i ran into
jim coudal

the other day and he let me touch and feel the product of his
latest endeavor, jewelboxing; as the website states, it is “…”coolest, most modern, best
engineered DVD/CD case, ever.”

it’s a little hard to convey via a picture, but they really are the
the smoothest cases you’ll lay your hands on. if you’re a little
rusty on your design skillz, they’ve got
templates

and a bevy of
example boxen

. to top it off you can get a peak behind the scenes with their
jewelboxing blog

.

so rather than just handing out
snowdeal schwag

yet again this holiday season, i think some custom photo cds might
make The Perfect Gift.

pathalizer

seems like a nifty little tool for visualizing the paths most users
take when browsing a website:

“More specifically, Pathalizer takes an apache
access.log and from this generates a list of hits, ordered first by
source address and then by timestamp. This list is then converted
to a list of graphs (where the nodes are web addresses and the
edges are transitions (‘mouseclicks’)), and all these graphs are
summarized into one big graph.”

[ via
morelikethis

]

i’m happy to report that scanning under panther is a painless affair. i just needed to reinstall the drivers for my CanoScan N650U, which i lost when my disk went south a few weeks ago. canon hasn’t updated their site and explicitely stated that the drivers work with 10.3.x, but everything seems normal.

now that i’m back in the scanning saddle, i have to commemorate the occasion by digging a few pictures out of the shoebox. of course, that means we have new dog pictures! the pictures of cadence were taken a few weeks before we ran the chicago marathon, which means she was just a few weeks shy of her first birthday.

and proving that i have at least a few non-dog pictures, here’s a shot i took of my niece ruby as she sat on the curb waiting to greet us at mile 18 of the chicago marathon. notice her very stylish “flying pig marathon” t-shirt that we made for her when she watched us run the flying pig marathon in the spring. it’s a little hard to tell, but she’s refueling with a bananna, just like her aunt and uncle.

in the middle of writing about

“what being the father of an autistic son taught me about being a
red sox fan (and vice versa)”

,
ned

articulates one of the great sublime truths:

“A good day is a good day. Let it be a good day. A good
day is not an instrument of torture designed to ratchet up the
agony of your ultimate and inevitable anguish. When you start to
fear good days, you have gone down a dangerous path. A good day can
lead to hope, and hope can later be extinguished, but a good day is
a good day, and you have to find a way to weave that into your
life.”

great. i noticed today that upgrading to
panther

has screwed up my ability to print to my

hp deskjet 895cse

.

at first my problems

looked pretty similar to those seen by others

, but after installing the newest panther update [ which purports
to fix printing-related problems amongst others ] and reinstalling
the

hp drivers

, now all i get is pages and pages of symbols and control
characters [ actually it looks like it might be trying to print postscript, even thought the printer isn’t poscript compatible ].

sigh. apparently a goodly number of people are having a wide range
of

printing problems

update: 11.14.03 o.k. a call to applecare fixed the problem. it seemed like they had me repeat what i was doing when it was broken, but this time it magically fixed the problem. i think the only difference was i closed all open programs before i reinstalled the drivers, which seems like a decidedly pee cee thing to have to do.

.

one of the following stories is in the
the onion

, and one of them isn’t. and yet they are eerily similar, right
down the photographs of the offending bloggers.

“mom finds out
about blog”

:

“”I don’t have one of those sites that’s a big tell-all
about one-night stands and wild parties,” Widmar said. “I mostly
write about the animation I like or little things that happen to me
and my friends. But there are definitely things in there that I
wouldn’t, well, write home to Mom about.””

“Student punished
for comments made in online journal”

:

“”The dean told me that what I’d written wasn’t school
appropriate,” said Juhl, who was Valley’s homecoming king this year
and also was president of its drama club. “He said it wasn’t
appropriate for a journal. I just feel like I’ve been violated,
like they’ve punished me for expressing my personal
opinion.””

can you spot the satire?

from the new-to-me-but-not-exactly-new
department.
localfeeds

, which lets you merge rss feeds by geography. it’s nice to see someone
taking advantage of the
geourl

data.

i bet it’d be fun throw in a little local calendar foo similar to
what’s going on at the
gothamist event
calendar

, which is “powered” by
upcoming

[ and
and movable
type

].