November 2007 Archives

This entry is probably more for my benefit than for anybody else's, but I want to remember these useful websites that I've come across in the process of doing web dev work.

IE NetRenderer — let's you test your website on IE 5, 6 and 7. Indispensible for someone like me who works on a Mac (and who recently lost her copy of Windows due to, ahem, not backing things up more carefully.)

CornerShop — automatically generates images, HTML and CSS to create rounded corners for your website.

http://www.picnik.com/ — If you want to quickly resize, rotate, or touch up a photo, you can do it without PhotoShop at this website. It works with Flickr too!

When you're a multimillion dollar e-commerce company powering online stores everywhere, you can apparently afford to not sweat the small stuff.

Like this pop-up message when you upload files.

Some files are alredy exists. Click 'Ok' to overwrite them or click 'Cancel' and remove them from list!

This really irritates me more than it should, but unfortunately, I have to see it a lot...

I remember dancing to this strange song at the Berkeley Square in the 80s... all I could recall was some beeping and booping, and the repeated phrase, "No, Senor..." but I never knew who recorded it or what it was called.

Mystery solved, thanks to Crap From the Past and YouTube! It is the French band Magazine 60, and the song is called "Don Quichotte" (yes, that's how they spelled it.) Ah... those guitars, those outfits, the dancing, the blow-dried hair... pure 80s goodness. (Or badness, depending on your perspective)

From the annals of bad parenting. A mom helps her daughter create a fake boyfriend online for another girl, who ends up killing herself when she gets "dumped." >This story gets weirder and weirder as you read on. And depressing.

...and their warehouse/outlet is a few blocks from my house!

Hide the credit cards!

License plate spotted today:

PLSR PRN

How did that one slip past the DMV?

Edited to add:
Somebody else also noticed it. And had a different theory as to what it meant.

... you've still got to agree this is rather fucked up, right?

U.S. immigration officials said they have enacted a new policy to show greater consideration for breast-feeding mothers, days after authorities arrested a Honduran woman in Ohio on an immigration violation and separated her from her crying baby.

Sayda Umanzor, 27, admitted to being in the United States illegally when sheriff's deputies and federal agents knocked on the door of a house in Conneaut, Ohio, on Oct. 26.

Umanzor was breast-feeding her 9-month-old daughter, Brittany, at the time, and the baby cried as her parents were led away.

"It was like a piece of me was torn away," Umanzor said Thursday, speaking through an interpreter.

The baby cried incessantly over the next several days as she went without breast milk and Umanzor suffered soreness from engorged breasts.

Greg Palmore, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said the agency approved Wednesday a new policy to address the needs of breast-feeding mothers.

"It basically ensures that you take humanitarian issues involving nursing moms into consideration," he said Friday. "It also ensures we make contact with state social service agencies to address caregiver issues."

Nursing or not, babies are dependent on their parents. You can't just tear them apart like that. Talk about the punishment not fitting the crime...

I was amused by this paragraph in an article on WorldNetDaily about Google

In addition, the company came under fire for an editorial decision giving preferential placement to large, elite media outlets such as CNN and the BBC over independent news sources, such as WND, even if they are more recent, pertinent and exhaustive in their coverage.

Poke around WorldNetDaily for a few minutes. "Irritating," "Exhausting" and "Ranting" come to mind...

So I could be in an FBI database.

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

Somebody gave us a set of "touch and feel" books for mimic, intended to let babies "pet" animals (when the real thing is hiding in the closet because they don't want their fur pulled). One such book, Touch and Feel Kitten, greatly amused me this morning with this passage:

Feel my HARD,
yellow food bowl.

Unfortunate phrasing, punctuation and typographic emphasis...

From the "what were they thinking" files:

Item: "GetGoodKarma" ad campaign. The first time I became aware of this campaign was when I was in the Bloomingdale's mall in San Francisco and saw a poster that said something like: "Volunteering: cool. Volunteering long enough to get college credit: not cool." My reaction: volunteering is something that already has such a heavy weight of responsibility and guilt to it. Why add to the pile? So what if some poor shmuck signs up to serve meals at a soup kitchen just to earn credits or impress the ladies (that was another poster's accusation). What if he finds that helping people makes him feel good and he wants to keep doing it? Were I the target audience (a young adult) I would shrug and keep walking. (Or give the poster the finger.)

Item: "Recycle yourself" bumper sticker. A worthy cause. I totally favor donating organs when you are gone and don't need them anymore — you can save several lives at once. But there's a reason that we usually use phrases like "give the gift of life." Recycling evokes sticky crushed soda cans, shredded paper, or food waste turned into compost. Not an image you want to apply to your own body. I mean, really? Ew.

Item: "Animals are little people in fur coats" bumper sticker. No, they're not. Rather, we are animals without fur. I can't stand the anthropomorphization of cute little animals. So non-mammals are fair game, then? I'm sure that's not what the people who came up with this slogan meant, but it's just really not well thought out.

Item: "Welcome to America/Now speak English!" bumper sticker. This one really annoyed the fuck out of me when I saw it. I think it's safe to say I do not share the politics of those who choose to affix this piece of crap to their bumpers. More than that, though, why be gratutiously rude to anybody you drive past? Way to make a good impression on newcomers and tourists!

Item: the signs at Costco explaining that receipts are checked to make sure customers don't get overcharged. Yeah, right.

So those are my pet peeves. What are yours?