February 2006

Whoa. I don’t know how I haven’t seen this yet. Google lets you target specific sections of your page as more or less relevant to AdSense. This should be required reading for all bloggers and — hell — should be part of the default WP install …

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?

A package arrived at my apartment today. It was a box of (late) Christmas presents from my little sister. (She’s not known for promptness.) Each item is fabulous and is listed here in order of fabulousness:

1. an egg-laying rubber chicken – one of the most amazing gifts I’ve ever received
2. Danger Mouse Seasons 1 & 2 DVD — The World’s Smallest Secret Agent
3. Adventure Joe Bender — just plain cool
4. Nose Pencil Sharpener — extra cool because I’ve been complaining for months that there are no pencil sharpeners in my office
5. a copy of You’ve Got It Made, Snoopy, by Charles Schulz, 1974 — I love Peanuts.
6. an assortment of Rocky & Bullwinkle stickers
7. a Bert Pez dispenser — I really have no idea why my sister sends me a Pez dispenser for every possible holiday, but she always finds interesting ones.
8. a wee and tiny pack of Bicycle playing cards — very handy!

Want to do something really cool today? Sponsor an elephant!

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, founded in 1995, is the nation’s largest natural habitat refuge developed specifically for endangered African and Asian elephants. It operates on 2,700 acres in Hohenwald, Tennessee - 85 miles southwest of Nashville.

The Elephant Sanctuary exists for two reasons:

• To provide a haven for old, sick or needy elephants in a setting of green pastures, old-growth forests, spring-fed ponds and a heated barn for cold winter nights.
• To provide education about the crisis facing these social, sensitive, passionately intense, playful, complex, exceedingly intelligent and endangered creatures.

For quite some time now I’ve been wanting to be able to create “new!” and “updated!” type images for use at work and here on my site. I wanted something like you’d expect to see on a box of Tide or cereal, y’know? The splash-graphic. The “new and improved!” image.
I finally found the answer. If you want to make nifty 3D(-ish) “badges” like this one, look no further than the excellent tutorials at Bartelme Design: Part 1 and Part 2.

Today I finally finished Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, which has been sitting on my reading list for well over a year now. It’s not so much a “book” as it is a huge collection of quotes and stories from cast members, producers, writers, directors, etc. It could have been subtitled “All About Lorne Michaels” to be honest with you; it seemed like every other quote was somebody talking about him. It was quite fun to read, though. I’m a big fan of the show and have been for as long as I can remember.

I have never been able to forget one sketch. It was the one where Kevin Nealon was a reporter covering the “All Drug Olympics” and the weight-lifter’s arms ripped out of his sockets. I don’t think I had ever laughed so hard in my life. I picked up the phone and called one of my friends to ask him if he’d just seen it, and he had. Everyone was talking about that skit at school on Monday, too. For some reason that memory is lodged in my mind and I don’t think I’ll ever lose it.

So I went to the doctor’s today. I have what is probably the twentieth sinus infection I’ve gotten since I moved to LA 5+ years ago. This one is really killing me, especially since I thought that I had gotten over it last week. I am on Round Two of antibiotics. Blech.

The doc took six x-rays of my head, which was pretty cool. It’s rare that I get to see my inner workings. I barely remember the last time I was x-rayed; I was in my early teens I think. I remember thinking that it was awesome to get to see your own bones. This time I was wondering about whether it was safe to bombard your brain with radiation. Didn’t M. Curie die of radiation poisoning?

It’s way cool to see an x-ray of your own skull. I have — and I quote — “abnormally large sinuses”. Just the top ones, mind you. The lower ones, under my cheeks, are about average. But the ones sort of in the forehead, over the eyes? He said they were just really huge compared to most people’s. I asked him if that was something good or something bad. Like, could I brag about it at work? He said, “No, it’s just interesting.”

I love Please Take Me Home from blink-182’s “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket“. It’s a great song with one glaring problem: For some ridiculous reason they decided to pull a Nirvana on it and extend the track length of this 3:03 song to 6:06. So when I am listening to my iPod in shuffle mode (which is just about the only way I ever listen to iPod or iTunes), there’s three minutes and three seconds of dead air. Annoying. Very annoying.

I’m a computer geek. I really am. I am an ultra-nerd of the highest order. But I loathe graphics-editing, video-editing, and audio-editing. I don’t know why. I just do. Could I figure it out? Yes. Of course. I know there are programs that I could use to manually strip dead space from the ends of songs. Hell, I could probably use a hex editor and just delete the bytes from the actual mp3 file. But that’s annoying, too.

It just so happens that Apple was thinking, I can only assume, of me and my ilk when their coders sat down to develop iTunes.

Open iTunes. Browse your way to Please Take Me Home. Right-click it. Select “Get Info”. Go to the “Options” tab. Put a check in the “Stop Time” checkbox. Change the “Stop Time” value to 3:03. Done.

Brilliant.

Check out these Law & Order: SVU Valentines … excellent …