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youtubearchive for March of 2006
Perils of online job-hunting
So I saw this ad in the Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wl/jobs/JS_JobSearchDetail?jobid=21261966
Sounds amazing, right? The top of the stated pay range is what I earn now. InDesign CS2 is my bread and butter. Books are what I want to make. And it’s in Fairfax. At route 50 and Waples Mill. Basically a block from Lisa’s. Great! Almost too good to be true!
The name of the company is there, so I go to the site. And I find this.
http://www.xulonpress.com/faith-statement.htm
UH, NO.
I find that I’m disgusted by the idea of degrading *my* values by applying for a job at a place like that. But am I doubling back on my standards by saying so? When the job and the location and the pay are perfect, aren’t I being closed-minded to abandon the idea because of the company’s religious affiliation?
What gets me is that the books they publish don’t look so bad. Some of them are about the Bible as literature. Many are personal reflections. I don’t think it would particularly bother me to work on books like that, especially for a vanity publisher like this. I fully understand that the author’s opinion doesn’t have to be mine, and that these authors are paying for a service.
My worries about this irony are put mostly to rest by the fact that they use the phrase “we at Xulon Press” to express their statement of faith. That says to me that they speak for all their employees, and it would be wrong in two ways to consider working there because I don’t share that belief: both deceiving them and compromising myself.
So I’m not applying for it. But I can’t think of ANYTHING else a company could possibly put on their website that would make me make this decision. I would gladly work for a gay publishing house, but I won’t work for a Christian one. Doesn’t that make me a bigot too?
New license plate
I have to register my car on Saturday (yes, Mom, I should’ve done it by now, hush) and I’m on the DMV website designing a new personalized plate.
I’m leaning towards the Shenandoah National Park plate, as it is cute and matches my car. Plus it has flowers in a circle on the left, so I can count that as the letter O.
Deborah and I have been playing with the plate-maker on the site, bemoaning the fact that nothing seems right. I tried REO, RIGAMI, VARY, BELISK, XYGEN, BSCENE …
until I hit on this idea. I would’ve bought this plate in a minute, but MFG is taken.
I tried LDSMBL, SUSNNA, PQRST, BGYN, CLOCK, MNIVOR …
MNIVOR led to Deborah’s best idea yet.
Then I started looking through the dictionary. BSCURE, BSESSED, CELOT, CCAM (also tempting), NMTPIA, HIOAN, NESELF, PNSSME …
But I think I’m gonna go with this one.
It works on several levels.
Wayne, this one’s for you.
Crayola colors
I’m filling out a form to get some free crayons, and one of the questions is this awesome one:
What is your favorite Crayola® color?
And they list the choices. There are a hundred and twenty of them. As follows (don’t you love View Source?).
| Almond Antique Brass Apricot Aquamarine Asparagus Atomic Tangerine Banana Mania Beaver Bittersweet Black Blue Blue Bell Blue Green Blue Violet Blush Brick Red Brown Burnt Orange Burnt Sienna Cadet Blue Canary Caribbean Green Carnation Pink Cerise Cerulean Chestnut Copper Cornflower Cotton Candy Dandelion Denim Desert Sand Eggplant Electric Lime Fern Forest Green Fuchsia Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown Gold Goldenrod |
Granny Smith Apple Gray Green Green Yellow Hot Magenta Inch Worm Indigo Jazzberry Jam Jungle Green Laser Lemon Lavender Macaroni And Cheese Magenta Mahogany Manatee Mango Tango Maroon Mauvelous Melon Midnight Blue Mountain Meadow Navy Blue Neon Carrot Olive Green Orange Orchid Outer Space Outrageous Orange Pacific Blue Peach Periwinkle Piggy Pink Pine Green Pink Flamingo Pink Sherbet Plum Purple Heart Purple Mountain Majesty Purple Pizzazz Radical Red |
Raw Sienna Razzle Dazzle Rose Razzmatazz Red Red Orange Red Violet Robin Egg Blue Royal Purple Salmon Scarlet Screamin Green Sea Green Sepia Shadow Shamrock Shocking Pink Silver Sky Blue Spring Green Sunglow Sunset Orange Tan Tickle Me Pink Timberwolf Tropical Rain Forest Tumbleweed Turquoise Blue Unmellow Yellow Violet (purple) Violet Red Vivid Tangerine Vivid Violet White Wild Blue Yonder Wild Strawberry Wild Watermelon Wisteria Yellow Yellow Green Yellow Orange |
I can’t decide which surprises me more: that the 64-color box contains only half the available colors, or that one of them is called Beaver.
Some news is good news
Sometimes (read: usually) when I’m reading the Post headlines in my RSS reader I just get so depressed that I click “mark all as read” and move on to lighter fare.
Headline after headline about cops shooting unarmed teenagers, cops who shot unarmed teenagers not facing charges of any kind, baseball stadiums not being built, housing prices going up and up and up, municipal building limits being relaxed or broken to allow more building of larger houses, environmental protection laws being relaxed or broken to allow more building of larger oil wells, war criminals dying in prison, terrorists being allowed to storm out of their trials, good people dying, bad people being promoted, elected officials breaking promises . . .
But sometimes, very rarely, when I click “refresh,” things that don’t actually make me physically sick might come up. Two in a row that make me smile, sometimes.
A PP, a GIGIGT, and a WIEBT
Pet peeve:
People who cannot internalize the difference between a click and a double-click. God forbid you ever need them to right-click on something. I even just got a professional newsletter email telling me to double-click on a link. I think I’ll just click once, if you don’t mind. You know, the way we’ve all been clicking on web links for a decade now.
GIGIT (God, I’m glad I got that) (pronounced “gidget”):
A canvas shelf unit that’s hanging from the rod in my closet. It’s amazing how perfect this thing is for bra storage. Drawers never were, and over the last several months I had taken to storing bras on my doorknob. It also holds sweaters (of course), jeans, sweatshirts, and flannel pants, and it’s doing a bang-up job.
WIEBT (Why’d I ever buy that?) (pronounced “wibbet”):
The Blair Witch Project on VHS.
Tilt-shift photography
Lately in the blogosphere there’s been quite a fad for tilt-shift photography, a technique of making a photo of real objects look like a photo of tiny scale models. The effect, especially of trees and cars, looks like an overhead shot of a model railroad setup.
This is a tutorial for the method, and this is a collection of tilt-shift photos on Flickr.
I just went through my photos looking for something I could easily adapt to this technique. I have a couple taken of the beach at Waikiki from our (high-floor) room at the Marriott, and I have a couple old ones of the inside of the Toronto SkyDome, from the bar in the attached Renaissance hotel, where I stayed during the 2003 Worldcon, and I have a few of Boston from above, taken from the window of the hotel I stayed at during the 2004 Worldcon.
But none of them are as good for this as a picture I didn’t even take. Jeff took this in Germany. And we’re gonna make it look like a toy.
It’s kinda cool. Let’s do a Hawaii one.
Ha! Check out the trees on the island on the left. That’s groovy.
Washington Post Sunday crossword, January 15 (contains answers)
Title: Happy 300th
Theme entries: trivia about Benjamin Franklin
Example:
111A, Late 1770s appointment for 23 Across: Minister to France
Things I learned, with web links so you can learn them too:
43A, Plain of Jars land: LAOS (what a neat place)
44A, Humidor items: CLAROS
81A, Bug of interest to Reed: AEDES (so that’s why Walter Reed is called that!)
85A, Miss Pym’s creator: TEY
5D, Golden Fleece source: RAM
24D, Obadiah preceder: AMOS
40D, Delia’s sister: NORA (Oh, duh, Ephron. Never mind.)
41D, Stock phrase: AT PAR
47D, Eastwood ex: LOCKE
53D, Leave stranded: ENISLE
59D, View from Arles: RHONE
102D, Seth begat him: ENOS
Overall:
I changed 5 squares and looked up 12 things.
Washington Post Sunday crossword, January 1 (contains answers)
Title: Not All There
Theme entries: phrases with the letters ALL changed to OWL.
Example:
86A, Result of a barnyard collision?: fowl flat on one’s face
Things I learned, with web links so you can learn them too:
5A, ___ Julius Caesar: GAIUS (of course, this is the first Gaius I thought of)
59A, Tours’ river: LOIRE
77A, Parabolic helper: SAMARITAN
82A, “I Could Write ___” (“Pal Joey” song): A BOOK
11D, Landon title role: ANNA
25D, Food and drink: CHEER
36D, Clinton cabinet member: PENA
75D, WWI troop gp.: AEF
87D, Maine town: ORONO
89D, Plumed garb: SHAKO
I don’t usually do this, but check this out. What a great hat!
99D, Joe of “Hill Street Blues”: SPANO
100D, Uncle Tom’s wife: CHLOE (weirdly, the Wikipedia entry for the book doesn’t name her.)
111D, Ab ___: OVO (I knew the story of Leda and the swan, but I’m not sure I knew that’s where Helen came from.)
Overall:
I changed 4 squares and looked up 13 things.
This is the first puzzle posted under the new, faster system. I hope my huge audience for crossword puzzle analysis doesn’t feel slighted.
Silly meme
I’m only posting this because I want to know what my mother’s score is.
Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 45% General American English |
| 30% Yankee |
| 15% Dixie |
| 10% Upper Midwestern |
| 0% Midwestern |