tim merritt [dot] net

I went googling for something or other and one of the links was to this.

Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: McSweeney’s Recommends.

I regained my sense of time after several minutes, and had only scrolled about a third of the page. This is a huge list of podcasts, books, movies, foods, music, experiences, and ideas. You’ll recognize some of them, and think the list is smart, so you’ll keep scrolling to find more familiar items. In the meantime, you’ll find out about more things worth checking into. An honorable time sink.

Ask H&FJ: Four Ways to Mix Fonts

Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ's Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.

I see that the combos look really good together, but I do not understand the criteria they use for their choices. It’s a way of seeing and combining patterns that I don’t grasp yet. I may never. Too bad I haven’t studied design. Nonetheless, an interesting presentation (and advert for their fonts).

Via John Grober.

I am going to install an automatic rotating photo header slide show on both my blogs with jQuery. (At some point.)

I found this tutorial for doing dynamic jQuery headers yesterday, and this morning my aggregator came up with this more basic tutorial. I’ve been playing with jQuery slide shows – here’s a sample.

To make them I used Jalbum, a free Java-based web photo slide-show app for PC and Mac to make those. I started with Flash slide show templates, but Flash is hateful. The jQuery versions don’t require a browser plug-in and “degrade gracefully” if the user’s Java is not enabled. I used DrMikey’s Lightbox2 for the album linked above.

13 April Update: Came across this article and thread about Including jQuery in WordPress The Right Way.

Dave Pell: My Head is in the Cloud.

Before heading to the emergency room, I climbed into the back of the ambulance where I asked her if she wanted me to call her boyfriend. She said she did, but she didn’t know his telephone number. It was lost along with her now obliterated cell phone, and she had never committed the number to memory.

[...]

My phone tells me numbers, Facebook reminds me of birthdays, my nav system gives me directions, Google tells me how to spell, my bookmarks remind me of what I’ve read, my inbox tells me who I’m having a conversation with – my mind has been distributed across several devices and services.

My head is in the cloud.

Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster stream.

Via John Gruber.

I used to check this site regularly, but I’ve gotten away from paying as much attention to my iPhone photos.

There are 2,920 photography apps available in the App Store, and more are being added every day. Sorting through and testing each new release—every faux film filter, cropping, and tilt-shift tool—could amount to a full time job. Thankfully, Glyn Evans narrows it down for you on his site iPhoneography.com.

via An iPhoneographer’s six favorite apps.

I wanted to make note of this, though, to look at the recommended apps and think through the ones I’ve already invested in. The pic above wasn’t edited on my iPhone, but in Imagewell, which I also used to SFTP the image up here.

Three feast on Buford Highway for $42 | Omnivore Atlanta.

I am going to eat at this place, and very soon. Close to home, and looks fabulous.

Will made a big honking pot of chili from the ancestral Gadberry recipe. Oh my yes.

I’m showing yet another GSU Professor about blogging with WordPress. There are lots of educators building portfolios with WordPress. Cool!

The AJC reports that The Advocate ranks Atlanta as America’s gayest city! This makes me happy. There are several criteria apparently, and as a straight myself, I’m unaware of many of them—but it turns out Atlanta is gayer than San Francisco or New York! I’ll have to tell Tom Price, my Congressman. It should make him feel happy too.

Shorpy posts vintage photos, with good quality and detail. Make sure to click through and look closely at the full-sized image. This is wonderful. My maternal grandmother, whom I am so happy to say I came to know pretty well, was about 2 years old in 1902—though living in Paris at the time. Having known her gives me a less remote feeling of connection to historical scenes like this; a person I spoke with regularly, as an adult, was alive in this world of horses, hats, Victorian dresses, and nascent automobiles.

Via

Shrimp Pho.

Atlanta and North Georgia has just enough snow/slush on the roads, and falling temps, that many schools are closed tomorrow and other places opening late. It make sense, really – it means roads will be unpredictably icy in the morning and there’s little sand/salt/gravel to make things passable.

Which means I’m sleeping in a bit tomorrow morning, and going downtown to work a little later than usual. [happy sigh]

Have you played with one of these $100 network attached storage servers? I just found out about them today. They’re “Plug computers”—a solid-state wall-wart-sized low-power-drawing Linux server; attach a Gigabit Ethernet connection to your router and a USB drive for storage, and you’ve got file sharing and media streaming on your home LAN and over the web. There’s the TonidoPlug, the PogoPlug, and the announced-just-yesterday Marvell Plug computer. I don’t know if I’m too easily impressed, but if these things deliver what they promise, then our home network needs just got way cheaper.

30 Best Blogs of 2009 – Fimoculous.com. Like I’ll have the time to go and actually read these. I want to, but I have to get stuff done, too.

Creamy Chicken Liver Pâté

• 10 to 15 peppercorns
• 2 allspice berries
• 1 clove
• 4 coriander seeds
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 pound chicken livers
• Salt
• 1/3 cup cream
• 1 to 2 tablespoons brandy

• Bread or crackers for serving.

  1. In a spice grinder or clean coffee grinder, combine peppercorns, allspice, clove and coriander seeds; grind until fine and set aside.

  2. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a skillet over medium-high heat; when foam subsides, add onion and cook until softened, about 3 to 4 minutes. Add livers to pan and sprinkle with salt; cook livers on one side until they begin to brown, about 2 minutes, then flip them and cook the other side. Be sure to keep heat relatively high so that the outside of livers sears and inside stays pink.

  3. Put onion, livers and their buttery juices into a food processor or blender with remaining butter, the cream, spices and brandy. Purée mixture until it is smooth; taste and adjust seasoning.

  4. Put pâté in a terrine or bowl, smooth top and put in refrigerator for 2 to 3 hours or until fully set. Serve pâté with bread or crackers.

  Yield: 8 to 10 servings.

  Via the New York Times.

FunctionFlip – Software – Kevin Gessner. Gonna add this to my MacBook Pro.

Interview with DAVID SIMON in Vice Magazine. Thanks to JD for the link.