You may not have heard of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, so here, let me show you it.

And while you're at it, check out ( Joss Whedon's comment on same, posted to Whedonesque this morning. ) Or go visit Whedonesque yourself!

I finally did a huge Flickr upload (and upgraded to a Pro account), so for your viewing pleasure, here they are.

Travel pics, including NASIG and the move from Texas to Washington (and including a nice set recording my visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter studio/home.

Flowering things, including some photos of my parents' yard, which includes the itty bitty birdhouse my dad made.

I have a whole Tupperware full of the wrong curry.

I "made" (AKA "opened a jar and added stuff") a beautiful chickpea-tofu-apple curry that just doesn't taste right. It's okay, but it's not great, and I wanted it to be great. Now I have to eat it, because throwing it out would be wrong. I've been avoiding eating dinner -- see, it's already 8:23 PM -- just because I do not want to eat this curry, yet I'm growing hungrier by the minute. Didn't I read somewhere that "Hunger is the best sauce?" Maybe if I wait long enough...

I'll blog about the recent NASIG conference once I get around to Flickr'ing the pictures, but for now I will leave you with this. Consider the American Library Association's (ALA) pathological love of acronyms. You know, there's ALTA and there's LITA. What I want to know is, are members allowed to invent their own groups? Because mine would be the

Amazing
Library &
Information &
Technology
Alliance


[of doom!]

And you would all join, wouldn't you? Clearly, you can't put a price on the awesomeness of such a group as this, so naturally the annual dues would be ZERO DOLLARS. We'd have a website that was usable, a logo that was bearable, and a slogan that was catchy. I would appoint myself Immediate Past Grand-High Poohbah, thus allowing the responsibility of all and sundry to rest comfortably on better shoulders than mine.

Tee-hee!

[Ed. note: for those who don't know me IRL, my name is what's in bold. That's, er, the joke.]

The only good thing about this little decline into $4 Gasland is that my email inbox has miraculously NOT been flooded with "Boycott XYZ Gas Stations Next Week!" For some reason, even though the American gasoline consumer (e.g. 99.9% of us) is being pushed harder than hard, certain people to whom I am related have gotten the message that those little psuedo-boycotts aren't worth the bandwidth whose descriptions they occupy.

I'm luckily not feeling any real pain -- I've actually spent less this month on gas than I did in April -- but I am going to try and get my lazy rear out of bed earlier so that I can bike to work. It's so close that frankly, it's kind of embarrassing to drive when weather permits. Yes, I'm a wimp. :) I do feel for the folks who are feeling real pain. I know there's a lot of them out there. Probably some of you reading this, eh? All I can say is that I hope the prices peak soonish so that they can come back down naturally.

Today I had lunch with Mr. Seattle Turtle, and his little scooter -- which he rode from Seattle to Olympia!! -- gets a gazillion miles per gallon. Plus, it's really cute. Seattle scooter sales are apparently up 30% from this time last year, and I know that SUV sales generally are in the tank (so to speak). Public transit ridership is up, too. One can only hope that some of the changes that are taking place as we adapt to $4 gas will take root and survive the crunch. Long-term solutions to oil dependency demand structural change, and one silver lining of $4 gas is that it is coaxing Americans into making some of those changes now. Let's hope they stick.

( Bones and House fans, skip if you haven't made it to your TiVo yet. )

Eventually I'll find something to blog about that doesn't involve television or silly people in Kitsap County. Oh, wait, I have something... I learned from today's Washington Post that CK is ranked #297 out of 1358 high schools in the nation. And I learned about 2 weeks ago that one of my colleagues in the math dept also went to CK, and that we had some of the same teachers (Jay Jackson, J.D. Sweet). How cool is that? We (you know who you are) did luck out on the high school lottery, and I remember many of our teachers (and of course Mrs. Izzi, counselor extraordinaire) very, very fondly.

Silverdale, that bucolic place that so many of us called home and which is not known for its ribald sense of humor, offers this gem in today's paper:

Unsatisfying Sex Life Leads to Silverdale Woman's Meltdown

Best line: "During an argument with one of the deputies, the woman picked up the family's 20-pound dog and threw it at the deputy, who caught it, the report said."

I've become some kind of mediocre cliche. It's Friday night and am I out dancing? Drinking? Frolicking beneath the stars?

No.

I sit at home watching "Battlestar Galactica" and "Doctor Who."

Must. Meet. People.

(Ok, this is somewhat misleading, as I'm not really one for dancing or frolicking. But I certainly don't mind a nice drink every now and then.)

Everyone goes all squirrelly when the mercury hits the 70s!

I sure don't miss those South Texas summers, but I wouldn't complain if we had gotten tad more sunshine instead of snow this past spring.

An English professor, one Instructional Designer, and three librarians posed for a photo at the recent SMU graduation, and a passerby asked if they were students. Next time we should wear badges. :)

Yay: Tim's Cascade potato chips got a close-up!

Regular unleaded is going for $3.71 here in Olympia, and I've seen $4 premium on at least one sign in town. What's it like where you are?

Everyone should enjoy species parading through town!

Lots of lovely art to look at, great Thai food for lunch, a new Obie to meet, and SUPER weather.

I can feel myself falling head over heels for this town.

I love me some "Grey's Anatomy," and I'm great at suspending the disbelief. But c'mon. You're camping in the mountains, you get attacked by a bear, your innards are falling out, everyone's bleeding profusely, and you drive to downtown Seattle for medical treatment because there are no hospitals between the Cascades and DOWNTOWN SEATTLE?

PS And since when are cockroaches a problem in Western Washington? In 17 years, I'm pretty sure that I've never seen a single roach.

Lots of gleeful shouting took place. Here's an actual transcription of one such episode.

"I love Obama!"

"I love Hillary!"

"I love whiskey!"

I finally uploaded some new pictures to Flickr.

Some are amusing yet vaguely disturbing:


This was taken today, April 19, around 8:00 A.M.

Others are just plain cute:



And one is inspiring:


This was today's legislative caucus at a nearby high school -- spent 7 hours in the bleachers but it was fun!

Er, not really.

I finally got cable installed this morning. I've done quite nicely without cable since setting up shop here, but now that it's (a) baseball season and (b) BSG season, cable must be had. So the Obama-pin-wearing-middle-aged cable technician came this morning and voila! A zillion channels magically appeared in my idiot box. I even got a spiffy new remote just for the cable.

But.

Everything associated with the remote appeared to work fine: menus, On Demand, volume, etc. Except that when I tried pressing actual numbers (e.g. '5' and '9' for channel '59'), nothing happened. I made a weak stab at troubleshooting before deciding that I must be doing something wrong and calling Comcast. The cure? The remote's default setting for "Channel Entry Behavior" was on "No Auto Tune," and I had to change it to "Auto Tune." I'm sure that when they sat down to determine what language to use on their menus, someone must have raised some objection to such phrasing. What I would like to know what arguments the pro-'Channel Entry Behavior' and pro-'Auto Tune' marshaled in order to win. I suppose that 'Channel Entry Behavior" could have been worse, but who on earth is going to look at 'Auto Tune' and think, "Oh yes, my sweet, sweet 'Auto Tune,' now I shall finally be able to go directly to FOX News. Bliss!"

Folks, unless this was an anomaly and most technicians change this for their clients and mine just forgot (understandable, it being early Sunday morning), this is ridiculous. Has Comcast ever heard of usability, user friendliness, or the basic fact that what any red-blooded American is going to do when faced with a new remote is start punching in numbers? I know that lots of remote control behavior consists of browsing, but there are also many, many times when you have a known and desired channel that you want to go to directly. To disable that functionality from the start is just about one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

I don't normally think about library-related usability issues on Sunday mornings -- in fact, I am usually asleep at this time -- but clearly this one just landed in my lap with a thunk. It's actually a nice little vignette: reasonably bright user unable to perform basic task due to (a) ignorance of where to look and (b) incomprehensible jargon. If the lesson were any more obvious, I might cry.

P.S. If it had occurred to me to look in the setup menu, I might have had a shot at solving it myself. The thing is, who will look under "set up" in order to change channels by pressing numbers? It is so basic that I skipped setup entirely. Hmm, now I'm wondering how much sense that makes.

Of late we've been indulging in a bit of 80s Apple II game nostalgia at work. You know, Neon Green Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Hard Hat Mack, etc. However, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of one game, and it's driving me crazy. I will explain, and hopefully someone can tell me what it was.

It was a racing game that looked like it was made entirely of ASCII art. Seriously. There were two parallel lines on the screen and your car. That was it. You used the [I think] arrow keys to go forward and dart swiftly from side to side. The objects were to (a) move forward quickly and (b) not hit the sides. It was obscenely simple yet tons of fun (for a 4th grader).

Ring any bells with anyone? I would've been playing this 1988-1990.