l-dopa

You know what’s even cooler than a razor with 5 (5!) blades?

I bet you don’t.

Guess.

No. Guess again. That wasn’t cool at all.

Yes!

(design by Blake Luttrell)

~jeff

While on a recent day trip to Keene, NH, my girlfriend and I stopped off at a random pizza place. During the wait for our pizza slices we stumbled upon an stray left-behind issue of “The Pawprint”, the high school newspaper of the Monadnock Regional High School. But I don’t actually believe it was simply “random chance” that caused me to find “The Pawprint”.

I believe it was, instead, divine intervention. Because now I get to tell you about it.

Listen; I know I may try to trick you into reading some weird stuff now and then — and I do apologize for that — but seriously, you really need to check out “The Pawprint“. It’s adorable. My girlfriend and I tore through the random issue we found with delight. Reading these issues take me back to being in high school, but instead of making me barrel-vomit in nail scraping, white knuckle terror, instead I get a soft, warm, fuzzy feeling. That’s high praise.

And! in a forward-thinking move by someone at the MRHS staff, every issue is available via unrestricted, searchable PDF*. Check it out.

~jeff

* Listen up, New Yorker.

(thanks to www.6v6gt.com)

~jeff

I have a lot of crappy CDs. Millennium Music in South Carolina has an intriguing offer; they offer to trade you an iPod for a bunch of crappy CDs. I’ve contacted them to see if the 60 GB iPod they offer is the previous generation or the current generation; if it’s the current “video” 60 GB iPod, I might actually consider taking them up on this. Sure, at that rate, they’re only offering $2.28 per CD, but as I mentioned before: I have a lot of crappy CDs.

Update: Turn It Up in Northampton will give $4 per CD; I think I’m gonna try them, as I suspect they’d be more receptive to my obscure atonal jazz CDs anyhow.

~jeff

This is the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. And I wish I knew who to credit for it.

Update: The song is by Lemon Demon, and I still can’t track down who did the animation.

Update II: The animation was by AltF4.

Run this script to find some gorgeous nature photos that are stashed away on your Mac’s hard drive:

Find Nature Patterns (requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher)

…part of the little-known “Nature Patterns” screen saver that silently snuck in to your hard drive via Mac OS X 10.4, they’re stunningly beautiful, high resolution JPEGs; and any or all of them would work really nicely as weblog header graphics, background elements, or just additional desktop backgrounds. Pretty!

~jeff

Found on Coke’s web site, it’s apparently a mix of coca-cola and coffee. Listen: I’ve tried before (in college, usually around 3:45 AM) to create this mix with surprisingly disappointing results, so it will be interesting to try Coke’s official stab at it. In this household, we’re always looking for ever more efficient caffeine delivery mechanisms, and yes, you guessed it — we’re talking now about installing high-pressure “coffee hoses” mounted around the house.

~jeff

I’ve implemented this lovely CSS drop shadow technique on ldopa.net; the best thing is once it’s set up at the CSS level, all you have to do is add a class=”shadow” into your IMG SRC tag.

(This picture is of my mom and my mom’s dog Snowball, taken at Thanksgiving 2005.)

~jeff

I like Christmas shopping at Target. You know why? No Christmas music. In fact, no music at all. The absence of music and voiceovers blaring belies a certain respect for their customers that most other retailers don’t have. It’s really nice that you don’t have to suffer through listening to Diana Ross warble through “Holly Jolly Christmas” or hear Mark Knopfler wheeze through some sappy ten-year-old Dire Straits song while you frown and try to shop. Also, no annoying voiceovers like “WELCOME TARGET SHOPPERS DO YOU NEED TO FIND THAT SPECIAL GIFT FOR THAT SPECIAL SOMEONE WELL WHY NOT TRY A TARGET GASOLINE RATION CARD”… I’m looking at you, “Stop & Shop”.

~jeff

I’m a pretty serious geek. I build electronics (details about the electification of the Whackinstick are coming soon). I head straight for the Preferences menu item as soon as I get a new piece of software and immediately begin a critique of its user interface. I’ve been known to play video games until my eyes have dried up, falled out, a technology for eyeball-replacement has been invented, and my eyeballs have been replaced.

So it should come as no surprise to readers of ldopa.net that I love me some role-playing games.

I’m fussy, though. I can’t stand video games that have time limits, I can’t stand nonstandard electronic components (that is, most of them), and bad software design burns me up. Likewise, I can’t stand bullshit role-playing games.

So, like so many before me, I decided to fix the problem. With the assistance of the extraordinary creative community of The Forge, I released Under the Bed at GenCon Indy, last August. It’s a weird little game for weird roleplayers. It’s been selling much better than anticipated, but it’s a game about child endangerment that uses handfuls of 8-sided dice. Not a mainstream product, even in the fringe world of RPGs.

I’ve got another project that I’m working on, too. Shock: Social Science Fiction is a game about building a world and fiction therein to talk about societal-level issues. It has none of the crap I hate about so many RPGs, and is built around composing worlds and characters as metaphor, just like science fiction has always done.

It will be released in full form in March, but you can download playtest version 0.1.0 and play it with your friends. It’s substantially different from a lot of mainstream games like a lot of stuff gestated on The Forge, so there’s a lot of playtesting to be done.

I’ll announce 0.2.0 when it’s ready, probably in a few weeks.

I love driving, and I’ve always driven interesting cars. I started with an ‘83 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce, then a ‘62 Ford Ranchero, and now an ‘05 Corolla XRS. For all-around, the Corolla wins hands down.

I live about 50 miles from my job, so I spend about 2 hours each day in my car commuting on the freeway. The Corolla has been a fantastic car to do it in. It is comfortable, gets about 33 mpg, and has more than enough oomph to merge with the breakneck speeds of Highway 280, without looking like a homemade super-hero car.

The performance aspect is no small part of why I wanted this car. The Alfa was a slow-ish sports car with good handling, and the Ranchero was terrifying to drive on a freeway, even in the slow-lane, and it turned like a bowl of wet pasta (but looked good doing it). The XRS comes in at 170 horsepower / 2670 pounds, and handles quite well for a car in its class. I can take it out into the hills on a Saturday and tear around awfully fast for a laugh, and have no complaints about perfromance. It has a 6-speed transmission, which means I have to shift a bit more often, but I can always find a strong spot in the power band to really jump the car forward.

The interior fit and finish gets decent marks. The seatcovers are very comfortable, though the console lacks a bit. It is far better than the Scion line, but feels a bit weak. I guess that is to be expected in a lower-end Toyota.

There is no question that I’m picky about what I drive, and the XRS has been a fantastic car.

For my money, the nicest hike in Western Massachusetts is Crag Mountain. You can get there by taking route 63 from Amherst north until you get to Northfield; when you get to the junction of highways 10 and 63, go 0.3 miles until you come to a right turn onto Maple Street. Go 3.1 miles on Maple Street and you’ll come to a turnout on the right. Hike a leisurely 1.7 miles up the white blazed Metacomet-Monadock Trail and you’ll come to this view:

Panoramic Shot, JPEG, 1.4 MB

(This is my first stab at making a panoramic shot via Photoshop by blending together a bunch of smaller photos; you can totally see the seams, but I think you get the idea of what a totally killer view it is off Crag Mountain!)

~jeff