anaphase
she told me that i was her favorite online friend. then she said that i was still her favorite after meeting me, and that she was happy about that. i am, too.
( Monday, January 31, 2000)

prosaic
this is quite beautiful. i don't visit enough.
( Monday, January 31, 2000)

liar liar (nyt)
"'Unfortunately, he could not stop lying,' Gary Brown, an assistant United States attorney, said."

the main problem was that he was lying to other people, and not confining it to himself.
( Saturday, January 29, 2000)

grownups enter dot com land (standard)
"Maybe older reporters resented the early financial success of the founders – at least four outlets felt it necessary to point out that Daniels is a relatively hoary 42 – but they and their sources pointed out an indisputable trend: Like it or not, the suits are back in charge."
( Friday, January 28, 2000)

philip morris' food brands
i only have two pm items in my house currently: kraft mac & cheese and gevalia coffee. the latter is old and for a coffee maker i no longer use.

tombstone pizza is one of theirs. sometimes irony is the best thing about corporations.
( Friday, January 28, 2000)

catalog as soft porn
everything good comes from scandanavia.
( Friday, January 28, 2000)

no longer a trade secret (standard)
"Lawyers for an entertainment industry trade group, which claims that a program breaking the content scrambling system for DVDs violates trade secrets, inadvertently made the program widely available as part of its request for a preliminary injunction against Web site operators who posted the software."
( Friday, January 28, 2000)

dot com bowl (nyt)
'"What if the commercial drives someone to a site and the experience is not what it should be?" Mr. Rickeman asked. "If you don't deliver, maybe you would have been better off spending the $3 million" on improving the computer user's experience at the site.'
( Friday, January 28, 2000)

options (standard)
"Last session, Boehner introduced a bill that would give companies increased tax incentives to issue stock options to employees. Under current law, a company can either claim a tax deduction on stock options it issues or employees receiving stock options can defer payment of taxes on options until selling shares. Boehner is proposing that both choices be available at the same time."

so according to this, if your company takes the tax deduction on shares it issued to you, you're left footing the bill. funny how that works.
( Thursday, January 27, 2000)

bk bitties
their new logo "marries the best of the old design with a new look that creates the new BURGER KING® Bun Halves and Crescent Logo. BURGER KING® modernized its logo by giving the impression of the burger bursting out from the buns and placing it on an angle to add motion, energy and direction. The introduction of a new color element, a blue crescent, surrounds the bun to add dimension."
( Wednesday, January 26, 2000)

mcdonald's trip planner
i stopped eating in fast food places when i was in graduate school. since then i've been to in-and-out once and taco bell twice (once to pick up food for a sick girlfriend). i am somewhat proud of this fact.
( Wednesday, January 26, 2000)

weasels! (standard)
"Michael, I'm blowing off all the goddamn meetings. It was over when some weasel asked me for my 'job description.' Companies are divided into weasels who have job descriptions, and people who have work to do."
( Monday, January 24, 2000)

william weld (nyt)
it's not hard to see why people in massachusetts loved this man. he's fucking hilarious. i'd move to have him as my governor.
( Monday, January 24, 2000)

fauxhemians (nyt)
"But that's the point, isn't it? Exclusivity and elegance aren't cool, but exclusivity dressed up in the artfully tattered guise of the downscale and democratic / that's the coolest thing of all."
( Monday, January 24, 2000)

silicon valley inequities in income rise (standard)
the numbers are eye-popping, especially that "the average wage in Silicon Valley was $53,700 last year" (compared to the national average of $33,700). [they don't say if this includes stock options and other forms of compensation beyond salary.]

but the real kicker comes at the end, after a discussion of how latinos are falling behind, when the policy director at a labor-backed research group in San Jose says, "The new economy turns out large numbers of low-end service sector jobs, and someone is going to end up doing them."

yeah, the hype about silicon valley is that it's a meritocracy. obviously this applies selectively.
( Monday, January 24, 2000)

instant ecommerce (nyt)
"Fashioned from a two-year-old firm called 911Gifts, which catered to anniversary forgetters and other crisis shoppers, RedEnvelope successfully remade itself in less than six months into a top-of-the-line Web retailer. RedEnvelope's sales for its 60-day dash to Christmas easily outstripped everything the company had made in the previous two years."
( Sunday, January 23, 2000)

that study about incompetence (nyt)
"On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well."

This is borne out by experience.
( Saturday, January 22, 2000)

a letter from the art director (word)
this is linked without comment.
( Friday, January 21, 2000)

nailgun faq (mcsweeney's)
"5. Should I decide to build a birdhouse, is true love possible?

"True love is only possible once you have decided to build a birdhouse. The best birdhouses use solid wood and not particle board or plywood although some of the composites coming on the market today do show promise and offer the possibility of skipping the tar-paper and water-proofing steps that often trip-up beginners. Love exists only where a refuge is offered for the fragile things of the universe. Also one must be willing to accept that this house, of love or of birds, may never be inhabited. One should also note the birds commonly in your area and make the birdhouse appropriate to those species. Birdcages, however, as noted in literature and popular entertainment, are not acceptable substitutes for birdhouses."
( Tuesday, January 18, 2000)

coupland.com
i have all of his books, many of them in hardcover. i am looking forward to seeing him read again. he has a good voice. maybe i can get him for my "this is not a poem" project. i should ask at his booksigning. hee hee.
( Saturday, January 15, 2000)

paris in nyc (nyt)
flat out, this just makes me sick for both new york and paris. and one of the brasseries was designed by diller/scofido. sigh.
( Wednesday, January 12, 2000)

pokemon gets tourettes
the k-mart store that the couple bought pokemon no.25 in says they're the only ones to call. the wal-mart in town replies simply to the (unverified) claim by saying, "That kind of inappropriate stuff isn't needed in a retail establishment."

we'll ignore what wal-mart's business practices do to locally-owned retail stores in smalltown america.
( Wednesday, January 12, 2000)

tasteful, yet discreet
where are the gucci floral patterned versions of these? or coach's competing product line?
( Monday, January 10, 2000)

bags!
rena pointed me to this. i love the grey felt dj bag. yummy.
( Monday, January 10, 2000)

gregory
mister alkaitis-carafelli positions himself a potential chronicler of (one of) the internet clique(s) with this piece. it sounds like it may strike close to home for a lot of people i know.

i have tended, thus far, to let the party come to me.
( Sunday, January 9, 2000)

anger management
"There's no way you can destroy energy; you can only divert it. But where to divert it? Well into the empty gulfs where happiness usually resides!"

more scamper. misty pointed me to this.
( Sunday, January 9, 2000)

interactive disengagement
"Until now the only remedies for people unable to otherwise cope in social forums involved psychotropic drugs, surgical modification of the frontal lobe, or surprise assassination."
( Sunday, January 9, 2000)

failure=success (nyt)
"Most F's are probably a result of a calculated bailing out. For an F is, in some respects, more desirable than a C. An F says you didn't care enough to do the work. A C suggests that you might actually be kind of dumb."

this in the context of kozmo's founders basically saying it's full-on success or total failure. nothing in between, no shades of gray.

just like a lot of things these days, apparently.
( Saturday, January 8, 2000)

everybody in headsets! (nyt)
"It was the whole thing of 'I can be a secret agent,' " said Megan Matthews, a spokeswoman for Nokia, the giant cell phone maker.
( Saturday, January 8, 2000)

whoa. pop-culture collision.
peter bagge does suck. wow.
( Friday, January 7, 2000)

orange cones
this is just nice. i love industrial graphics (see the latest SFhipster design) and this is a nice catalog of them.
( Friday, January 7, 2000)

saved by physics
good party tricks.
( Thursday, January 6, 2000)

dinc!
diane sent me a package of stuff a while back. i need to send her something nice in return.

i thought of this today, when i saw that melanie was writing with a dinc floaty pen. which just now made me think of evany's floaty pen museum storefront on bigstep.
( Monday, January 3, 2000)

pink is good
yes it is.
( Monday, January 3, 2000)

sanrio
rena, derek, chris and i went to the sanrio store on stockton yesterday after eating dim sum at yank sing. i bought an orange hello kitty tigth lunch box (which wouldn't hold any of my lunches, but might hold some office supplies), keroppi playing cards, and a camoflage badtz maru coin purse.

the thing that bugs me about sanrio is the fact that their products are so unbelievably poorly made. it would be amazing if they manufactured nice things and then put the characters on them. like a cute tiffany & co.
( Monday, January 3, 2000)

the third millenium (nyt)
steve martin writing his new yorker-style column for the times. amusing.
( Monday, January 3, 2000)

mmmmmmmmarc newson
i have his dish drainer, in orange plastic. it looks like a flying saucer landed on my kitchen counter. these things are just lovely. and that show car that he did for ford that was in wallpaper*. wow.
( Saturday, January 1, 2000)

must have. must have. must have.
too funny. it makes me think of "man bites dog" and that silly song the film crew and serial killer sing together in the bar scene.

i really want this. buy it for me and you'll get something nice in return. promise.
( Saturday, January 1, 2000)

mike
the other art director at work does this.

i gave him the tagline "a bigger hand flips a bigger bird."
( Saturday, January 1, 2000)