Giving in to Doritos: The Quest
Well, the Frito-Lay marketing ploy worked for a second straight summer. Today was grocery-shopping day. I hadn’t bought a bag of Doritos in over a year, not since the X-13D Flavor Experiment . . . which of course turned out to be the oddly compelling but ultimately quite gross Cheeseburger flavor. Now, today, I couldn’t […]
WebVisions 2008 in review: Part two
This is a continuation of WebVisions 2008 in review: Part one. On Thursday and Friday, May 22-23, I attended the WebVisions 2008 conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. Below is a quick overview (or: potentially understandable scrawling connected by lots of ellipses) of all five sessions I attended on Friday, with links. Many […]
WebVisions 2008 in review: Part one
On Thursday and Friday, May 22-23, I am attending the WebVisions 2008 conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. (Also see my review from WebVisions 2007. I didn’t compose a write-up when I attended in 2005 and 2006.) Below is a quick (read: marginally coherent) overview of all five sessions I attended on Thursday, […]
Microsoft-Yahoo wedding called off (plus ceiling cats)
Today Microsoft said that it was abandoning its blockbuster bid to acquire Yahoo after the two companies could not agree on a price: “Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo.” Probably for the best. The news reminded me of this video: Microsoft designs the iPod package. Awesome. Every company has its own strengths, right? Remember the […]
WordPress 2.5 upgrade
Today spiral::notepad was upgraded to WordPress 2.5 (released yesterday). The basic design of my custom theme has stayed the same, but I took this opportunity to add some features and widgets I had wanted to implement in my theme for awhile. WordPress 2.5 improvements include “multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted […]
USO All-Stars and Chuck Norris in Iraq
I flipped through a friend’s April issue of Maxim magazine the other day and found that Scarlett Johansson has taken it upon herself to battle al-Qaeda! Well, actually, it was more like she did a five-day United Service Organizations (USO) tour of Kuwait, but whatever. There wasn’t much to the article, really, but it did […]
Happy Leap Year, Pop Minds, Will Ferrell
Happy Leap Year, everyone! Or perhaps that should be: Happy Birthday to all leaplings! We observe the modern leap year because Earth orbits the sun every 365.242 days, which evidently isn’t an easy number to work out on calendars. Seems to me that the way we count time is a rather sloppy system that’s been […]
Marketing gold: Doritos X-13D Flavor Experiment
Today I was walking through the grocery store, just minding my own business, when, out of the corner of my eye, I see a plain black bag of chips with a generic sans-serif font that says “X-13D.” In this age of sophisticated, glossy, photo-rich packaging, how am I not going to look more closely to […]
WebVisions 2007 in review
On Thursday and Friday, May 3-4, I attended the WebVisions 2007 conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. This is the third year I’ve made the trek up to Portland for this excellent “future of the web” event. Below is a quick overview of some sessions I attended, with links: 1. Practical AJAX Inside […]
WordPress 2.1 upgrade
Today spiral::notepad was upgraded to WordPress 2.1, complete with a new custom theme I designed. I will import all of my old blog entries into this new format soon. Uh, yes, really soon. There’s like 80 old entries to add, from June 2002 to present. I’m going to get right on that. In other news, […]