• Forthcoming surge protectors designed for cable management — finally!
• Interfacelift has some really cool backgrounds, especially for folks with big or wide screens.
• Frustrated with the rigid online interface for making a flickr badge? Make your own!
• Lullaby covers of cool rock music — it’s strangely tempting to just buy them all…
• Beam on up for Star Trek motivational posters!
• Or make your own motivational posters from stuff you find on flickr.
• Lists of links you find online? You’re on notice!

*shudder*

• The “News Hour” birthday party
• An apartment converted to a “Star Trek” set
• The Neverending Story van

Thanks, Internet! I feel a lot better now.

First off, how about 101 versions of “Stairway to Heaven”? And if your ears aren’t bleeding too much from that, let’s chase that down with the best 50 video game ending songs.

While we’re on the subject of “top-N” lists, check out the top 10 strangest Lego creations; Han Solo frozen in carbonite looks pretty badass to me. (Now where could I put that?)

Thanks to some clever video editing, we can finally settle the debate about how it’d go down if the Enterprise tangled with the evil Galactic Empire. And even though Gnarls Barkley isn’t really my cup of tea, I have to say that Chewbacca on drums totally kicks ass.

My cool flickr-based link du jour is Spell with flickr, which lets you spell words using letter images found on flickr, just like what you see here. Nifty!

Some geek reading: Joel Spolsky on “Great Design” and Michal Zalewski on “Cross-Site Cooking” (potentially dangerous shortcomings of how cookies have been implemented by pretty much every browser).

While we’re on blogs, who would have ever thought Chewbacca needed his own blog? I guess you could consider it a scathing satire of “the blogosphere” (a term I really loathe), asserting that any random bloggish drivel is about the same as Chewy grunting and growling unintelligibly (and you probably wouldn’t be too wrong). It’s really, really daft, but it makes me giggle. What a Wookiee!

Artie attempts to scan your iTunes library, find tracks that are missing album art, and fetch covers from Amazon for you to review and drop into iTunes if they are what you’re looking for. As my iTunes library–currently closing in on the 45 GB mark–continues to grow, this seems like an utterly brilliant solution that will save me much time, hassle, and pain… Too bad it doesn’t seem to like my increasingly ungainly iTunes Library.xml file. Mostly it seems to time out trying to upload or process the data. Your mileage may vary–let me know if you have success!

Which leads me to the obligatory Mac geek section… I have a new favorite browser: Shiira, a nifty treat from Japan that so far seems lighter and faster than Safari and Firefox, and which sports some wicked visuals (I particularly enjoy the page forward/back that peels the webpage away like a piece of paper). I also ran across a pretty good list of must-have Mac software.

Some amusement for the gamers among us: a library of video game endings for those of us (like me) who were too lame to ever finish most of their games, and, when you have eleven minutes to kill, perhaps this short film will help you conquer your “Fear of Girls”. (I’m glad to say I overcame that a long, long time ago!)

Finally, something to get us all ready for lovey-dovey season: SVU Valentine cards. Gosh. Um. Yeah. That’s not creepy or anything.

Next time, I promise some real content, even if it’s lame, or pictures of the cats doing stupid things.

Chunk Norris Facts will teach you all sorts of interesting things about Chuck Norris; for example, “the chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.” Not to be missed.

Learn all about sushi with the Sushi Eating HOWTO. (Kind of self-explanatory.)

Can’t get enough “Firefly?” I certainly can’t. Check out Escape Key’s “Mal’s Song”, an expanded version of the “Firefly” theme. It’s a bit filkier than my tastes usually run, but I’ve gotten it stuck in my head anyway. Plus, if you didn’t fill your belly with sushi (see above), you probably have room for a tasty Fruity Oaty Bar!

When you’re done watching the Fruity Oaty Bar video (and putting the MP3 on a loop for a few hours; don’t be embarrassed, it’s perfectly normal), some of you might be amused by IBM’s Linux cartoons. While I was entertained, my inner shareholder wonders how much they paid for those.

Transformer di Roboter present “Stranger in Moscow”, a musical gem that uses the Macintosh startup chord as its bassline. No, seriously!

Retrievr lets you search Flickr by sketching. It’s wickedly mind-blowing!

I hooked up my new keyboard (a Christmas present) today to see how effective I’d be at typing without any labels on any of the keys. It turns out, with the exception of well-formed (aka tricky) passwords, I’m quite good with it. I also really like how different regions of the keyboard have different resistance to touch, so your hands get a good feel for what keys are what as they are being struck. The only thing that kind of pisses me off is that the Scroll Lock and Caps Lock lights don’t seem to light at all (the Caps Lock would probably be helpful, don’t you think?), and the Num Lock light seems to be flaking out–typing causes this LED to flash and sometimes go completely dark. I guess I wouldn’t particularly miss these if they went away, but they are kind of annoying and really detract from the overall quality of the keyboard. Alas, I think my search for a new “perfect keyboard” must press any key to continue… (Time to find someone who makes a USB equivalent of the old Apple Saratoga keyboard.)

Finally, Minifesto is a cute tool for making animated icons out of your favorite snippet of text, suitable for generating excellent customized LiveJournal icons.

…

After I managed to almost ruin a sweater last week, we finally got fed up with the door closer on the screen door in the garage and its wanton spree of greasy terror. You will be pleased to know, should you ever have the opportunity to avail yourself of this door, that we have purchased and installed a replacement closer, and you shall travel safely across that threshold without fear of horrible black marks on your back. Huzzah!

…

It’s now officially winter in the Pirnat household–tonight we prepared the first gigantic pot of chili, guaranteed to warm your spirits (as well as various other parts that come into contact with it). The fun part is that it’s a bit different every time; this batch has a deep, round, smoky heat that I find reminiscent of barbeque, but without the sweetness. Of course it needs a day or two to really mature correctly, so we’ll see how it develops.

…

Walk the Line… We intended to see the new Harry Potter but ended up at the Cash biopic instead when Potter was sold out. Walk the Line was perfectly serviceable, and a fine film, just nothing that really blew me away. It seemed to lack some of the cinematic expressiveness of films like Shine or Ray (the latter of which really blew me away). I was quite impressed with the vocal performances (who knew that Phoenix and Witherspoon could convince me that they were just lip-syncing to the originals?), but I was bothered by the story structure, which seemed to imply that Johnny Cash’s life was over, done, and of no more interest after June finally relents and agrees to marriage, which seemed like a bit of a cop-out to me. And I would have really liked his cover of “In My Life” over the end credits, but I can’t have everything.

…

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire… Entirely too many shows were sold out, so I it took a couple days before I got around to it, and at that point I found myself largely disappointed. Sure, it’s pretty, and it’s spooky and dark, and there are some really great bits… But it seems to have fallen back into the too-literal feel of the Chris Columbus Potter films. Also, it’s about time that Harry got a full three hours (or more) or got serialized into multiple parts ala Kill Bill, because the amount of discarded material is really starting to detract from the filmed stories. In this case, the film might as well have been …and the Triwizard Tournament, because just about everything else during the school year is just plain gone.

Miscellaneous other gripes… The confrontation with Voldemort was completely and totally devoid of tension or scariness; and Voldy really comes across as a poorly-costumed wuss in bad makeup; he’s just silly, and not even remotely terrifying. Cedric Diggory’s death? Nowhere as effective as the book, since we didn’t spend nearly enough time getting to know him. I never would have expected a girl named Cho Chang to have such a thick Scottish accent; I’m not sure what I had imagined, but it wasn’t her. There wasn’t nearly enough done to establish the budding sexual tension between Ron and Hermione. I didn’t remember the British retro-punk band at the Yule Ball, but it has been a few years since I read the book. Dumbledore’s performance seemed to be all loud and shouty, merely a phoned-in cariacture. Oh, and excuse me, but there was nowhere near enough Snape.

…

I’ve been ripping a huge pile of CD’s that have been building up on my desk for a couple of months, mostly stuff that I either haven’t listened to in forever, or that I never gave enough of a proper listen in the first place. It’s really a treat to rediscover a lot of this stuff! Some of the real winners have been:

• My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult – A Girl Doesn’t Get Killed by a Make-Believe Lover… ‘Cuz it’s Hot
• Juno Reactor – Bible of Dreams
• Warren Zevon – Mr. Bad Example
• Various Alan Parsons albums
• Vangelis – Oceanic

…

CSS geeks might enjoy learning how to create bar graphs with CSS. Now I just need stuff to graph!

…

And remember, kids, if you’re giving it up, you’re going steady with Hitler!

Should you find yourself in need of insomnia remedies (or perhaps causes if you, like me, like to read documentation late into the night), my presentation is available online, chock full of links to more things you can and probably should read if you are so motivated.

The short, short version: though not yet fully baked, TurboGears is maturing rapidly and (in my opinion) making some very good choices along the way; TG is already emerging as a strong contender in the Python “framework wars.” If you’re a Python geek, or a web application geek, it’s well worth your time to check it out.

[Updated @ 23:55]: Kevin Dangoor has just unleashed a new screencast tutorial on the world to show off some of the features in the forthcoming 0.9 version of TurboGears–behold TurboTunes!

• Gentoo Wiki: Software Suspend v2 HOWTO
• Craig’s Linux Notes: Hibernate

Most important for me with my ThinkPad’s clock drift issues was to make sure to set SaveClock yes. This means I don’t have to use rdate or ntp to fix the time after reawakening, which is problematic if there’s no Internet access handy at the time.

Since my ThinkPad doesn’t support ACPI, I whipped up a simple script to use APM to monitor my battery charge and automatically hibernate once the charge drops below a given threshold. On my laptop, I put it in /usr/local/bin/autohibernate.py and added it to my /etc/conf.d/local.start so that it automatically kicks off as soon as I boot up.

So, there you go, Dave! Hope that helps!

I have a huge amount of exciting but challenging stuff to deal with at work (which I can’t go into). I’m excited by its excitingness but a bit fearful of its scope and ambition.

On Monday, I’m supposed to give a presentation to our local Python group about TurboGears. I’ve barely had time to keep up with the traffic on the mailing list, let alone do more than the most trivial experiments with actual code. It doesn’t help that our last meeting had a really well executed presentation on a similar theme, so whether I want to admit it or not, the bar has been set.

I also need to squeeze in another presentation for work sometime in the next week on some unrelated topics. Hopefully that will come together quickly, but it’s One More Thing.

House stuff continues to be crazy; it seems like there’s always something new cropping up, or something old that becomes more complicated. I’m woefully behind on my rotating cleaning schedule, and every day that I think I am going to be getting back into my workout schedule proves me wrong. And I’d like to think I could find time for a simple trip to the car wash and some errands, maybe even cook up a real meal again. Hah! In my dreams.

I lost the past weekend to travel (for good cause, so I’m not upset about that or anything); tomorrow night is blocked off for MirrorMask (finally!); Saturday potentially takes a significant dent from the World Series of Wine; and there’s more travel/vacation in my very near future too.

In a word: overwhelmed! I suppose I should be Doing Stuff instead of whining about it on my blog, but I have to do something to balance out the lack of cat photos.

…

Unrelated to all that, I found this presentation on “identity 2.0″ to be pretty interesting, and shockingly relevant for those of us who build stuff for the web.

So, I figured I ought to watch at least a little of the show before the movie comes out, so that I’m not completely clueless among the throng of browncoats who will surely be in attendance. A coworker has been trying to remember for about three or four weeks to bring in her DVD’s. Finally, the waiting got to be too much, so I broke down and bought the damn thing.

And, I have to say, I was pretty much dead wrong about this show. It rocks! Snappy dialogue, great FX, good stories, a fascinating blend of cultures, top-notch acting… In a way, it’s a lot like Cowboy Bebop, only without the jazz music. And completely, utterly addicting–we’ve watched over half the series since about eight o’clock last night.

So — “Firefly” fans — I admit it! I was wrong! It’s a freaking great show!

I am also greatly amused and intrigued by Dance Dance Immolation, which seems to have raised the DDR bar to the point where it would actually be interesting to play.

…

In unrelated news, I’ve started looking at and playing with Aquarium, yet another of the diverse biosphere of Python web application frameworks. Seems kind of interesting, though I’ve not gotten deep enough into it yet to know if I will love it or hate it.

Hubble spies lord of the stellar rings (thanks to gieves for the link)

Das Keyboard, which I think I might want to try out.

Sloganizer (thanks to supercarrot for the link)

The Victorian Sex Cries Generator, stumbled upon through Neil Gaiman’s journal. Mildly NSFW (some “naughty language”).

Speaking of Neil, I ought to read We Can Get Them For You Wholesale at some point soon as the link is supposedly only good for this month or so.

I downloaded some nice Beethoven MP3’s from the BBC.

On Friday I ran across this very cool online version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide text adventure game, a highly excellent way to waste time at work.

Luckily, the teddy bear that she loaned me back in 1999 still fits nicely in my suitcase.

…

My connectedness to the rest of the world may vary wildly during the next few days, as I have no idea what the hookup will be at the hotel, and I expect that during the days I will be pretty much preoccupied with presentations. Hopefully everyone has a dandy ol’ week with or without me.

…

At least, I hope you have a better week than this fellow did.

Cheers!

Behold!

hidethewookiee