Plain Brown Blog

I didn't buy M&M candy when I went shopping for Halloween swag yesterday. I thought about it, but the only packages available at my local grocery store were M&M 2.0—the pastel variation of that otherwise tasty treat.

It's not that I dislike pastels, or even that I think the M&M folks were thinking about web 2.0 branding when they came up with the idea of doing a version of their candy coloured in this non-traditional way. That being said, I have gotten to the point where I don't explore anything on the web, or anywhere else, that is created using that recognizable 2.0 palate.  

Bah. Colour me grumpy. Bah, colour me anything but baby blue.

Web 2.0 is sold as being all about the social aspect of on-line life. We have social bookmarking, social photo sharing, social clipping, social sorta-blogging, and so on, and so on. I'm a big fan of finding a sense of community on the web, so, in theory, I should appreciate these things, even if their target audience is 30-35 years younger than I am. However I'm finding that even when I could use the tools themselves, the planned community aspect of them makes me want to run away.  

There's an aspect of this that reminds me of the summer of love (that would be 1968) as sold in discount stores all over the US in 1974. By the mid 70s kids from the suburbs were buying pre-frayed jeans and everyone had a bong hidden under their bed, purchased from the head shop in the mall. Any connection to the anti-war movement was gone and Janis was dead.

If you have to google Janis, go find a baby blue sorta-blog to read. There's nothing for you here.

 

posted by taming at 07:02 | link | comments (9)|
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Weekday at Beanies

 

posted by taming at 12:48 | link | comments |
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

I'm drinking some mighty fine coffee this AM, India Dewan Estate Kohinoor AA, that I got as part of a sample pack from Sweet Marias (scroll down). I don't purchase a sample pack every time I order coffee, but it sure is a great way to try a half pound or pound of something Tom and Maria stock that I might not think to buy myself.

The only downside is that by the time I actually roast it, there is a good chance it is no longer available for purchase. Such was the case with today's fine brew.

I'm fine with the here today gone tomorrow nature of fine coffee. Some of my roasting buddies fall so deeply in love with one or another bean that they build huge stashes and grieve when a particular favourite is no longer available. I, on the other hand, enjoy this aspect of home roasting. Heck, if I wanted to drink the same thing every day, I would buy 100 pounds of my favourite blend (SM Moka Kadir) once a year and be done with it.

I am a huge fan of consistent quality, but not all that fond of any other kind of consistency. I like to be surprised, even by my coffee.

It's so easy to fall into a rut, especially when you don't have kidlets at home keeping things fresh, or a job with built in challenges. You can end up cooking the same meals day after day and having the same conversations with your spouse year after year. 

Having an on-line connection to great recipe sites can keep mealtimes fresh, but it takes something a little less virtual to keep a marriage alive.

One Halloween, many years ago, my grandmother's friend Iona took this reality perhaps a little too far. Apparently things were getting a little stale between Iona and her husband Joe, so she decided to spice things up. After dinner, she told Joe she was going out for a bit and asked him to take care of the trick-or-treat duties.

Iona then went over to my grandmother's house, where she changed into the traditional teenage candy mission costume: a ratty long coat, a stocking hat, and, to add her own twist, nothing else. She applied black grease paint to her face, slung a pillow case over her shoulder as a goody bag, and back to her house she went. She waited in the shadows to make sure the coast was clear before she rang the doorbell. Joe answered the door, no doubt with the scowl we adults reserve for those who are clearly too old to trick-or-treat, and turned to the candy bowl to get the proper amount of candy required to guard against teenage vindictiveness. It was clear to Iona that the ruse was working just fine.

Joe turned back to the doorway, bribe in hand, to see Iona, disguise still in place, standing there with the ratty coat open, and her strangely unfamiliar body, in all its plump glory, on display.

It was quite the surprise, all right. Joe backed up quickly and went ass over teakettle, cracking his head on a brick planter, and passing out cold. An ambulance was called, and Iona, still nekkid under her costume, spent the rest of the evening in the ER with her spouse.

I learned one of those life-lessons from this. I'll be surprising RT for Halloween tomorrow night, but my big surprise is along the line of sautéing some shallots in with the roasted asparagus we're having with our broiled salmon. 

 

posted by taming at 10:36 | link | comments (1)|
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Just call Me Geek Girl

We have real snow today, which didn't keep RT from heading into his office for a bit. It's not the first snowfall of the season, but it's the first one that looks like it might have staying power.

That means that I am left to my own devices for most of the day. I suppose I could go outside and shovel the walk, but I wouldn't want to undercut RT's masculinity. We may live in the 21st century, but gender-based role expectations à la 1950 something are alive and well in our house. Most of the time, it works pretty well for us. And whilst we are both fine with how it plays out for cooking, cleaning, and taking out the garbage, we are all about equality when it comes to techie goodness.

We're both a little, urmmm, geeky. OK, a lot geeky.

In general RT is our in-house network and database guy and I am our in-house web wizard. We're both enthusiastic about new technologies, and we are both, budget and time permitting, early adopters. I guess it's because we share that sort of thing that I was so amused by a commentary on CNET today entitled Top products with high 'wife-acceptance factor' .

From the article:

Today, WAF is one of those dirty little secrets of the electronics world, and it's both openly discussed and rarely talked about, because it's now integrated into the DNA of so many products. It's not always called WAF, because, after all, not everyone is married, but it's become fairly common practice for manufacturers to market electronics directly to women as they wink at men.

The article goes on to talk about how Sony sought to increase sales of one of their television lines by making the slogan associated with them more appealing to women. Apparently ease of use is an important part of WAF. Sheesh.

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my freelance techie time trying to explain things that seem awfully simple to me to men who are truly clueless. I do the same thing when I am working with women. The only gender based difference I see is that men don't generally admit they have a problem until they have screwed it up big time, and then there is this odd mixture of shame and bravado involved. Helping women is really much easier.

Women tell me what the problem is, I look for (and usually find) a solution. They say thank-you, and pay my bill.

With men, they have to be sure that I am aware that its an example of some sort of well thought out plan by Big Business to take advantage of them and that the knowledge that I have (and they don't) is esoteric in the extreme. They also grumble as they pay the bill until I point out that the Best Buy Geek Squad charges $129 to put a memory chip in their computer and I do that sort of thing for free if I have the box open for something else.

Somehow, once they understand that I work (relatively) cheap, they have something to smile about. They are no longer tech-impaired men, they are men with an on-call computer girl.

It works for me...all the way to the bank.

 

posted by taming at 14:37 | link | comments (2)|
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Gee Wizz

I have no right to feel as if yesterday was a day well spent. Nope.

This being the case, I'm still greatly amused and satisfied that I figured out what was making FireFox go haywire every couple of hours. The timing of the craziness was actually the clue that led to the resolution of my periodic decent into browser hell. It turns out that the RSS program I was using, WizzRss, took FireFox into an alternate reality every time it searched for new entries for my subscribed feeds.

And while it looked like the only solution was to clear my browser cache when it happened, the real solution was to ditch the Wizz extension, and go with Sage, another RSS aggregator. So far so good.

 

posted by taming at 05:58 | link | comments |
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