December 2007 Archives
Park Lane Place is a 33-acre transit-orientated, multi-use, urban-style development under construction near our house. It will include apartments, condominiums, a hotel and office space as well as an 80,000-square-foot Whole Foods Market and, apparently, an “upscale bowling alley”? Huh?
Splitsville is an upscale entertainment concept featuring twelve bowling lanes, six billiards tables, a full service dinner lounge and multiple bars.
The Main Room features stone hearth pizzas, fresh rolled sushi and signature appetizers like Tuna Steak tournedos, and Thai Shrip Quesadillas.
I used to be a Crest man. Several years ago, I decided to give Tom’s a try. The first flavor I picked out was Wintermint with Fluoride. It suggested on the box that you take a week to get used to it but I liked it right away. I’ve never been adventurous enough to try one of the more exotic flavors I’ve seen some people using like Fennel or Gingermint with Propolis & Myrrh. Some of the other minty flavors and varieties I’ve tried were fine but none as good as the Wintermint with Fluoride. I actually liked the Cinnamint a lot (tastes like Big Red gum) but it seems I’ve developed an allergy to a particular form of cinnamon flavoring also used in cinnamon candy.
I keep specifying “with Fluoride” because there are other Wintermint varieties such as the Whitening Gel but the flavor is completely different. The problem with all of this is that I have developed a dependency on this one very specific variety of toothpaste. Although most stores now carry some Tom’s products, the only place I have been able to find the Wintermint with Fluoride is Whole Foods. We don’t shop at Whole Foods very often anymore since there is not one convenient to us so we have a tendency to buy several tubes at once and then not notice when we are on the last one.
Amazon to the rescue! They only sell six tubes at a time and I seem to have gotten the last they had in stock but we should be set for a few months now.
I recently “obtained” a greatest hits album by The Kinks for Renee in order to cure an ear worm caused by the name of a friend’s cat (Lola). Anyway, there is another song on it that comes up in my random playlists called “Stop Your Sobbing”. You really have to listen to it to get the full creepy effect but the main lyric is:
Yes it’s time for you to stop all of your sobbing
There’s one thing that you gotta do
To make me still want you
Gotta stop sobbing now
Yeah, stop it, stop it
Stop crying or I won’t love you anymore? Yeah, I’m just not sure what to say about that but there is seriously something wrong there.
Just last week, I asked Google to add OpenID support to Blogger. Today, I was posting a comment on Renee’s blog and there is now an option to sign-in using OpenID! I never knew I had such power.
Update: Ok, apparently they’ve been testing it publicly since November but I’m sure I must have had something to do with it.
When Google launched GTalk, their instant messaging client, I was excited that they based it on an open protocol, XMPP (also known as Jabber). It seemed XMPP was finally gaining some traction and that perhaps having a heavy-weight behind it would help encourage the other networks (the big three: Yahoo, Microsoft & AOL?) to join in. When Google and AOL announced a partnership (with Google paying $1 Billion for a 5% Stake in AOL) the revolution seemed imminent (yes, I am prone to exaggeration (and parentheticals)). The press release even included this statement:
Enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met;
After two years, we finally see the fruit of this labor. Last week, it was announced that GMail users can now talk to AOL users using GMail’s bult-in chat client. Sounds great, right? Except, rather than convincing AOL to adopt an open protocol, Google is simply accessing the AIM network in the same way that multi-protocol clients such as Pidgin (GAIM), Trillian and others have been doing for years. IOW, you still have to have an AIM account. The only difference is that this one is officially sanctioned. Apparently, AOL’s “Open” AIM program doesn’t normally allow clients “that are multi-headed or interoperable with other IM networks”.
The thing that really irked me was this statement in the announcement:
From the beginning, Google has been committed to open standards and interoperation for instant messaging. So when our friends at AOL agreed to let Gmail users talk to users on their network, we jumped at the chance.
Except this is the complete opposite of “open standards” and barely even interoperation. So, why does any of this matter? Imagine if email still worked the way IM does now. If you wanted to send an email to a Hotmail user, you’d have to have an account on Hotmail. Want to email a Yahoo user? Time to sign up for another account. I’d like to say that this is a step in the right direction but I am not hopeful.
PS to Google: I wish you luck with Open Social but how about OpenID support for Blogger?
One of the things I like about commuting on public transportation is the time it gives you to get lost in your own thoughts. No radios, no tv, and (generally) no one trying to talk to you. Yesterday, for example, I came up with a solution to a difficult programming problem I was having at work that afternoon.
Today I was thinking about Christmas lights as Renee has been talking about doing some outdoor decorations this year with our new house. It happened to spark a childhood memory of the light displays Dad would do when we lived at the big house in Arlington. He would run long strings of lights from a single point on the roof down to the ground in a conical shape, creating a sort of wire-frame Christmas tree. I got excited about attempting something like this ourselves, although on a much smaller scale.
We went to Home Depot tonight to look at lights as well as pickup the list of stuff we have been collecting. Their selection was a little disappointing and I’m not sure how much I want to invest in this. We are thinking about starting small this year and buying a bunch of lights on sale after Christmas, for next year. We also got two bags of free lights via East Dallas Freecycle but most of them are indoor only so I’m not sure I can use them, not that they look any different than the outdoor rated lights.
On the train this morning, there were a couple of passengers discussing all the expansion construction that has been going on lately. One of them was trying to explain that new rail line “going down towards, uhm, over to, ah, you know, that place were everyone goes to buy marijuana?”
I had no idea that the DART Green Line expansion was all about helping people without cars get their weed.
