After Apple CEO Steve Jobs becomes Disney’s largest individual shareholder (after Disney completes it deal to buy Pixar), Apple could make a bid to buy Disney. Man, if we could only be so lucky…
Category: Cool
The Ultimate Computer Desk
While these are pretty sweet workstations, I think having the computer built into the desk would be pretty dang sweet.
What Was The Number One Song When You Were Born?
Apparently mine was “With a Little Luck” by Paul McCartney & Wings. What was yours? Thanks Dave for the link.
What A Great Little Flash Application
This goes into the “Why didn’t I think of this?” category (oh wait, I know why…because I can’t program in Flash. Duh…). But the concept of the Sketch Swap is very simple. You draw something — anything — and hit the submit drawing button, and then wait. In a few seconds, you’ll get to see a drawing from somebody else that has used the application. Most of the drawings are stick-figure esque (at least everything I put in there is) but some folks are putting in some very cool drawings and you’ll see those if you submit enough stuff.
Addicting Flash Game for The Day
Monk is one of the two TV shows I have to watch when new episodes are on (House being the other, which is on tonight). For kicks, I went to the Monk web site and played the games they had posted there, and I have to say Monk’s Mind Game is a great little game that is far better than you typically see on TV shows’ Web sites (usually there’s no thought put into the game, but this one’s kind of fun). b3ta also linked to it over the weekend, so enjoy.
137 Feeds And Counting
We’re now up to 137 feeds over at Bend Blogs. Many of the ones I added in the last couple days were LiveJournals, a few Blogger.com blogs, and even a few MySpace and MSN Blogs. There’s some very good reading and some well-established blogs that have been added that I didn’t know a thing about, so be sure to check it out.
And for my reference, here are the Google search queries I used to find them (and variations on them for the different cities):
- site:livejournal.com “Location: Bend, Oregon”
- site:blogger.com “Location: Bend : Oregon”
- site:spaces.msn.com “Location Bend, Oregon”
- site:profile.myspace.com “Bend, Oregon”
- site:blog.myspace.com “City: BEND”
Also of note: I didn’t bother to put any blogs on there that hadn’t been updated in more than 6 months or so, though I did find quite a few of them. I’m pretty sure one of the features they’re working on for Gregarius is a system that automatically depreciates a feed after nothing has been posted to it for six months (which would include several blogs there, I know).
If you notice something I’m missing, please let me know (contact form coming on BendBlogs of these days).
Sonic The Hedgehog on The Piano
There have been a pile of variations of folks playing the Mario Brothers theme song on everything from marimbas to piano to the ukulele, but it takes a real man to take on the Sonic The Hedgehog theme.
Now if the guys playing these were as easy on the eyes as these amazing percussionists….
The $1000 Sundae
You won’t find this one at Dairy Queen:
Made with “5 scoops of the richest Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla and covered in 23K edible gold leaf, the sundae is drizzled with the world’s most expensive chocolate, Amedei Porceleana, and covered with chunks of rare Chuao chocolate, which is from cocoa beans harvested by the Caribbean Sea on Venezuela’s coast. The masterpiece is suffused with exotic candied fruits from Paris, gold dragets, truffles and Marzipan Cherries. It is topped with a tiny glass bowl of Grand Passion Caviar, an exclusive dessert caviar, made of salt-free American Golden caviar, known for its sparkling golden color. It’s sweetened and infused with fresh passion fruit, orange and Armagnac. The sundae is served in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18K gold spoon to partake in the indulgenceserved with a petite mother of pearl spoon and topped with a gilded sugar flower by Ron Ben-Israel.”
Expensive, and probably tastes like crap. I’ll take my peanut-butter cup Blizzard, thank you. Link from BB.
Weapons Against Hard-To-Open Packaging
One of my biggest pet-peeves is when I get computer parts or supplies (or even toys for my kids) that they put them in those impossible-to-open, hard plastic clam-shells that you can’t cut through with anything less than a chain saw. Finally, there’s some good weapons that can be used to get the things open. Thanks Barn for the link.
An All New BendBlogs.com
Nearly a year ago when I started BendBlogs, I had grandiose dreams of a great site with timely information, great speed, searchable, RSS feeds, etc…. Unfortunately, that never became much of a reality because of the limitations of working with the software I chose, and really not able to find time to replace it or hack it to make it work how I wanted it to. The site has grown to over 130 blogs from around Central Oregon, and with its growth the limits of the previous software were starting to show.
Then yesterday after thinking about the site, I decided to search around again for solutions, and found a great one. So it gave me a chance to clean up totally dead feeds and rebuild the thing. Obviously it still needs a bit of work (as it’s mostly the stock template with some hacks, and I need to implement a few other features), but here’s the all new Bend Blogs. Among the new features:
- AJAX-Powered so things load quickly and intuitively.
- Full text search (soon — fixing something with that, but look for the form on the top of the page soon).
- RSS feed for not only the entire directory but for every page on the site (click on the “RSS” link on the bottom of the page for the URL).
- Cached archive of local blog posts.
- Ability to tag entries (with RSS feeds for those tags). For example, I just tagged Shannon’s latest post, and it’s instantaneous (and you guys can submit tags, too).
- Nice, clean URLs that Google will love.
- Clean code that is standards compliant.
- Updates cleanly every hour (with a much better caching system).
- Totally MySQL powered, giving me the ability to manipulate the data if need be.
- And a large community of developers and resources.
Obviously, I still need to do some work on the site, and many features on there are totally messed up in Internet Explorer 6.x (I haven’t tried the 7.x beta, but I know it works fine on a real browser). On my to-do list:
- Get the search bar on there.
- Get navigation figured out and added (as I just temporarily commented out the system that came with it, as it gave the general public a bit more power than I wanted).
Shrink down things just a tad, especially in the feeds source list and the main header <H1> text, so it’s not so big.- Adjust the color scheme so it’s a bit easier on the eyes.
Get Google adsense ads on there (gotta pay for hosting somehow, folks).- Get some photography as the background of the header area (similar to ORblogs.com’s city page for Bend). I’ll be e-mailing a few of you for submissions, and credit will be given, of course.
- Edit the template and stylesheets to pieces to fit future needs.
- Fix the time so it reads in non-24-hour time (I prefer AM/PM, thank you).
- Re-implement some trimming code so that long titles such as this don’t screw up the page.
Figure out why some URLs are using mod_rewrite, and some aren’t (see the links on this page).- Sort feeds list by latest updated.
- Add a “Submit” and a “Removal” request forms, as well as FAQ, About, Contact, etc…. (which was on my previous to-do list for the site).
- More to come, I’m sure….but it’s late, and I’m braindead…
So go check it out, and comment here if you notice anything or have a feature/bug that should be added to my to-do list (or notice any blogs that I’m missing).