DEBlog

Turkeys in the Family

Mel's Turkey
Originally uploaded by dhamel.

When Rebecca was in second grade, there was a family turkey project that we did. You had a turkey to decorate and everybody was supposed to work on decorating it. We did a good job, and the turkey's been hanging in our kitchen ever since (below).

Now Mel's in second grade, and was given the same turkey to decorate for a family project. This time we've outdone ourselves. Click through to the Flickr photo for notes on some of the areas.

Sunday Salon: Annoyance

I'm seriously disgusted with Yahoo Pipes. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't--you'll have noticed that it's not working today--even when I've made no changes. I don't understand it well enough to effectively troubleshoot. I'm trying to figure out if there's some other means of aggregating the Sunday Salon feeds. It's not as easy as you'd think: there are almost 500 RSS feeds we want aggregated, filtered, sorted, with dates appended to the titles, and spat out. I've wasted hours on this today and so far have not come up with anything like a solution.

Crossword: Colonization

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
23 "O say can you see" or "Thru the perilous fight"?
25 Resident of a military installation?
40 Tropical fruit seller?
61 Place to get drunk in the kitchen?
67 What overuse of a credit card might result in?
84 Gentleman's intransigent reply?
105 Where nitpickers walk on a street?
108 Online beauty contest?

THE ANSWERS
23 NAGURZ YVAR
25 ONFR GRANAG
40 CYNAGNVA QRNYRE
61 CNAGEL ONE
67 TVNAG OVYY
84 ZNQNZ V'Z NQNZNAG
105 CRQNAG KVAT
108 JRO CNTRNAG


The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: November 7

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

• Debra -- 1:29 [Karen's going to grind me into the dust on this one. It should have been much faster.]
• Clare -- 2:30
• Karen 0:37
• Maxine -- 3:48
• Susan -- 2:09

How to participate:

1. Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)


2. Post your time in the comments to this post.


3. The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
   This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
   because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
   to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<br/><a<br/>href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html"><img<br/>src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&"<br/>/></a><br/>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Test of Twitterfeed.

Blah

McNair, Cici: Detectives Don't Wear Seat Belts

Center Street © 2009, 368 pages

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

In her book Detectives Don't Wear Seat Belts, Cici McNair introduces readers to her very unusual life. As the title suggests, she's a private detective (see Green Star Investigations), and stories about her experiences as a detective form the backbone of her memoir: her initial attempts to break into the business, stake-outs with guys with thick accents and foul mouths, investigations into counterfeit property or accusations of rape or lunchtime shenanigans, wearing a wire in the diamond district, in seedy warehouses, in a massage parlor. The author walks us through her role in a great many cases. It's fascinating, real-life stuff, the nitty gritty of detection, from paperwork to phone calls to the innumerable times the author has had to fake her way through a meeting to get information. She assumes an identity, swallows the information she'll need to pass herself off, and walks into a dangerous situation to lie her way through it and get her mark to say something incriminating on tape.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

links for 2009-11-05

• ELEMENTARY EPIDEMIC: 11 Uncovered Videos Show School Children Performing Praises to Obama

links for 2009-11-04

• TwitterPeek gets reviewed, slated: sluggish & poorly featured - SlashGear
  Sounds like there are some real negatives to the TwitterPeek experience, which is unfortunate. (I'm still annoyed by the people who think that everyone these days uses a smart phone and there's no market for a dedicated Twitter device.) Not being able to search and the truncation of the tweets are perhaps deal killers, if the price weren't.

Testing Blogo

For the last half hour or so I've been testing out Blogo, a desktop blogging editor for Mac OS X. I use ScribeFire these days in Firefox, and I love its simplicity, but it leaves a lot to be desired: you can't post-date blog posts, for example. Or rather, you can post-date them, and the date of the post (in TypePad, at least) will reflect the date you've given the post, but it won't delay the publication.

There's a lot to like about Blogo. It's simple. It has an attractive interface. I particularly like that you can break off into the extended area of a post simply by adding three hash tags to your post. But it doesn't do everything I need a blog editor to do, alas. To wit (unless I'm missing something):

• There's no way to add Technorati tags to a post.
  
• You can post-date a post but, as with ScribeFire, it will still post in TypePad right away.
  
• There's no way to access TypePad's excerpt field.
  
• There's no way to create stationery (except making a draft post and copying it, I suppose, but that's a little inconvenient).

You can post to Twitter from Blogo, too, which is neat. But while the posting panel is attractive, the window for reading Twitter posts on Blogo is pretty ugly.

Crossword: Compound Fractures

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
22 Eyewear providing hindsight?
29 Peanut-loving ghost?
32 Intermittent revolutionary?
43 Rare mushroom?
56 Give up smuggled goods?
71 High-school athletic star at a casino?
81 Noble Les Paul?
99 "Maybe" music?
101 Dreams that don't die?
108 Bug that never takes a ride?

DOWN
21 Like online medical advice for kids?
44 Vegetable that gives you an emotional release?

THE ANSWERS
ACROSS
22 ERGEBFCRPGNPYRF
29 RYRCUNAGBZ
32 FCBENQVPNY
43 CFLPURQRYVPNPL
56 PBAGENONAQBA
71 ERQYRGGREZNA
81 THVGNEVFGBPENG
99 CREUNCFBQL
101 SBERIREVRF
108 PRAGVCRQRFGEVNA

DOWN
21 JVXVCRQVNGEVP
44 PNGUNEGVPUBXR


The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: October 31

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

• Debra -- 0:55
• Karen -- 0:29
• Susan -- 2:33

How to participate:

1. Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
2. Post your time in the comments to this post.
3. The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
   This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
   because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
   to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<br/><a<br/>href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html"><img<br/>src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&"<br/>/></a><br/>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Maugham, W. Somerset: The Hero

Norilana Books © 2008 [orig. pub. 1901], 248 pages

Note: Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

In The Hero, which was originally published in 1901, Somerset Maugham tells the story of Captain James Parsons, who comes home to Little Primpton a wounded hero. He's been away for five years, first at Sandhurst and then in India and South Africa. During that time he has not seen his parents--his "people," as Maugham consistently refers to them--nor his fiancé, Mary Clibborn, to whom he was engaged shortly before he left home. Upon his return he finds, unhappily, that everything has changed. Or rather, he has: his experiences have broadened his mind, and he now finds the dogmatism and puritanical attitudes of his parents and their circle unbearably oppressive. His parents adore him and yet their love is conditional upon his adherence to the rigid code by which their lives are circumscribed. Mary is no better. Ostensibly an angel of mercy, whose good deeds toward the ill of Little Primpton are outdone only by the kindnesses she heaps on James and his parents, she is in fact an odious creature, small-minded and convinced of her own rightness and out to change James into the sort of husband she should like. It doesn't help that during his time away James experienced real passion, falling helplessly in love with the wife of a friend, a woman who made a habit of collecting and toying with admirers. His burning infatuation for this woman made James realize that his relationship with Mary, which he'd taken as love, had never been anything more than a comfortable friendship.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

The TwitterPeek: a dedicated Twitter device

Back in August I actually Twittered about this:

.@Duddy A dedicated Twitter device would be neat. I wonder how cheap it could be w/cell. service. Palm-sized, with (on-screen?) keyboard.

I even Twittered the idea to @biz: "The more I think abt it, the more I think a dedicated Twitter device wd be a grt idea. Maybe way to monetize Twitter."

My point is that I was unduly pleased to learn yesterday that such a device is now about to be marketed. Behold, the TwitterPeek (see, for example, Wired's post). It also means that I'm the ideal market for the device. Why is the TwitterPeek exciting? It's always-on Tweeting from anywhere in the U.S. over a wireless network. That means you're always on, always able to communicate. Yes, you can do this on your smart phone if you've got one. But if you don't--if, like me, you have an iPod Touch that's dependent on wifi service--then this fills in a big gap. If I had one of these I would never go anywhere without it.

The problem is that, despite my excitement over lust for the TwitterPeek, despite that it's exactly what I seemingly wished into existence, I couldn't stomach paying as much for it as they're asking. You can pre-order the TweetPeek from Amazon as follows:

TwitterPeek Mobile with six months free service: $99.95 plus $7.95 per month after six months

TwitterPeek Mobile with lifetime service: $199.95

Now, I have no idea what this should cost from the manufacturer's perspective. It may well need to be this expensive for them to turn a profit. All I know is that from the perspective of a consumer, this is too much. I, as the self-proclaimed ideal customer, balk at spending $200 on a Twitter-only device that I don't really need. I propose the following prices:

Gadget alone: $49.99 plus $4.99 per month

Gadget plus a year of service: $99.99

Gadget plus lifetime service: $129.99

Cheaper would be better, of course. And the cheaper they are, the more they'll fly off the shelves, particularly with Christmas coming up. But the above are the prices I could stand paying for the device.

Crossword: Wishful Thinking

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
23 Start of a wish by 112-Across on 9/21/09
28 Wish, part 2
43 Wish, part 3
57 Wish, part 4
71 Wish, part 5
80 Wish, part 6
94 Magazine for which 112-Across writes
112 NBC football analyst/reporter and longtime writer
19 End of the wish

THE ANSWERS
23 ZL TBNY VA YVSR VF
28 GB OR N PYHR
43 VA GUR ARJ LBEX GVZRF
57 PEBFFJBEQ CHMMYR
71 V'IR
80 ARIRE GBYQ NALBAR
94 FCBEGF VYYHFGENGRQ
112 CRGRE XVAT
19 GUNG OHG VG'F GEHR


The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Announcing the newest site in my fleet: TwitObits!

I was thinking about Soupy Sales' death yesterday, having just Twittered a quote about it, when I got one of those flashes that in the past have resulted in web sites like BAFAB or TwitterLit or in an actual publication. Historically these things seem to be combinations of ideas that have been rolling around in my head and suddenly coalesce, leaving me obsessed with whatever the idea I've come up with is and unable to rest until I start working on it. The same can be said of this one. Celebrity death was in the air, meanwhile, not only because of Soupy, but because I've long had a...healthy competition with my husband to see who can be the first in the house to announce celebrity deaths.

At any rate, I can now announce the launch of TwitObits.com, the newest site in my fleet.

My description from the site:

What is TwitObits?

A database of death in 140 characters or less.When someone famous dies I cull the Twitter stream for interesting, poignant, or otherwise memorable commentary.

TwitObits. Checking the pulse of Twitter when someone famous loses theirs.

I've begun, fittingly enough, with Soupy Sales. If you click over to TwitObits you'll see some tweets already posted. Enjoy, and please spread the word!

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: October 24

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

• Debra -- 0:39
• Maxine -- 0:50
• Susan -- 1:24
• Karen -- 0:31

How to participate:

1. Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
2. Post your time in the comments to this post.
3. The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
   This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
   because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
   to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<br/><a<br/>href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html"><img<br/>src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&"<br/>/></a><br/>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

links for 2009-10-23

• FitBit Technical Review
  Here's a very detailed review of the FitBit. Really looking forward to getting mine.

Myers, Tamar: The Witch Doctor's Wife

Avon © 2009, 307 pages

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

Tamar Myers' The Witch Doctor's Wife is set in the Belgian Congo in 1958. There are increasing demands at this time for Congolese independence from Belgian rule. But before they are compelled to cede power to the natives, the Belgians mean to extract as much profit as possible from the country's diamond mines. The town of Belle Vue, situated near a waterfall in the Kasai River, is largely under the authority of the mining consortium that owns the mineral rights to much of the surrounding area. The social divide between the white colonialists and the black natives is enormous, almost unbridgeable, and most of the Belgians in the country are racist and dictatorial in their relationships with the natives.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Crossword: Ahead of the Curve

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
1 "Before the Mirror"
23 With 29-Across, holder of the works named in the nine italicized clues, celebrating its 50th anniversary on 10/21/09
29 See 23-Across
68 "Green Violinist"
97 "Composition 8"
103 "Peasant With Hoe"
120 Controversial form that 43-Down used for 23-/29-Across

DOWN
14 "Seated Woman, Wiping Her Left Side"
15 Like 43-Down's design for 23-/29-Across
34 "Tableau 2"
38 With 43-Down, what 23-/29-Across was
43 See 38-Down
51 "Mandolin and Guitar"
101 "The Antipope"
112 "Head and Shell"

THE ANSWERS

ACROSS
1 ZNARG
23 GUR FBYBZBA E THTTRAURVZ
29 ZHFRHZ
68 PUNTNYY
97 XNAQVAFXL
103 FRHENG
120 FCVENY FUNCR

DOWN
14 QRTNF
15 ABAGENQVGVBANY
34 ZBAQEVNA
38 SVANY ZNWBE JBEX BS
43 SENAX YYBLQ JEVTUG
51 CVPNFFB
101 REAFG
112 NEC

The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Melikan, Rose: The Counterfeit Guest

Touchstone © 2009, 432 pages

Mary Finch, orphaned teacher at a girls' school turned wealthy heiress, was introduced in Rose Melikan's 2008 novel The Blackstone Key (see my review). In that outing, Mary found out about her late uncle's surprising bequest, fell in with smugglers, and met the dashing artillery expert Captain Robert Holland. The Blackstone Key was delightful, a slow but still compelling pseudo-Victorian novel. Having finished it, I was eager to read the second installment in Melikan's proposed three-book series.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »