Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Too Full to Sleep
December 16, 2006, 6:23 am
Christmas Stuff
Just came back from Mike’s company dinner at King Street Trio. Event started at 8:30 and we stayed until midnight. Attending holiday celebrations with a small company is certainly different. We basically got three tables of about 8 people, and had a 3 course set meal. I had shrimp bisque, pork loins, and this “night and day” mousse-cake thing. The soup was good, the pork was a bit dry and heavy, so had trouble going down. The dessert was alright. And King Street Trio’s one of the better restaurants in the area. Either I’m too picky, or the standards of the restaurants here are just dropping. Or maybe I’ve been too disillusioned from all these Winterlicious/Summerlicious events.
Anyways, I find attending dinners with total strangers is more interesting than attending dinners with my coworkers. I find that I socialize more with people I don’t know because it’s just easier, that people are more open to talking to you. Whereas when I am with coworkers, they either just talk amongst their own group of friends, or we just don’t have anything in common to talk about. I mean, if there were, I would think we would socialize more when at work. Or maybe I’m just a social recluse at work, as there’s not much motivation to just hang out and chat with other people.
So it’s a week or two till Christmas. I’ll be working the last three days of the year, on the 27th, 28th and 29th. In previous years, my company encouraged people to take that week off by automatically deducting the thee days from our vacation days. If you don’t want to take the days off, you have to manually go and request these days back. I think people complained, and so they no longer did this this year. And of course, only a handful of people who really had plans took them off. It seems like most people are really passive about it all. If the system automatically deduct the days, they will take the days off, otherwise they won’t go out of their way to request them.
I will be taking the first week of Jan off though. Going to Tremblant to do some snowboarding. Hopefully the snow will be good, and they won’t go on strike again.
Mac Stuff
So the latest Mac thing going around this week is MacHeist, which is basically offering a shareware software package for $49, of which 25% of the total will be donated to charity. They have the goal of raising $100k, which they met some time this evening. There was a bit of controversy about the whole idea, because it leaked out that they offered the independent developers of the products featured in the bundle a fixed rate for their participation, instead of a percentage of the sales. So even though 25% of the money will go to charity, the MacHeist group stand to make a lot more money than the developers themselves. However, a couple of the “victimized” developers did come forward to say that they personally didn’t care that the group would make a larger profit, $5000 or $8000 flat fee is still more than what they will normally get from regular customers anyways, so the extra marketing is great. The users also don’t care too much, as $49 is quite a good deal for some pretty cool software.
I think the idea is pretty ingenious, as the reasonable price does encourage people to pay for software who normally won’t. (ahem, like me) The part about the fixed profit was a bit of a shock though, as I figured the developers would be getting a percentage of the $49, and after the success of this bundle, I think the next time, they will have to move to a more fair payment system.
One of the apps in the bundle I really wanted to get is the Delicious Library. It’s basically an app for categorizing all your music, books, movies, games, etc. It’s integrated with Amazon, so it shows photos of all your titles, and it also help you keep track of borrowed goods. The coolest part is that I can use my iSight camera to scan in the barcodes of the products, and they will be added automatically to my library.
I think the best thing about these apps is how they integrate with all the other apps that comes with MacOS. The Delicious Library, for instance, has integration with my Address Book so I can email titles to any of my friends, or add them as “borrowers”. It also connects with the Calendar to remind me when borrowed items are “due”. It’s the sort of thing I like most about Google as well, that all my contacts are integrated with every service, from Calendar, Spreadsheet, and Notebook. It’s so convenient, and just makes *sense*.
Photos Stuff
I recently decided I wanted to print out a couple of personalized calendars. I tried Best Buy and Snapfish. Best Buy had a recent promotion for 20% off their calendars, which I saw in their flyer. I suppose that’s what set me off. In terms of print quality, the two places are very similar. The Snapfish software is a lot better and lot more versatile, you can have multiple photos with multiple layouts and orientations. The Best Buy one only allow a single landscape photo for each month. I don’t know if the extra options of Snapfish is worth the $25 (after shipping, with some discount codes), compared to $16.99 (after 20% off, reg $19.99) from Best Buy. I suppose $20 is a bit pricey for a calendar but these are printed on card stock, and most importantly, they are YOUR photos. Though just printing out regular photos, and just gluing them onto calendar grid printouts might achieve the same effect.
I think the Best Buy ImageLab thing is pretty new though, I don’t know how different they are from how Futureshop does it. However, they are really disorganized. The first calendar I ordered, I had it shipped to the local Best Buy for pickup. My package included someone else’s calendar. My second order, half the photos in the calendar were not mine! Like they printed out a calendar with half my photos, and half of someone else’s. Talk about invasion of privacy! That prolly means that the other people got half of MY photos in their calendar. Good thing I used only scenic photos. Best Buy did reprint my order, and gave me a $5 coupon for my troubles. I think I’ll give them some time to work out their processes before ordering anything else from them. Good thing I won’t need a new calendar until next year.
Ok, I think I’m ready for bed now. It’s late, but I’m still so full!
Oh and before I forget:
China Photoset (#1)
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