davintosh

Another neat find from Neatorama; BECAUSE I SAID SO. A mom’s blog expressing the frustrations of child rearing (suppose that term was coined by the spankings that are applied when said children misbehave?)

The blog is very well written, and unlike a lot of blogs, is very unassuming and innocent in what is posted. Most blogs seem to be written to gain attention, because it’s the cool thing to do, to make money, (is my blog different? I hope so.)… I guess the word I’d use is unassuming, or maybe unpretentious. Dawn seems to write just to get things off her chest and was truly unprepared for all the attention she’s now getting. And the attention started when she put a baseball up for auction on eBay using the story behind how the baseball kicked off a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day for her.

The Ball That Started it All

I’m selling the baseball that started my wonderful first day of spring break. Do you want to know why I’m selling the baseball that started off my wonderful first day of spring break? Only because Ebay won’t let me sell my kids who were playing with the baseball that started my wonderful day. Is spring break over yet?! Here’s the whole story…

You’ve just got to read it and laugh, because if you’ve got kids, you’ve probably had a day like that before. At least one.

Just bumped into ShouldDoThis.com this morning (thanks to a link on Neatorama). Think of it as a suggestion box for everything. Some suggestions are serious, some not; some are helpful, some naughty… But most are fun to read.

3000 Faces – New York Times

Not sure how long this will be online, but it’s a great graphic showing stats on the casualties in the Iraq war, from March 16, 2003 to the present. Among the more interesting tidbits is the percentage of Air Force personnel lost in combat (1%). Good proof of what I’ve known for a long time; if you are going to volunteer for military service, the Air Force is the place to be.

Also of interest is the breakdown of casualties by race; 74% are caucasian, and 10% are black. Compare that to the breakdown of enlisted personnel by race, according to the DOD; 64% white, 20% black, 10% hispanic, and 6% other. Quite a disparity. Makes one wonder what could account for that.

There are thousands of addictive flash games out there. Lots of them remind me of the old classic arcade games, like Asteroids, PacMan, Galaga, etc… (if only I could have all the quarters back that I wasted on those games, with interest. I could probably retire!)

A couple of days ago, Deane posted about another one that’s particularly addictive, Jeu Chiant, or Irritating Game. It’s as simple and basic as a Flash game can get; takes hardly any time at all to load, and game play is as simple as moving your mouse back & forth. The difficulty in the game is the multiple goals. At the top of the game panel is a pong-style paddle with the ball that bounces between it and the walls & ceiling of the panel.

The twist is that below the paddle is a ramp with a ball on it, and the ramp tilts in the direction you move the paddle. The farther you move the paddle, the more the ramp tilts, and the faster the ball moves near to the edge. So the trick is to keep the ball bouncing up & down without making the ramp tilt too far.

Thus far my highest time is 43.something seconds. The ball starts going hellaciously fast after 30 seconds, so I don’t know if it’s possible to get much better than that. Something tells me that I’ll likely keep trying.

Oh, and just for the record, I realize that I blew my resolution to do a post-a-day. And it only took a day to do it. Sigh. But to justify my blunder, Deane also posted something relevant about that. Seems that a post a day is a bit too much for most bloggers. I don’t feel so bad after reading that.

The Human Marvels really doesn’t describe this site accurately; something more along the lines of Human Oddities would be closer to the mark. Basically a collection of stories about sideshow freaks and people born with bizarre physical deformities, how they dealt with being different, and how people treated them. Very interesting reading.

Neatorama.
Not much more to say than that; just a collection of neat stuff found on the Internet. Kinda like BoingBoing without the scuzz and left wing political rhetoric.

Here’s a panoramic photo of San Francisco in the wake of the great earthquake & fire of 1905. Click the link to see a high-resolution version of it (warning: very large file)

Words fail me.

Wow! I use Adobe Illustrator on a daily basis, and thought that there was some complexity to the files I work with, but this guy’s work leaves me speechless.

Like I said, wow!