how am I supposed to put any real thinking time into analyzing the nuances of who-said-what when I've got ESPN NFL 2k5 to play? Politics is for people who don't have Xboxes, duh.

The Strib recently ran a cover story about how some University of Minnesota classrooms have old-school chalkboards and how others have the new white boards. Plenty of people have already written in to bitch about how chalkboards shouldn't be front page news, but I say screw them because a) the news is boring and repetitive as of late - oh look! another car bomb in iraq! - b) nobody reads the 'paper' paper anymore anyway, so who cares if it was on the front page and c) white boards suck.

Don't believe me that whiteboards suck? Well head over to the disaster that is the CSci building at the U, with it's bajillion whiteboards and 8 working markers, and watch as your fresh-off-the-boat TA tries to teach an ENTIRE LECTURE of numerical analysis using a dry, crusty, maybe-I-can-scratch-the-equation-into-the-board marker. Or sit back and watch Actual Professors come to class EVERY DAY and hunt around for a working marker even though none of them have worked FOR THE LAST SIX MONTHS. Watch as students bring new markers to class, confident that their bozo profs won't have the smarts to remember to bring a fresh one. (Students buying supplies for teachers?! Take that, public school teachers!)

And what's more, blackboards are just plain old better.

Blackboards rule because they're traditional and they're stuffy and they're messy and they make you feel like you're in some sort of real institution of higher learning. When you take a physics class in one of those big old lecture halls at the U and the professor fills 6 boards with diagrams and formulas - including the 'upper' boards that he has to pull down and then push back up to the ceiling - that's when you feel like you're engaged in the class. The professor is passionate. His fingers are dusty, the sleeves on his corduroy blazer are dusty, and - oh yeah - YOU CAN READ THE BOARD because studies have shown that white on black shows-up better than pale yellow on white. GENIUS!

But don't get me wrong. Everyone's office at work has a whiteboard and - since we have tons of makers - we use them all the time. I even worked at a client where every wall in every room was solid whiteboard. They manage entire projects by writing notes on the walls in project-dedicated "war rooms". I'm not saying it worked, I'm just saying they did it. Wacko alert!

And as bad as whiteboards are, they're wiggi better than a stupes PowerPoint lecture. The worst! I seriously think that those lectures where some boring, disinterested professor reads slides off a screen while sitting on a stool should only cost half as much as a 'traditional' class. I used to get so worked up in one of my chemistry classes that it would take 2 hours of girl watching on the mall with friends just to calm down.

And wouldn't you know that the entire business world lives and dies by PowerPoint? Gah! Double Gah!

In summary: walk the walk, keep the chalk, tony hawk, powerpoint sucks.

Blackboard Blues [strib]
PowerPoint is Evil [wired]
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb [nyt]

During the 'puzzle' segment on Weekend Edition last Sunday, Puzzlemaster Will Shortz cooked up some anagram type puzzle where every answer was the name of a popular television show. Go figure, the public radio dork they called to play on the air "hadn't watched TV in decades". He struggled right out the gates with 'SHAM'.

Great stuff.

'Weekend Edition' Puzzle: TV Show Anagrams [npr] [audio]

It's apple season and my dad brought us like 100 pounds of apples from the orchard in his back yard. (It's the orchard right off the highway that has all the broken hockey sticks holding up the trees.) Don't get me wrong, I like apples, but that's a lot of damn apples. Like way more than anyone could eat before they go bad. Today, for example, I had two. Now there are only 800 or so left. Dig in.

Libby already made a giant apple crisp for me to eat. It's very good. Much better than any of the fruit cobblers or crumbles or crisps I ever make. My problem is that as soon as I see the recipe for the crumble topping I get freaked out by the 10 sticks of butter it requires and I try and cut back and we end up eating flour dusted fruit. It's still good if you put enough cinnamon on it. And if you like paste. Which I don't, especially. But I'll eat it anyway. Fruit, that is, not paste.

Maybe I'll sauce some this weekend.

While walking into Bylerly's on Saturday afternoon I noticed this lady about 20 yards in front of me. She was tall and well dressed and was carrying one of those brownish Louis Vuitton purses that I think are expensive but I suppose could have been a fake or something. I was wearing a white t-shirt, clogs with no socks, and dirty shorts that don't have a button so I have to continually rezip them as I walk. We were basically twins if you saw us from a distance.

My phone rang as I was walking up to the front doors so I grabbed it and leaned against an outside wall in an attempt to avoid being labeled a jackass grocery store cellphone talker. While chatting, I continued to watch the woman I had followed through the parking lot enter the store. She made a bee-line straight for the big bin where people drop off their used plastic bags for recycling.

"Huh," I thought, "I didn't notice her carrying any old bags.

Then I watched as she quickly dug through the bin and collected a couple of used plastic Target bags. Then I watched as she made a u-turn out of Bylerly's and started walking over to Target, used bags in tow.

"Huh," I thought, "I don't see a lot of a people with designer purses digging in the trash to find used bags to bring to Target."

I'll let you draw your own conclusions. I found it odd enough that I walked over to the store and told one of the cart kids in the parking lot what I had seen. He said "thanks, dude" and went back to corralling his carts. I said "no problem" and went back across the street and bought some chicken legs and some milk. Vigilante I am not.

We were seven minutes late for Colin's wedding last Friday. Seven minutes late after spending 45+ minutes stuck in a gridlock nightmare on the freeway like a caged animal. When we finally drove-up to the mansion on Summit Avenue, I was already trying to calculate how many glasses of champale it was gonna take to get me back to the happy place I prefer to be in. I figured around 30.

Then I saw the bride and groom standing out front of the house, looking oh-so fetching in their wedding garb. "Whew," I thought, "they're running a few minutes late, too. We made it just fine."

Wait a second... something's not quite right here.

Why do the bride and groom look so carefree and relaxed? Shouldn't they be nervous and stuff?

And why are all those people waiting in line to greet the couple?

And why is JoePa laughing and pointing at me?

Holy crap, the wedding is over! Holy crap that was a short wedding! Did they just shoot them out of a cannon or something? Ta-da! Husband and wife!

It doesn't matter, we're still late.

Sosorrysosorrysosorrysosorry.

It was actually closer to 32 glasses.

You ever notice how the Top Grossing Movies of All Time are always the newer ones? And how the records are always being broken and stuff?

Here's the current top 12:

1. Titanic (1997)
2. Star Wars (1977)
3. Shrek 2 (2004)
4. E.T. (1982)
5. Star Wars Episode 1 : Jar Jar's Revenge (1999)
6. Spider Man (2002)
7. Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003)
8. Spider Man 2 (2004)
9. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
10. Jurassic Park (1993)
11. Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers (2002)
12. Finding Nemo (2003)

(I did 12 because the last two were newer. Stesticle wizard am I!)

Ok, I guess maybe records aren't being broken all the time, but you get my point: the list means nothing beyond what it endeavors to say, which is "check it out! this movie over here made a ton of effing money!" It doesn't mean "this movie was the number 8 movie of all time!" The list really has more to do with ticket prices and number of screens and the price of a box of junior mints and the fact that old people haven't figured out how to download movies of the internet yet.

But I'm sure people point to the Big Money List and conclude that the movies that are on the list must rule because they made (or are making) so much money and that means tons of people have seen them and tons of people can't *all* be wrong, so it's gotta be mint it's just gotta! And if you'd argue that "people" don't necessarily do it, then screw off and at least admit that the advertising genius sure do. And the media plays right along. Look at the way the weekend box office takes are reported in the paper and analyzed in the news and in way, way too many "blogs". It's some sort of fake sport or something, only instead of being for 'normal' people it's for 'dorks' who think that a 3 day haul of $35MM for some stupes sci-fi movie is somehow worth digging into. Not for me, thanks.

What triggered me thinking about this was a sidebar in USA Today that listed the biggest selling musical artists of all time.

1. The Beatles
2. Elvis
3. Zeppelin
4. Garth Brooks
5. The Eagles

And the top selling individual albums of all time:

1. Eagle's Greatest Hits
2. Thriller
3. The Wall
4. Led Zeppelin IV
5. some Billy Joel album

Now I'm not saying, I'm just saying, but I'm pretty sure there are a bunch more music buyers around now than there were 40 years ago, yet somehow the music side of the Big List seems way more reasonable than the movie side when you try to draw parallels between The Greats and The Moneymakers. How is that possible? Lots of reasons, I'm sure, most of which have to do with the price of a giant box of junior mints.

Maybe the movie industry needs to get off their collective asses and drive some real innovation in content distribution. Maybe they shouldn't be so quick to turn their collective backs on their 80 year old catalogue. Maybe they should send me a bunch of free DVDs to evaluate.

Or maybe they could just sit back and hope for another Jar-Jar. That dude made millions!

Top Selling Albums of All Time [riaa]
All Time Movie Box Office Records - USA [imdb]
Can Money Buy the Beatles' Apple love? [usatoday]

Some things I don't worry about while on vacation:

• email
• overeating
• staying up late
• deodorant

Good times were had by all.

Grand View Lodge [gvl]
3 km S of Nisswa, Minnesota [terraserver]

• Break out your eyepatch, screw on your pegleg, and get ready for this year's Talk Like a Pirate Day. Prediction: totes stupes after like 10 minutes. That's why I'll keep it up for a couple of hours, minimum. Ahoy! [Sept19]
• Head over to the Edina4 and catch Festival Express on the big screen. Jerry + Janis + Canada = worth the $8. Plus, when it kicks all over F9/11 for best documentary at the Oscars, you can smile knowingly and tell your Moore-loving friends to shove it. [At least one more week]
• Drop everything and install the latest Firefox.
• Head up north for some post-Labor Day R&R time. Seriously, you've earned it. Those long weekends can be killer. On the way home, stop by Brainerd and kick Paul Bunyan in the shin.

Well, I didn't think it could get any lower after the Great TV Reunion Disaster of '97, but I think I've just been proven wrong. Today it was announced that Hollywood has hired an overexposed princess to play Diasy Duke.

That's right, the media creation that is Jessica Simpson has somehow managed to score the role of Lil Bo Peep in the yet-to-be-filmed-mockery-of-my-childhood that is The Dukes of Hazzard Movie. It's probably gonna be a real stretch for her, so here's hoping she does a good job.

From the Mtv propaganda piece announcing the casting decision:

"I would love to be Daisy Duke," Simpson told MTV News in March. "I think that would be so much fun, just to wear the shorts. I would get to have my own car. I think it would be a blast."

Uggh. Daisy drove a Jeep. Not a car. A Jeep. It was white CJ7 and it was awesome. Sure, she drove some dumbass car in the early episodes, but seriously, who remembers those? Not me. I remember the Jeep. And that dog Flash. That dog ruled. He was always howling and stuff. Crazy dog.

And to be clear, my point isn't to do a "look how stupes she is" message, it's to go on record as saying that today was the day that the very integrity of the institution that is the Dukes of Hazzard was officially completely and totally destroyed.

First the tootsie-pop owl sells out and now this? It's been a bad month to be a child of the 80's.

Jessica Simpson Scores Daisy Duke Role [mtv]
Daisy Duke's Jeep [tvland]

Over the last month or so I've observed a spike in the number of spam messages I've been getting. It's still not that bad - maybe 1 or 2 a day - but even one is enough to bug me. And before anyone downshifts into one-upmanship mode, the 'junk' yahoo account I use to buy stuff online and to register at websites gets like 100 bulk messages a day. I'm sure tons of people get more than that, but I don't care. The lesson here is: never type your email address into any form on any website ever.

As the volume of spam goes up, I've been playing with Thunderbird's native junk mail filtering to see if it can automatically ID and trash unwanted messages. It seems to be working fine, but I've decided it's not the best solution for me. It works by marking the message as junk and either throwing it away or moving it to a special folder. Well I don't want to just blindly throw messages away, so I go with the other option and have it file them for review. But them I'm such a dork that I can't resist immediately checking to make sure it wasn't actually a 'real' message that got deleted by mistake. So basically it gets me nowhere. Stupes.

I've decided that if it gets worse over the next few months I'll just go ahead and set-up some sort of server side protection. Probably with a whitelist and a challenge/response system backed by TMDA. (The lesson here is: I have way too much pent-up geek energy.) It'll be slick. If you're on my 'whitelist' - as opposed to my blacklist or my shitlist - I'll get your mail just fine. If you're not, my server will send you a message back asking to confirm your identity. Once you do, I'll see your original message and you'll automatically be cleared to send me stuff in the future. The idea is that spammers don't use valid 'reply-to' addresses, so they'd never get the 'challenge' bounce-back and therefore I'd never see their message. Bingo bango bongo.

I kinda wonder if Google isn't building some sort of gigantic whitelist for their Gmail system. For now, the only way to get a Gmail account is to be 'invited' by someone who already has one. When you invite them, you have to type in their email address to send them the invite. You get a couple million people sending out invites, suddenly you've got a whole lotta 'real' email addresses on file. And there's the start of your uber-list.

Sneaky those Google developers are, yes.

So tonight I was talking with a couple of people who went down to Florida with the Red Cross to help out in the aftermath of Hurricane Charlene or whatever. They told a bunch of crazy stories, but my favorite was the one about how the Red Cross has invested tons of money in these super fancy, super rugged laptop computers for people to take out in the field.

The funny part isn't that they spent a bunch of blood money (ha!) on technology - I'm all for the paperless office - it's that so many of their volunteers are retired geezers who are totally computer illiterate.

"Hi, I'm Dorothy. I'm here to help with the hurricane."

"Great, here's your laptop. When you return this afternoon, log into our local domain with the password 'florida' and upload your case files to the server."

"Who logs who in the what now?"

And so on.

Give it 20 years. Once the Children of the Computer Age start to retire and look for something to do in their spare time, those laptops will be the picture of efficiency. They'll be slow and obsolete by then, sure, but that's not the point.

Here are some things that lots of people seem to like but that I don't really care for:

• watermelon
• Everybody Loves Raymond
• cats
• the Packers
• scary movies

I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

We don't call long distance using our home phone's long distance plan. We haven't for years and years and years. It's honestly kind of a mystery to me why anyone would what with our era of cell phones and 2-cent/minute prepaid cards, but hey, they probably have their reasons. Like laziness and/or stupidity, I'd guess.

Now here's the kicker. For some unknown unfair unreasonable reason, even if you *never* use your long distance service, you HAVE TO HAVE A PROVIDER. Seriously. You can't just call the phone company and say, “No thanks, I don't need long distance" and have them flip a switch and turn you off. Instead they'll say, “Uhh, we can't do that... Now let me tell you about our highspeed internet offerings."

Up until now this hasn't really been a problem. The provider we use – Qwest, maybe you've heard of them – doesn't charge for their 'basic' plan that we're enrolled in by default. They don't call us to beg us to upgrade and nothing shows up on our bill. It's beautiful. And they're the only ones who do it like that. Everyone else charges a monthly fee. Jackholes.

At least it was beautiful. Over the weekend I got a letter saying that Qwest was changing it's policy and was going to start extorting charging us $1/month. For something I don't want and for something I don't use. Uh huh.

And to be clear for you dismissive doofs out there, it's not the $1 I'm worked-up about, it's the principle.

Can I cancel all voice service and still keep DSL? Hmm. Tempting.

Phone company accused of fraud - Not related, but a new story with good quotes [strib]

Hoping to beat the crowds, Libby and I threw the kid in the car and headed down for our inaugural visit to the big new Ikea store early on Sunday morning. Not everyone knows this, but "Ikea" is actually Swedish for "huge ass blue building that fills you with rage and kinda makes you want to reorganize your closets". Seriously, look it up.

Well beat the crowds we did not. The place was *so* busy. Like state-fair-on-a-bad-day busy only way, way worse. Normally I can survive - sometimes even thrive - in large crowds. Well not at Ikea. You have no freedom of direction. You're herded along this nightmare of a path, forced to shuffle through EVERY EFFING DEPARTMENT ON BOTH LEVELS BEFORE YOU CAN LEAVE. You see it all, whether you want to or not. You also see about a million frustrated customers, including on that day, several in tears. Hey Dante, you thinking about adding a 10th level of hell? How about one where you're forced to navigate a double long stroller through an endless Ikea store? Noooooo!

I'm too lazy to google, but if nobody in the user experience community has documented a trip to a busy Ikea, they should. (Assuming they can drag themselves away from their Powerbooks for that long, that is.) Ikea has obviously crafted the environment very carefully, so I'd imagine a rigorous reverse engineering might reveal some neat theories as to why they did what they did.

The big consolation is that the stuff Ikea sells all seemed reasonably nice and all seemed reasonably cheap. It also plays well with our smaller house. A lot of it disagrees with me stylistically, but in reality that's probably a good thing.

I will never go back on a weekend, but I'll go back sometime. In 2008 or so. On a Tuesday morning.

IKEAnnot wait to get out of here!! - Huna went last weekend, too [musicola]

Labor Day is over and I'm back from my August mental holiday. I'm ready to rock and rage. First, some quickies.

• Today was the day that Target rolled out it's new capital-B Business Formal dress code. For the gents: shirts and ties are the order of the day; for the ladies: something about 14-notches more professional than the hoochie pant / halter top combo that was oh-so popular this summer. (Don't forget the flip-flops!) We went out at lunch hoping to spot a newly professional downtown, but other than a herd of Indian contractors sporting white shirts and ties, it didn't seem like much had changed. Bonus report from Juettner on the inside: none of the big talk from the self-proclaimed corporate rebels was followed up with actual dress code rebellion. "I'm gonna wear a tie with Wal-Mart logo on it!" Sure you are, doof. Back in your cube.
• JoePa was shopping at Gabbert's last weekend - presumably searching for a super expensive Victorian-esque couch for his dog to puke on - when he spotted local newsbabe Julie Nelson out for a little Labor Day weekend deal hunting. After careful observation, his conclusion is that she is just as hot in person as she is on tv. I suspected as much.
• I painted our dining room on Sunday. Ceiling and everything. My neck hurts from looking up so much. I thought about assembling some sort of scaffolding system © Michelangelo.sistine.chapel so I could lay on my back and maybe take a little napsky if I got tired, but I settled for one of those extendable roller handles and a cold beer.