Cheezer and Louzer

Back in my college days, in the 90’s, I used to collect these artsy graphic design magazines called Emigre. These issues have been sitting quietly in a box for the last 10 years and so I am selling them on eBay this week. They originally cost $7.95 per issue and you had to send away through this thing called “the mail” to get them. Inside, they include all sorts of wild graphic design, which of course, was right up my alley. They were a cool combination of old-school Bauhaus style and amazing new hi-tech 1990’s San Francisco design.

The people who made the magazine are stil around at emigre.com but from what I can tell, they only sell fonts now. Well, not “only” since they always did that and their fonts are totally cool. Check ‘em out, if you’re into design in any way. Then again, if you are, you’ve probably already seen this.

I rented Wild Zero from Netflix last week. It is a movie made by Tetsuro Takeuchi about well, a lot of things. It’s pure B-movie, zombified, space aliens ate my girlfriend, head exploding, whacked-out fun. There are lots of really really loud and distorted rock n’ roll songs by the great Guitar Wolf and a lot of really bad acting.

I had to watch this in two halves, and I must have been tired for the first sitting, cause when I turned it off I was thinking it was really not worth the time invested. When I watched the second-half though, I enjoyed it more somehow. Maybe just because the action heats up and there’s sort of a point to it by then. Well, OK, not really. I did really like the lines they gave Guitar Wolf though, like “Rock ‘n Roll is NOT over, baby! Rock ‘n Roll NEVER DIES!”.

I think there’s not much here for you if you’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing before. If this is something you dabble in every now & though, you’ll probably like it. Don’t bother if you can’t take loud R&R music though; even I could only take Guitar Wolf in short sessions.

OK, so my favorite computer game of all time is Half-Life 2. And the makers of Half-Life 2 are releasing a super fantastic new update coming in October by the name of The Orange Box. OK, really, it’s three super fantastic products in one box: HL2 Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

This here is the newest teaser video Valve has released for TF2. It features The Engineer, whose job it is in the game to build unmanned gun turrets to protect the home base with. This was a really fun role to play in the older version of this game (Team Fortress) and they came up with a really clever idea for this video.

I can’t wait to play this game!

I have two Gmail accounts with the nice folks at Google. One for work, family, friends and Kiwanis and so on. The other accounts I only use when signing up for web site accounts, to avoid getting a lot of spam and so on. I like to check both accounts throughout a normal workday, when I ‘m in the office at least, but that’s been a hassle till today. Now, I found this wonderful little article with many good ideas on how to solve this problem.

The solution that’s going to work best for me is the one that uses the IETab extension for Firefox. I already had it installed and so should have thought of this solution myself. You see – - – warning! Geek talk starts here!!! – - – the whole problem with being logged into more than one Gmail account at the same time is that web browsers store that login information in a Cookie. But the good news is that Firefox creates cookies for its use, and IE has its own separate place for storing cookies as well. So, I can have one account in Firefox and the other in Firefox, through an IETab window, and so there are two cookies at the same time. So clever!

Thanks download squad! You’ve made my day.

Harry Shearer is really funny and really brave to make songs and videos about subjects like the US government’s practice of waterboarding (a form of torture).

Here’s a link to a video he made for the song. Check it out.

I salute his patriotism. I curse the man who said using this form of torture is a “no brainer” when it comes to protecting national security.

Here’s a nice picture the boy drew at school today:

Such talent!

OK, so we’re only three weeks into the school year, and guess who’s already been awarded Student of the Month at his elementary school? That’s right, our little mini-me.

When I first heard the news, I was very proud and excited for the boy. Then I thought, wait, what if they just give this to the kids they think need that extra boost to make them do better in school, like as a psychological trick? Then I thought, nah, that can’t happen, but what if this marks him on the playground – ya know, as a smarty-pants braniac, etc… – all the bad names I was called when I was a kid, just for doing well in school.

I think he’s going to be fine in the long run, he will get to learn how to deal with any little brat who gives him grief over this, and I hope that will make him stronger in the end. And, if any of those kids make trouble for my boy, well, nyahhhhh-nyah on them.