I’m thinking I need to toy around with making my own meme generator.
Archive for May, 2009
but I MUST post these:
The first ever online disease evaluator: Do I have Swine Flu?
And Johnny Wander has a meme generator up! I must harness this power!
(And I must now most sincerely apologize for the first link in this post. I could not resist. I know, I have poor impulse control.)
Some people go to the movies. Some people travel. Some people spend Friday nights with their kids. Me? I beat people up (or, alternately, get beaten up).
Friday, May 1 was a low-attendance night, only 4 of us (myself, Tony (Suzanne’s husband), Suzanne (Tony’s wife), and Master Ford). We usually have 6 or 8, but Brad was celebrating the end of finals, Steph was getting ready for finals (so we probably won’t see her again until June), and Casey, Tommy, and Chance didn’t show either.
In all these clips I’m the smaller guy in black in the foreground. The red belt is Tony, the taller guy in black is Master Ford, and the orange belt is Suzanne.
Jon vs. Tony, May 1, 2009.
Jon vs. Suzanne (clip 1), May 1, 2009.
Jon vs. Suzanne (clip 2), May 1, 2009
These are really all the good clips I was able to get. I had the camera in a bad position (I’ll have to experiment with some different locations, but the “safe zones” for a camera are pretty limited). We kept getting out of the camer frame (we were sparring, not filming a Hollywood movie!), and there was a lot of grappling and groundfighting, which is pretty boring to watch. Hopefully I’ll get some more exciting clips here in the next month or so.
As I’ve posted before, I am seriously selective when it comes to laptop.
Late last fall some of DI’s old IBM Thinkpad T4x fleet started to die off. Now, these laptops are amazing. User-serviceable, parts-interchangable, and very sturdy. But they were aging, and even the best-built laptops will start to show their age after 3 or 4 years of non-stop travel.
Since then, I’ve made a couple of corporate purchases to try and find suitable replacements for the T4x’s, with varying degrees of success.
The Toshiba Portege I picked up was Macbook Air-nice in the looks department, but it runs Vista like a dog with a brick tied to its head. An XP downgrade came with it, but I also was not terribly impressed by either the keyboard or the screen. It was okay, but not a shoe-in.
Macbooks are a near-certainty for not working long-term at DI. Yes, OSX is awesome, but I continue to be underwhelmed by every iteration of Apple laptop I pick up. I’m still in love with Mac Minis and iMacs. I have a Mini on my desk, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to dump our corporate-standard Dell desktops in favor of iMacs running Boot Camp ever since beta 1. But the laptops? Sorry. The great hardware features (battery life, fast wifi on resume) simply can’t overcome the substandard optical drives, unresponsive keyboards, and inexcusably high hard drive failure rates.
I took a chance on the new Thinkpad T61, my first “new” Thinkpad purchase since IBM tossed the entire Think* brand to Lenovo. It was a T43p with a dual-core processor and Vista. Not bad, but it certainly won’t win any awards. In its favor? It runs WoW and Warhammer like a dream. Oh, and Photoshop (as if productivity really matters when you’re using a laptop). It was good, but too consumer-grade bulky for my taste.
And aside here: I am a HUGE Thinkpad fan. I’ve been using them for YEARS. The next time you’re walking through an airport, watch the laptops you see people using. The power users? the big corporate movers and shakers? Almost invariably carry Thinkpads. Especially if you fly through the week during business-people-travel-time. Oh, you’ll see Macs and Dells and Sonys and even the occasional Acer or Toshiba (these last two tend to be limited to the consumer crowd), but the sleek black laptops will be the majority. There’s a reason for that.
My most recent purchase was for Nathan Martin, after his T40 (which was 4 years old) started to show signs of decrepitude. So I took a chance and ordered in a Thinkpad X300. This was my first experience with the Thinkpad ultraportable line.
I think the Lenovo Thinkpad X300 just may be the most perfect laptop ever. I’m not sure I can understate this. Is “lovelust” a word?
After all, I couldn’t keep coveting Nathan’s laptop. That’s a sin. (Although, I’m sure I could probably throw jealousy, lust, and maybe even a bit of idolatry in there as well). And I think an abacus would have been a step up from my Macbook. 
Lenovo Thinkpad X300 (for which I have the Covetousness)
I now have 4 of these beauties, and they are the new official laptop fleet for Destiny Image. <3
That’s enough link updates for tonight, I think. I got most of them back, but I know I’m still missing a few categories. Not that anyone but me ever clicked on them anyway.
…I just realized that all my links in the sidebar vanished. Guess what I’ll be fixing tomorrow morning?
Okay, so I haven’t updated in a while. I’ve been a bit busy lately. I did find the time to pop up to New York with Nathan this week to meet with Barnes & Noble. We went to the New York Public Library. There was a disturbing lack of books there. So we went across the street to the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, where they seemed to have very nearly just about everything. I could have spent the whole day there. At the library.
Frack, I am such a nerd.
But anyway! I thought I’d share one of my favorite little hobbies with everyone today. It starts with a confession:
I love self-published books.
There’s something to be said of a person who believes so strongly in what they’ve written that they will spend gobs of their hard-earned money to publish their book on their own. There’s a lot of things to be said, actually, and many of them are not particularly cordial. But I still love to read self-published books. I want to know what it is that was so groundbreaking, so earth-shattering, so important (and so put-offish to a publisher), that the author just had to publish the book on their own.
So I read self-published books. And then I will often send feedback to the author to try and help them market their book better or to help them become a better writer. Sort of what I do with some manuscripts that are submitted to Destiny Image.
I also like to see self-publishing done right, or at least someone trying to do it right.
The main reason to share this, though, was to give me an excuse to post the signings I found in the latest self-published books I bought. I just noticed the signings while finishing the second book on the train to NYC this week. It was a cute little gem to find.
I like authors who do cool little things like this unexpectedly for their readers.
