My new favorite store:

/ lintqueen / 2 Comments

I just placed an order with CD Baby, and received this confirmation email:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, May 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.

Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

the little CD store with the best new independent music

phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com http://www.cdbaby.com

They are my new favorite.

Consolidated Theaters

/ lintqueen / 1 Comment

For many years now, the closest major movie theaters to my house have been of the Consolidated variety. They’re pretty much interchangeable with any other mega-multi-plex and have their own little pre-show cartoon movie that reminds you to hush now, look for the exits (and remember that there’s one in the front of the theater too), and buy lots of candy and popcorn and soda.

Well, for the last several years the little pre-movie at Consolidated Theaters has, quite frankly, driven me batty, for several reasons:

  • The graphics were so, 1996! You could’ve gotten your average 14-year old to do something much *much* more professional
  • It featured a “space-age” (or vaguely futuristic-looking, I suppose) car zooming around a city full of snacks and trash cans and exit signs (think The Fifth Element, but much less well thought-out and with a strange Hershey’s obsession)

So none of that is particularly terrible, except for the fact that the zooming car made me dizzy! Now I love roller coasters, and tend to be unfazed by boats and other “seasickness”-inducing phenomena, so it’s not like it made me ill or anything …it was just a wee bit disorienting. And the decision to make things all swoopy (and potentially nauseating) always struck me as unwise, assuming you really did want people to go buy more popcorn or Twizzlers.

But now they’ve replaced the disorienting space chase by some sort of Battle of the Junk Foods, which, though uninspired (and not likely to cause hunger), at least looks like it was animated in the 21st century.

/ lintqueen / 6 Comments

I am probably overly happy about this:
Grammar God!
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

A feedback we received today

/ lintqueen / 1 Comment

background

We launched a new version of the search engine last week, and one of the features we implemented was Spell Check… the second block of text in the email below was in our Search Tips page. The bit that’s blue and underlined is a working link to a search-engine query (which, of course, won’t work when you’re not on the intranet).
/background

This was the email we received:

Thought you would like to know there is a typo on your link when I clicked to get more info on your new search features. Your pages always look so professional it really stands out when there is a typo… :0)

“We noticed that several well-known internet search engines have spelling-correction features, which can be quite useful if you’re a poor typist. Inktomi, our search engine, has a spelling suggestion feature that we’ve implemented in the new search. Try searching on “documennt“, for example, to see how it works.”

Well, yeah. In order to show you how the spell check works, we sorta had to misspell a word. Sigh.

Sad state of smoke detection

/ lintqueen / 4 Comments

The smoke detector upstairs in my house is very “touchy.”  It’ll go off at the slightest provocation, like when I, for example, turn the oven on.  (And who can blame it really?  I mean, it’s the *oven*.  Anyway…)  I haven’t tried looking cross-eyed at it yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that set it off too.

This afternoon I was fixing myself a *very* belated lunch (or breakfast, depending on how you count it) of a BACT sandwich (Bacon, Avocado, Cheese & Tomato).  I have some of that Hormel-pre-cooked-in-a-bag-bacon, and it seemed a good opportunity to try it out.  Per instructions, I heated the bacon (though I think they said oven proper, and I used the toaster oven.  Oh well).  Well, bacon is a slippery beast, and one piece escaped through the toaster grate and landed on the …erm…hot thing (in an oven it’d be a coil, but this is straight, so that seems wrong, somehow).

Stinky pig-gone-way-too-far smoke poured out of the oven (causing me to panic and open the oven door *before* finding the tongs to remove the bacon.  Not, perhaps, my wisest choice ever, but the bacon deities were watching over me and the pig did not erupt into flames (which it would have had every right to do at that point).  While the voice of Bill Cosby (Bill Cosby Himself; watch it if you haven’t.  Tres funny) ran through my head, I grabbed the tongs and rescued (can you say rescue if it’s way too late for the rescuee?) or maybe just retrieved the bacon, and doused it in the sink.

Through all this, not a *peep* from the smoke alarm.

I should probably have that checked out, eh?

Who is Chester?

/ lintqueen / 3 Comments

Posted today in the local free cycle newsletter:

Message: 18
Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 15:25:40 -0000
From: (snip)
Subject: WANTED: Shoe Cabinet

The one that looks like a Chester Drawer …

Now who is Chester Drawer, I wonder?

My Baby is Being Born!!!

/ lintqueen / 2 Comments

I just called 1-866-ASK-MINI (best customer service EVER) and my baby has started production!!! I have a VIN number!!!!

overload

/ lintqueen / Leave a comment

It’s 1:51 and I’ve received 64 emails since last night that I needed to respond to (not counting junk mail or throwaways).  Gak.  Have written 27 replies.  Working on #28.

/ lintqueen / 3 Comments

It may be gone soon, but read about Cisco’s:

HOOT & HOLLER SOLUTION

[…]
“Cisco Multicast Hoot ‘n’ Holler over IP, powered with Cisco’s VoIP technology, transports hoot ‘n’ holler traffic over Cisco equipment. Hoot ‘n’ holler networks, are specialized audio conference networks most heavily used in the brokerage industry but also employed in utility, media, mass transit and other industries. Hoot ‘n’ Holler networks are used by brokerage firms to advise brokers on market movements. Brokerage firms can spend millions of dollars in monthly leased line charges to pay for dedicated circuit-switched hoot ‘n’ holler long distance connections.” […]

Edited to add: I thought this was a joke… a funny Easter Egg planted by the web group. But, no, under further analysis, it seems “Hoot & Holler” network is real?

On why I “went digital” (musically, at any rate)

/ lintqueen / 3 Comments

(These are just some random thoughts I wanted to get in one place).

I’m really an all-or-nothing person when it comes to music. I bought one of the first mega-multi-disc changers back in 95(?) and since then have been completely unwilling to change compact discs (I *hate* butterfly packages — so un-butterfly-like, as butterflies are a good thing and not in the least annoying. Anyway).

I never had a CD-changer in my car, because I hated the idea that the CDs I wanted in the car at any given moment would be in the house or vice versa. My solution there was an in-dash minidisc player and mix MDs. “Mixes” fall outside the “all-or-nothing” realm because they’re intentional and have “flow.”

For me, the decision to “go digital” was spurred on by three things:

  1. the fact that my collection had grown far beyond the two daisy-chained 200-disc changers, which meant there was a lot of my music I wasn’t hearing (except for the “select” songs that made it onto mixes)
  2. the invention of the Audiotron (that lets me stream all my music from a PC, in my case a dedicated music server) , and
  3. the 40GB iPod, which was big enough to “hold it all” … the same logic (or lack thereof) about the CD player in the car applied here: “What if the music I want to hear is not on the iPod?!”

So now I have a 40GB iPod — that really holds 37 GB; thankfully, about 15GB of my collection is classical (which is “bigger” in filesize), new age or jazz, which I’m not as concerned with having with me. (FWIW, I have a little less than 9000 songs).

All my “real music” (which roughly equates to stuff I can sing to) is in my baby (at about 35GB), which makes me *very* happy! There are a lot of duplicate songs (the cases where I have a “best of” album as well as the original disc, for example), which I’m weeding out as time permits, allowing me to add more music (plus I have a GB or two to spare now).

I don’t think I’d want only part of my music with me. I did buy a Sonic Rio an eon or two ago, and almost never used it because trying to figure out *which* songs I wanted (and get them onto the bugger) was such a pain. I’m way too picky about what I want to hear… sometimes it’s not enough to be in the right genre or even the right artist; no, I want *the*song*that*the*radio*in*my*head*is*playing.”

Did y’all know that not everyone has a radio in his head? I can’t imagine that.