Not A Dollarshort

Lego Disneyland

So cool: Lego Disneyland!.

Via The Disney Blog, one of my new favorite blogs.

High School Reunion

After reading Heather’s post about high school photos, I turned to a photo that I keep on my desk at work. In this picture, Ben and I are 17 and a couple weeks shy of our first date. At this point, we have barely spoken to each other -- I just grabbed him and pulled him over so my friend could take a picture of us together.

Only recently have I started to notice that we look like kids in this picture -- Ben, especially.

I’m not sure when it happened, but we’ve started to look like we’re adults.

We've got our 10 year high school reunion coming up this year and I'm sort of dreading seeing how old we all are going to look. Despite the fact seeing a beer gut on a jock might bring me some short-term pleasure, the fact that we're all documenting the aging process brings out all my death issues.

I think I may have inherited this from my grandfather who, after attending his 50 year high school reunion in Cleveland (and after driving cross-country and getting sick to the point of near-death), came back home and uttered a simple phrase that summed up his reunion:

"Everyone's dead."

The Officer's Mess

Last week I spent some time in New York, followed by a conference in Chicago and finally Charlotte, North Carolina to visit my parents and grandparents (we are not from North Carolina -- they moved there three years ago because of a job my father got). Anyway, a lot of travel was followed by a relatively restful weekend with my family (sans Ben) in which my mother and I shopped and I got my first pedicure ever. Yeah, all nice and normal stuff.

On the last day of my trip, my mother and I went to a chain store called Steinmart, some sort of store that has clothes and furniture and is pretty different from any places I've been to California. Anyway, it was at Steinmart that I saw the most awesome painting ever.

I love Westies and I love whimsy. This seemed straight out of Disneyland. So, I called Ben and asked his opinion on the picture. Since I couldn't get GPRS working on my phone, I couldn't send the picture of the painting I took. Based on my description I could tell Ben probably would want me to pass. He was interested, yes, but unsure of how it would look in our home.

So we went home.

Later that night, as I showed my dad and grandparents (who responded that "that crap isn't going to hang in our house."), I finally got the picture uploaded to my blog for Ben to see. Pretty quickly we both decided the picture was too good to pass up. So, my parents and I jumped in the car and rushed to Steinmart which would be closing in about ten minutes.

When we got there, I rushed to the back of the store and asked a clerk if the painting was in stock. But instead of describing it, I showed a picture on my cell phone I took earlier that day.

Salesclerk: Wait. Are you the one who just called about this thing?
Me: Yeah, that was my dad.
Salesclerk: Oh, okay. I couldn’t believe there would be two people wanting that tonight.
Me: Yeah, well. I like Westies
Salesclerk: Okay...I’ll get it.

My parents then asked if there were any other prints of this caliber and she proceded to show them a beagle in miliitary attire along with The Officer’s Mess (my painting).

Salesclerk: We had to remove these from the sales floor because of complaints.
My parents: What kind of complaints?
Salesclerk: People were saying they were offensive.

Offensive? I’d give on tacky or weird, but offensive?

Anyway I got the painting, carried it back with me on the plane to California and propped it against a chair in our living room. Ben and I love the thing and the fact that it makes us smile every time we see it. People who have visited our house smile and laugh at it. It’s a conversation piece — it makes us feel good. If that’s offensive, I’m all for it.

When in North Carolina, I told my parents that it was my goal to get that painting in the background of an upcoming photo shoot Ben and I were going to do for a periodical. Luckily, when the photographer came over, she loved The Officer and it’s now predominantly in the photos (though there are some photos that we took in another room — we’ll see which one they choose).

Note: The reason I'm so dressed up in that picture from the shoot is because I'm wearing my prom dress from high school -- Ben and I started dating because I asked him to the prom.

By the way, the artist behind The Officer’s Mess is Thierry Poncelet.

Good stuff.

United Airlines Spam

I'm a United Mileage Plus member and I'm a pretty frequent flyer (I've amasedd about 50,000 miles these past three months) so I am a frequent visitor to the United site and happily receive the mailings. So, it gives me great pain to see that -- starting yesterday -- my inbox fill with spam with the unique email address I signed up with.

I'm not going to completely jump to conclusions and say that United sold the address (because I genuinely don't think they did) but I wonder how this email got discovered.

It's pretty easily solved. I'll just change the email address and direct mail to that one as junk.

I'm just saying...

Yelling 'Freebird!' In a Crowded Theater

Link: WSJ.com - Rock's Oldest Joke: Yelling 'Freebird!' In a Crowded Theater.

So good:

On a recent live album, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock declares that "if this were the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and you were going to die in 20 minutes -- just long enough to play 'Freebird' -- we still wouldn't play it."

The article is accompanied by some great audio files.

Frito-Lay Munchies

We keep a junk food stocked kitchen here at Six Apart. We owe the food stocking to our office manager, Maile, who, as a mother, knows all the sort of foods that we should but orders the food she knows we will eat. That's why the grapes go sour and mold while the peanut butter cups are gone within a half of a day.

Sidenote: She did buy the most gorgeous box of fruit from The Fruit Guys and as of this moment only a moldy kumquat and two grapefruits remain.

Anyway, I wandered into the kitchen after a Costco delivery to find three huge cardboard boxes stacked on a table. The boxes didn't have any indication of their contents and were all still sealed -- I questioned whether I should even open them. As I thought about this, I pictured numerous Six Aparters looking at the boxes and not feeling at liberty to just open some box in the kitchen.

So, of course, I just found a knife and tore into the first box. To my dismay, inside the box were packages of some sort of cheese-like chip snack called "Munchies." I'm not a huge fan of cheese snacks (I absolutely detest Goldfish) so I tossed the box to the side and tried the next box.

More Munchies.

Disgusted, I gave up and went back to my desk.

Later that day, at Foo Bar, I kiddingly ripped into Maile for buying such a disgusting snack.

Since most of the people at Foo Bar hadn't even seen the chips, I ran to the kitchen to bring in the evidence. It was then that I opened a bag of Munchies to show everyone the horridness up close.

But then I realized that inside Munchies was a fucking treasure cove of junk food.

Munchies are basically pretzels, Cheetos, Doritos and Sun Chips. All in one bag.

The picture on the bag is so utterly disgusting and yellow. And to make matters worse, the branding of the "contents" looks like a "from the makers of..." sort of labeling.

It turns out that these things are so addictive and so good -- and so deceptive. Most everyone I talk to say that they thought they looked disgusting but now have to watch their intake. We bond about the goodness as relative to the packaging and how bad of a job Frito Lay did with the marketing/color scheme.

Yeah, so they are targeted to stoners. And, they are horribly bad to consume.

But, they make me so happy.

In doing some online research about Munchies, I found this great review:

Frito-Lay scores a big hit with this mix of snacks. I figured that they just mixed Cheetos, Rold Gold pretzels, miniaturized Doritos and Sun Chips into a bag without much of a real plan, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot. But this combination of flavors really worked. There's plenty of cheese on the Doritos and Cheetos, but it's very well balanced by the smoothness of the pretzels and the different taste of the Sun Chips. These were very popular around the chip bowl. Good stuff.

I love that there is a site that reviews chips.

By the way, I know I could have just found a picture of the Munchies package online, but I just had to scan it in manually. It just shows what effort I'd go through to evangelize this treat.

Message from the Queen

Welcome to those who've stumbled onto this weblog via the various pickups of the Associated Press article!

The AP article captures well the sense of humor that we have at the company. We have fun at work and we're certain to reflect that in the interviews we give. Of course, when Andrew says something like "Mena gets upset when everyone is not talking about her every day" and you're not in the room to see how he trying to antagonize me in a big brother sort of way, there is something lost in the delivery. Still, we're all caricatures of ourselves sometimes and it's important to be able to laugh at yourself. (Oh, I don't even want to get started about the Queen thing).

A while back I wrote a post where the line about me wanting to be famous in the online world figures prominently. You can read the essay here how this desire for fame turned into something else over the course of the past couple years.

And for what it's worth though, Ben is a lot cooler that he seems in this article. I think he applied for all of three jobs before we dove fully into Movable Type. From the image in the article, he seems like a character in a 90s British movie looking for a job after they shut the coal mines down.

This weblog, my personal weblog, isn't updated as much anymore since I now divide my time writing about our company, Six Apart, over at Mena's Corner and on my private weblog that is intended for family and friends. My old weblog, dollarshort.org has a page of archives that capture life for me during 2001-2003. If you're interested in reading, start in April 2001.

If you want to learn more about Six Apart, you can read about our history.

If you want to take a stab at keeping a weblog, be sure to check out the free 30 day trial we offer for TypePad and you can start blogging in minutes.

All Day I faced the Barren Waste...

I'm certain to send my parents further into depression when they see this post, but I just had to write about the passing of my first pet, Lolly. She was a thirteen year-old Mitred Conure who had been with my family since I was 13 years old. Her death was incredibly sudden and came about due to kidney failure. As soon as my mom detected that something was amiss, she took her to an avian emergency room. The condition she had gave her a 20% chance of survival and the doctor said that if she made it through the night, she would have a pretty good chance of survival. Unfortunately, a little before 4 am this morning, she passed away.

When my parents first brought Lolly home, I was extremely upset since I had never had a pet and didn't want one for the sole reason that I never wanted to see them die. The first time I saw her, I was afraid to touch her, so I wrapped my hand in a red sweatshirt and put it in her cage. Of course, she came after me out of fear, but I quickly learned the right ways to give her affection -- she especially liked it when I would preen her pin feathers.

Lolly was a part of her family and I'll never be able to hear her favorite songs again without feeling sad. She'd sing along with Sharon, Lois, and Bram's Skinnamarink and The Sons of the Pioneer's Cool Water. I'm certain that my father will be playing these songs in a loop since, like me, we like making ourselves depressed. Why else would I be writing this post?

One of my favorite memories of Lolly occurred when my best friend Monica was visiting after school one day. We were both in 8th grade and she was incredibly scared of Lolly. As I was holding Lolly to show Monica that she wasn't a threat, Lolly jumped on Monica's back and started climbing her head and grabbing at her hair. As Monica ran around screaming, I just laughed. I think Lolly was laughing too.

Lolly's laugh was always Ben's favorite thing about Lolly. I swear she had the most cutting sense of humor.

Anyway, here's to Lolly. I've been incredibly sad today -- my entire family has been crying and feeling like we were responsible for her early demise. As Ben and I begin looking for our first pet together (a dog), I worry that one day we'll have to say goodbye to another pet.

I can only say that we wouldn't be sad unless these animals made our lives happier when they were around.

It's all fun and games...

About two weeks ago, I had a little bit of an accident that sidetracked me for a couple of days. Because I had crutches and now have a noticeable limp, I figured that I might as well explain what happened here (since I usually get asked at work-related events and conferences) in the hopes that I don't have to tell the embarrassing story anymore.

Two Fridays ago, we were hanging out in our office talking about a meeting we're planning with representatives from Europe, US and Japan and Barak mentioned the word "team-building exercises." Of course I had to make a joke and say "what are we going to do -- trust falls?" For those who don't know what a trust fall is, here you go.

Anyway, after I made the joke, I had the genius idea that I could try to catch Andrew. Like any stubborn person, the more he told me I couldn't bear his weight, the more inclined I was to try.

I was able to convince him he could trust me. Seconds later, he his head hit the door as he landed on top of me and my knee cap popped out of its socket. Five minutes later, the ambulance arrived, I was on a really mild morphine high and on my way to the emergency room.

When I tell this to people, they laugh and say "no, really, what happened?"

I'm sorry to say that this is the true story and that I indeed had a incredible case of lack of good judgment. Now I may have to get knee surgery and had to cancel our Christmas vacation.

So there you go. That's how I hurt my leg.

Building spell Check and WYSIWYG is a lot harder than it seems

I'm just testing the new spell check and WYSIWYG functionality in TypePad.

Here's more information about the new features.

Let's hear it for the TypePad team! There are a lot of subtle behaviors that make the new features cool. My personal favorite is the way the QuickPost bookmarklet handles quotes. So, when you select some text on a page and then post from the bookmarklet, the quote will be indented and attributed to the link where it was found.

The TypePad team kicks ass.