1000 pound butter sculpture of Vader and Yoda at the Tulsa State Fair

Each year at the Tulsa State Fair, an artist is commissioned to make a sculpture out of butter. In past years, cows, farmers, and baseball players were created out of hundreds of pounds of butter. This year, in celebration of Star Wars's final episode, TSF is featuring Darth Vader and Yoda, all dairy-like.

tulsa is a mere 90 miles from my hometown, and i for one am pretty sad to miss this! might call for a special trip back home. this totally beats the traditional butter-sculptured cow or milk-maid.

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Ebay bans other payment processors, only PayPal is allowed.

eBay has revised its policies to only allow one online payment service, PayPal. This comes after speculation that Google is preparing a payment service. So far the reaction among eBay users has been mixed.

we should have seen this coming. in case you didn't get a chance to flip through the "Ebay Aquisition of Skype" Powerpoint, here's a link: http://investor.ebay.com/downloads/050912ebay.pdf

gives a good idea about what was on their mind during the $2.6 billion acquisition. more info available on their web site.

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moblog: road trippin' dog

moblog: road trippin' dog
Originally uploaded by hlh-abg.

lola accompanied me to wyoming last week and we had a great trip. she loves the car, so the 9-hr days were just heaven. plus, she doesn't mind it when i sing at the top of my lungs.

moblog: weinermobile!

moblog: weinermobile!
Originally uploaded by hlh-abg.

we passed the weinermobile just outside of tahoe. this is the best shot i got, but i suppose it's fitting that it's a butt shot.

moblog: my foot

something stung/poked/punctured/bit me while i was out walking the dog today. not sure what it was, but it got me good! fortunately no further swelling or streaking, just a weird dime-size bruise.

mom thinks it was a hornet... i guess we'll never know.

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

(From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

1. Legibility Problems
2. Non-Standard Links
3. Flash
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
5. Bad Search
6. Browser Incompatibility
7. Cumbersome Forms
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

Santa has come early this year. Most of these are repeats; I guess it's safe to assume that the vast majority of web development is a wee bit stale (or according to Nielsen needs to get "back to basics")? I have to cop to a couple of these (fixed-width, anyone?), but we all know Nielsen's just a stickler for his rules.

A good read with some good links, nonetheless.

Google Launches Feed Reader

Audio/video integration... import from other services... integration with Gmail. looks slick, but we'll have to wait and see about adoption rates.

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Make Netvibes your new homepage

Netvibes.com is a customizable Web 2.0 homepage solution.

This service is free and gives you the user the ability:

* to create a personalized page with the content you like.
* to put together data feeds and services from web 2.0 applications with a very simple interface
* to access your page anytime and from any computer .

Very cool AJAX alternative to Google's Personalized homepage, Start.com and others. Be sure to check out their blog and wiki for more info.

Office 12 to have native PDF support

This is a big, and good forward-looking step for Office. Especially since it looks like .pdf files are here to stay.

Good news for PDF, bad news for Adobe? More and more open source software enables PDF creation, but with the big M$ taking them on, I wonder how long they can stay the market leader.

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tired feet

tired feet
Originally uploaded by quepol.

will & i went to yosemite this summer. we spent two days hiking around the rim and summitted half dome.

this is one of my favorite pix -- taken especially to freak out the mom and mom-in-law. love you!