Paul Merrill
Today is my birthday. My friends Alan and Chris took a photo expedition with some of my stickers in downtown Minneapolis. What a great birthday present!
By the way, I’ll be happy to send a few to you to put around your town – if you’ll agree to send me the digital photos. Just request some in a comment and we’ll go from there.
Footnote: the stickers say “shiny bits of life” in the white area. (You can’t really tell that from the photos.)
A few days ago, our family splurged and enjoyed a MacDonalds lunch. As usual, we all got water. For us, the big reason is saving $5 or more.
This was the first time I had seen cups specifically for water. Possible reasons for this are:
Do you have any additional ideas why they may have done this?
Simple shoes are great.
I’m on about year 14 for one pair… it just keeps going on and on. I continue to get the heels replaced, but the most recent time (a few weeks ago) was the last. Next time, it will just be more cost-effective to bite the bullet and get a new pair.
Since my Simple shoe love goes on, I went to their site recently and saw the detail above. What a wash of memories it brought back! Keds must have originated the end-of-shoe branding. But Red Ball Jets were the coolest thing when I was a kid. The pair I wanted were jet black. The heel had a tiny red ball where Keds puts the blue rectangle. Sadly, I could not get a pair, because they had none that fit my skinny feet. I actually cried at the store!
Simple shoes are the next best thing to Red Ball Jets.
I’ve written about Simple shoes before here. And this lady has a blog based around her love for the shoe.
You are invited to visit The International Toothpaste Museum.
Explore the rich depths of toothpastes from all over this wide world.
I monitor a MySpace account as part of my job. (And I think some of you may have read about how I am not fond of MySpace.)
So an email like this came in this morning. I had never seen upside-down type in a subject line that before! And the funny thing is that the sender did not look like someone who would know their way around coding.
My dad loved to take pictures. (The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.) He captured my teen angst pretty well in this shot.
(And a technical note – colors do fade with time.)
This Subaru lives in our neighborhood.
Maybe its owner has never heard of masking tape? Or maybe it’s a rebellion against coloring within the lines. In any case, I think the owner has seen Napoleon Dynamite one too many times. (That might be the car Napoleon would drive – and the owner secretly wants to be like him. But now I’ve let the cat out of the bag.)
And I guess it just struck me, because it seemed like something Napoleon Dynamite would do to his car if he had a Subaru.
“Once someone has an iPhone, it is going to be tough to persuade them that they also need to spend money on and carry around a dedicated GPS device, point-and-shoot camera, or tape recorder unless they have an unusual need.” from here.
I’m not an iPhone user, simply because I can’t afford the monthly charges. However, even if I were, I would not give up my beloved point-and-shoot. I like taking photos, and there just isn’t as much quality or control with any iPhone.
Having said that, it is amazing all the things that an iPhone can do. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of the late 00’s.
Dunno if you have ever been to an Ignite event. The best way I can describe it is TED-lite. (TED = “Technology, Entertainment, Design” – international talks that have the very best minds in our world today sepaking on all number of topics.)
Ignite is more “normal” people from the geek community speaking on whatever strikes their fancy. Since Boulder has a thriving geek community, the Ignite events there sell out the Boulder Theater. (Roughly 700 people come.)
I went to my first Boulder Ignite on September 16th. It was fascinating. Roughly fourteen presentations were on the program – topics ranging from climbing Mt. Everest blind to how one speaks Swedish.
If there is one in your town, it’s worth a try. The great benefit for me is the chance to hear how people very unlike myself think – and express themselves.
The other day, our dog was having fun chasing squirrels up a tree. They love this particular tree because of the tasty acorns it has been producing lately.
The funny thing was that as I heard the chattering, I thought it was a monkey. Briefly, I was back in Africa. Even though we lived in a crowded city of more than four million people (Nairobi), the occasional squirrel would sneak into homes in our neighborhood to see what tasty treat they might find.
