If you are a fan of The Office (the American version) and you are a bit of a geek, you will probably love That’s What She Said, a weekly weblog that calculates the litigation value of Michael Scott’s misdeeds in that week’s episode. [via ALOTTFMA] Their assessment is that the “Ben Franklin” episode is the most expensive recent episode, with so many horriifying examples I had forgot them all. The Office is possibly the funniest show on television today, in part because they manage to keep Michael likable even when he’s absolutely awful, allowing them to pull humor from situations that, in cruder hands, would just be distasteful.
I hope those are modern remake fairy tales…..
I browse the various Amazon.com sale pages occassionally, and I was looking at their DVD sales when I found their Girl Power DVD Sale (which hopefully will stay up for a little while so that link will work). I admit up front I have not seen the majority of these films but it seems that their criteria for “Girl Power” is fairly shakey and has little more to it than “has a female lead who is not 100% pathetic”. Yes, some of these are good – I haven’t seen Bend it Like Beckham but I have heard it is a good girl-centered story. The Secret of NIMH is a great movie, and I’m not sure I’d think to put iit in the “Girl Power” category, but it’s not destructive and it celebrates intelligence, so I’ll go along with that. But, Fever Pitch? Really? And, veering into the realm of films that I haven’t seen, they can’t do any better than Hello Kitty Becomes a Princess or a dozen different entries from the Strawberry Shortcake collection? Or a Bratz movie?!?!
It seems that Amazon has just decided to buy into the notion that there are “girl movies” and “boy movies” (with a few cross-over exceptions) and put together a “girl movie” sale under a slightly different name. Even if these films do have some positive gender role messages in them, wouldn’t it then be preferable to get them into the movies boys are watching also?
Graphical Humor
I’m loving the little Venn diagram humor sketched on index cards and posted over at Indexed. While it isn’t really a Venn diagram, I’m a big fan of the entry specifying the conjunctions of the various deadly sins into more complex flaws. You should definitely browse the whole site, though! [via Boing Boing]
Weekend Plans
A friend pointed out to me that if you are at all interested in knitting or crocheting you should wander by the Knit and Crochet Festival. I’ve never been, but looking at the schedule it looks like there’s going to be not only vendors but a bunch of classes and also some open hang-out-and-knit/crochet spaces. I’m probably going to spend tonight curled up in my comfy chair with my piles of patterns around me planning out if there are any pending projects that I’d be interested in browsing for supplies for and then heading out there some time this weekend.
Classic Orders
There’s a meme going around, most recently seen by me over at 50 Books in which you share your first time orderiing at Amazon. I looked it up and my first order was from June 1997 – back when you got free mugs from them at Christmas and free bookmarks in your orders – for a set of five books:
- 60 Crocheted Snowflakes, which I still use every year to make new thread snowflakes for the tree
- The Harmony Guide to Crocheting, the absolute best guide to crochet and its various stitches and techniques I’ve found
- Audubon Birds in Cross Stitch, a purchase born out of excessive optimism in my then-budding interest in cross stitch
- The Difference: Discovering the Hidden Ways We Silence Girls, a good discussion of the topic, if a bit of a retread of Mary Pipher’s themes
- Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, which is a nice blend of the scholarly and the personal anecdote, though I’m sure on re-reading it I would find it somewhat dated at this point
I appreciate that Amazon bothers to keep a list of all previous orders available on their site so you can look up stuff like this…..
Double Slit Mystery
Via A, this is a really good and entertaining video illustrating the Double Slit Experiment. It’s an animated segment of a larger film on quantum physics and discusses both the role of the double slit experiment in establishing wave-particle duality and introduces the impact of the act of observation on what is being observed. Recommended for either physics fans for the entertainment factor or for anyone who wants a low-impact way to learn a little bit about quantum physics.
A Roomba that doesn’t vacuum
I am the excitedly proud new owner of a iRobot Create, basically a Roomba with the vaccuum parts ripped out and an attachment to let you program it in C or C++. So, first, I’ve got to go in to my office tomorrow and retrieve my copy of Kernighan & Ritchie. There’s also a guide to WinAVR (the robot’s development toolset for C/C++ programs) over at SourceForge that seems pretty good. Though – damn – I haven’t had to deal with makefiles in forever…
Woooooo! Robots!!!!!!!
Mini Topic Portals
There seems to have been an explosion of carnivals since the last time I browsed the Blog Carnival Index. If you haven’t seen a carnival before, it is a group that arranges for people to collect and link to posts on a particular theme on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s hard to imagine you won’t find something to interest you if you scan through their listings. Just now I lost myself in the latest entries from the Books Carnival, the Carnival of Chocolate, and the Carnival of Game Production. Carnivals seem to come and go, but they’re an interesting halfway point between a portal and social bookmarking.
Writing about books again
I was asked the other day why I no longer write reviews of the books that I list as “recently reading” in my sidebar. The answer is two-fold – one, I started reading books faster than I could review them and I had fallen into a compulsion to only review books in the order I read them, and two, I’ve never upgraded the section of my site where I store book reviews, and it’s a bit of a hassle to post them there because it is all hand coded.
But, I want to start reviewing books again. And so I’ve told myself I will review the books I read in 2007, starting with a nice clean slate. I’ve also decided, in the interest of actually making this happen, to not worry about updating the “reviews” portion of my site until the summer – I’m adding a “Reviews” category to my weblog and that can be used to find my current reviews on the off chance someone is interested.
So, without further ado….
Take it apart…
I’ve got a bunch of random integrated circuits left over from my intersession course so I think I’m going to try these tips on how to uncap/open various integrated circuits on a few of them [via Make: Blog]. The pictures in that guide aree really interesting just by themselves. Perhaps cooler is the weblog that the post is from μblog: engineering from the trenches, which is just filled up with cool geek content covering most of the spectrum of electrical engineering.