Molpe 2007 Kill #4 (Pets)

We're not exactly sure when this shrew happened, since we just stumbled over the corpse outdoors instead of receiving our normal special delivery. Ick!

A Loser's Rant

Dissed in the Malibu! I was crushed in the Lifehacker coolest home office contest. Let's break it down.

• The winner has four 15" LCDs, whereas I have two 20" LCDs. That gives the winner about 12% more physical display than I have. If he's running them at 1280x1024 he has about 35% more pixels. Of course, with nuances of scale hard to pick up in the pictures, he may just look like he has twice as much screen as I do.
• The winner uses a keyboard tray. Hard to tell if it is ergonomically poor from the photos, but since almost all of them are let's just assume :-)
• The winner's computers are in his kick zone stuffed directly under his desk, whereas mine are neatly squirreled away where I am insulated from their heat and noise. In this respect the winner's mundane computer configuration is probably like almost all home offices.
• We are treated to no view of the winner's office except for his desk and a plain wall with a window's night-time view of nothing.

I'm not surprised I lost, but I do think this highlights the arbitrariness of these types of popularity contests. I'd wager that if most of the voters got to dork around in both the winner's office and mine for a day, mine would come out the winner almost every time. Usability is always being slain by marketability...

I've also got to say that, of all the entries, the winner had perhaps the least to do with the "home" part of a home office. It is just a single-purpose room with a desk and office junk jammed in it.

And have I mentioned recently how irritating it is that my office somehow became the cactus office in this competition? It is the hole-in-the-floor office, dammit!

Vegiedog (Pets)

Currently on 'Dolon's list of inedible vegetables:

• Raw celery -- good for chewing, but not swallowing.
• Raw rhubarb.
  

So far everything else is yummy, from avocado to Romaine stumps (pictured) to raw yam.

Go Speed Racer Go (Reblog)

The Mach 5 is coming to the big screen, courtesy of the Wachowski brothers. So sue me, I admit that I am excited about seeing this childhood cartoon come to life. Plus it has Susan Sarandon in it!

Our Next Surgeon General (Reblog)

Dr. James Holsinger Jr. is the President's nominee for surgeon general. He is the esteemed author of Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality. This document, sponsored by the United Methodist Church, describes how the alimentary and reproductive systems of humans are separate -- as indeed they are. Hence, inarguably, homosexuality is bad:

"...one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur -- the thing speaks for itself!"

Dr. Holsinger also has a masters in biblical studies from Asbury Theological Seminary.

Jonathan Coulton (Recommendation)

Jonathan Coulton has been releasing a song every week this year as part of his Thing a Week podcast. Many are related to this series of tubes we use, and they are all released under a Creative Commons license, which made me love him a little bit even before I listened to his music. The embedded song above is Flickr, and really cracked me up. I also enjoyed Code Monkey -- that song has a slightly-related World of Warcraft machinima laid over it by someone else.

Consumption (Reblog)

TIME has a dramatic photo essay on what several different families around the world eat in a week, and how much it costs. The above is a little over $5 U.S. dollars for a week's food for a family of 13 in Bhutan.

Home Invasion (Pets)

Here's a snapshot of the only four legged member of our household who was smart enough to figure out to use the pet door all by herself. It can really be startling to trip barefoot over an unexpected snapping turtle...