A Whole Lotta Nothing

My first job: food service

I lasted for three days at a string of small restaurants, hating them all, until I found my calling in the form of a bike shop.

Completed Installation

Completed Installation, originally uploaded by Matthew Williams Design.

heh. Bush St. in San Francisco gets a makeover

Matt, what's your favorite desktop twitter client?

My #1 recommendation on desktop twitter clients is.....NONE.

Seriously, don't use one, ever.

It's the most insanely massive pointless timesuck in the history of procrastination and timewasters. Imagine if you had a permanent desktop application that featured Google Reader scrolling up every new post on every blog you follow combined with every new link on delicious from people you trust and every photo added to flickr by your friends plus tons of instant messages sent to all, constantly streaming with no end in sight.

IT'S A TIMEWASTING FIRE HOSE OF INFORMATION.

Do what I do, which is every few hours if you're at a stopping point or bored or whatever, go to twitter.com in a browser. Scan through the missives from your friends, maybe page back a couple pages to catch up to the last time you checked. If you think of something you need to say, toss it up as a new message.

THEN CLOSE THE BROWSER TAB AND GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE AND WORK.

I speak from experience. I've tried half a dozen twitter clients but if you make a habit of coding, photoshoping, and/or/especially writing for a living it gets in the way much more than it serves as a creative reading or writing outlet.

It's like leaving a TV on in the same room while trying to write a novel. Just don't do it.

Bush Years summed up on twitter

Seeing how the inauguration is just around the bend, I thought maybe it'd be good to hear a bunch of short pithy summaries of the last eight years of Bush. I read this thing on Salon showing how the economy has slid under him and figured instead of me ranting for thousands of words on how things are worse than when he started, I might as well use twitter instead.

You can too, just tag your posts in twitter with #bushyears

Some favorites in just the first few minutes:

• "Didn't fuck an intern, but raped the Constitution" -- roomerholmes
• "The utter lethality of incuriosity" -- Vidiot
• "With an 'average guy' in charge, things are guaranteed to be below average." -- 75th
• "With the money flooding to abstinence-only education, the only thing you were allowed to tap was citizens' phones." -- torontonto
  

Help, help, help the police!

Years after I first saw this, it still cracks me up every time:

I thought about it today when I heard Lily Allen being played in a popular chain restaurant. As the lyrics drifted towards the frequent f-bombs they were magically replaced in a weird way that made me look this video up again.

Jizz in My Pants (nerd remix)

You've seen the original, now watch this one. Geeks may enjoy it more than the original:

I love that youtube makes this all possible, that two guys can make a funny parody and film it and upload it and no one in the NBC/SNL/LonelyIsland mix are copyright crazies that would pull it offline, and thousands more people can enjoy it. So great.

My new blog about cycling and stuff

I've started and abandoned a metric ton of blogs in my time, but my latest is one I'll be sticking to at least for the entire year of 2009 and likely beyond. My new blog is called Stronger, Fitter, Faster and it's about how I'm devoting a lot more time and energy into getting in shape, losing weight, and racing bikes.

Over the past year, half of this blog has turned to cycling related stuff but I felt like taking the next major step of having a cycling coach would mean I'd have a lot more to talk about and a lot more stuff that'd likely be boring to any non-cyclist, so I'm going to toss those kinds of things on the new blog.

This also means my internal flow chart for how an idea in my head ends up as a post on the web is even more complicated, with some stuff going to twitter, metafilter, this blog, the new cycling blog, or anything else I can post to. I should really draw up a visualization of this.

So yeah, cycling stuff will likely go over there from here on out, but I'll try to post more here in 2009 and not let twitter take every idea for a blog post away from me. No more of this "one post per month" crap.

New Oregon Laws for 2009 list anywhere?

My dad reminded me today that he enjoyed reading about the 700 new laws that went into effect in California today, so I set out to find an equivalent list for Oregon.

So far, after half a dozen Google searches I can only come up with the 6 laws listed here from yesterday's Oregonian. Quick summary: smoking ban in all bars and restaurants, bottle deposits, free electronics recycling, DMW checking immigration status, ATV safety for kids, and increased drug offender sentences.

Six new laws doesn't seem like much, is there a more complete list anywhere? Every other newspaper and TV site seems to be pointing to these same six laws as the sum total of legislative changes going into effect and that doesn't sound right to me.