Where’s the peanut butter?!

Music
• If I Should Fall from Grace - The Shane MacGowan Story
• Paul Westerberg - Come Feel Me Tremble (DVD)
• Paul Westerberg - Come Feel Me Tremble (CD)
• Dead Man Shake
• The Clash: Self Titled or Give em Enough Rope
• almost anything by The Faces or The Small Faces, but maybe try: There Are But Four Small Faces, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, Long Player, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink…To a Blind Horse

books
• Google Hacks
• Amazon Hacks

Expensive gadgets
• iRiver iHP-120

Excellent! Zippy archives are
available online. A little href="http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html">wget and the following
sprintf formats and now I’ve got something to add to my collection of
comics! The recent href="http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=12-Apr-03&Category_Code=a2003&Product_Count=10">Subtle
Political Analysis might be a good introduction to Zippy for those who
don’t “get” it.

• Sundays: “http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/sundays/images/%02s%02s%02s.gif”, , ,
• 95-end95:”http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/%02d/images/ZI%02d%02d%02d.gif”, , , ,
• 96-99: “http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/%02d/images/ZIT%01d%02d%02d.gif”, , $Y, ,
• 2003.01.06-today: “http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/%04d/images/%02d%02d%02d.gif”, , , ,
• 2000-2003.1.4:”http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/%04d/images/ZIT%01d%02d%02d.gif”, , $Y, ,

I’d already had Calvin
from 85-90 (and the books) so this is a welcome addition. Yow! Maybe I
should have asked for my Neutron Bomb in PAISLEY–

If there were any question whether my wife is the coolest ever, the href="http://www.iriveramerica.com/estore/ihp-120.htm">iRiver iHP-120
and collection of all the href="http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?P=amg&opt1=1&sql=replacements">Replacements’
cd’s I opened as early Christmas presents should put it to rest.

The Kill-A-Watt energy meter

Sears Craftsman LaserTrac Level.

I went to DC last weekend for the first time since href="http://www.finnegan.com/lawyers/index.cfm?id=1205">my sister moved
out there about 4 years ago. Has it really been that long? Wow, it’s about
time. My mom, oldest brother, and his oldest son were also out over that
weekend. Some of the highlights:

• The Corcoran has a great collection
  of American Impressionism and was showing an exhibit on the href="http://www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/Exhib_current.asp?Exhib_ID=69">Quilts
  of Gees Bend
• that
  creepy chair that’s been on Yahoo’s most forwarded pictures
• Dinner at the Kennedy Center
  before my mom and sister go to href="http://www.dc-opera.org/opera/lacenerentola.htm">La Cenerentola,
  we’re in the middle of all the tuxedos and my nephew Jack spills some Sprite on
  the crotch of his sweatpants and decides it’s time to go walk around the crowd My poor brother escorts.
• A guy on the mall is
  selling political buttons, including “OCCUPATION IS LIBERATION : BUSH/ORWELL
  2004″

Well we went to Manzanita over Memorial Day and had a very nice time. I’ve
put up href="http://purl.org/net/pjn/slideshows/Manzanita%202003/">pictures
from the trip as well as made a href="http://purl.org/net/pjn/slideshows/Manzanita%202003/Manzanita150kbps.wmv">~6MB
movie of kite flying and xbox playing with href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/moviemaker/downloads/moviemaker2.asp">Windows
Movie Maker 2 which is astonishingly easy to use. Ang and Greg organize
this each year and book href="http://www.ribboninvestmentfirm.com/captainshideaway.html">The
Captain’s Hideaway. After the costs are split up it’s a great deal.

We learned a fun new game from Alicia, maybe it’s called “the song game”?
The best games tend to survive on content rather than fancy names. Anyway,
teams split up, some word or motif is identified (”cars” or “summer”) and
then the teams have to come up with a song involving that topic and sing it.
It goes until somebody gives up or I suppose can’t handle the singing from
somebody who’s overly enthusiastic about the game. We kept trying to come
up with the transition from the opening stanza “You don’t have to front on
me dear” to the part where Easy-E starts talking about his “automobile” (in
the N.W.A. classic of the same name) but otherwise our Ang, Jenny, Tanya,
Tom and I played a pretty good game. Nobody violated the explicit rule
about leaving fecal matter on the floor as far as I know, so hopefully we’ll
get to go back next year - yay!

This weekend we’re travelling out of town again to head to Tanya’s
maid-of-honor’s wedding to a rock
star. It ought to be a bunch of fun and it will be nice to get away
for a couple days. Pictures ought to follow.

whee!

Last night we went to a great production of href="http://www.seattlerep.org/SeasonPlays03/ShowRJ.html">Romeo &
Juliet at the Seattle Rep. Afterwards we stopped at the arcade in the href="http://www.funforest.com/">Fun Forest and while I was trying to
win Tanya a stuffed blue M&M (or just a little blue disc shaped thing) from
a skill crane she wanted a gumball. She was especially lucky though and got
one with “FF” written on it. It looked kind of gross and I decided we had to
be winners of something. We went to the cashier’s desk and they said we
could have ANYTHING from the prize shelves that we wanted! Woo-hoo! Tanya is
now the happy parent of a big black stuffed hippo! And I contributed $0.75
to the skill crane coffer.

We went to Whistler for the last time this season last weekend and met our
friends Ben and Leslie who left the fief for href="http://www.google.com/">greener pastures about a year ago. It’s
interesting to talk with people who work on ads since I usually agree with href="http://www.bio.umass.edu/micro/faculty/reiner.html">one of my
professors from UMass who said
advertising and marketing should be illegal. Google does a surprisingly good
job of it though and I think it’s an evolution in advertising that I hope other
channels will start to adopt. Namely, the ads are subtle but unmistakable,
highly relevant, and generate close to no waste. I think this addresses what I
think are the chief problems with most advertising - it’s obnoxious (flash
animations that fly across the screen), manipulating (ads that make you think
you’re clicking something else), completely unrelated (think random banner
cycling or spam), or wasteful (printing + shipping + mailing + delivering ==
waste).

The DMA will send you a brochure
extolling the virtues of direct marketing basically along the lines I just drew
up. Unfortunately, their idea and the conventional idea of targeted marketing
means sending you a huge Pottery Barn catalog. I hope as long as we’ve got
marketing that it can all try to be as smart as Google.