Brainwaves of Sken

… but only thanks to large quantities of grasshoppers (the drink).

All sorts of people made it to Anne’s place, despite the crazy weather. Randy and Sheryl came with the most amazing sushi cupcakes, inspired by our LJ conversation. Seriously awesome.

Anneliese came in with a fun new shirt, and was in hilariously rare form. Comedy gold, as they say. She brought these cool cornbread muffins with sausages inside!

Amy, Alex, Keira and Nancy arrived from Lansingtown, with the requisite T-rexing and hugs.

Alex, The Jeef and Alyx represented Ann Arbor, along with Hope (after her shift).

Chuck and Erica bounced in early, and went off to swing dance (fantastically, I’m sure) – we talked weddings and roasts. :)

Sara Beth and Kevin came from the east side, with crazy stories and good times.

Brendan and Mike were here – Brendan was the blendmaster, serving up green goodness to the lot of us.

And of course, Lucy, Anne, Brian and myself kept things hoppin’. There were Apples to Apples and a blaxploitation B-movie card game, and conversation could. not. be. stopped!

My phone died last night, sadly, (sorry aiela!) or I’d have pictures up by now. Don’t forget to send me your photos, folks!

Lucy and I were way too wiped to drive home, so now we’re having breakfast at Anne’s!

Thanks for celebrating leap day with us, folks!

EDIT:

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If you miss Leap Day, you’ll miss this total hottie. That would be a shame.

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maybe I spoke too soon. 4 mp3s went, and the next 2 came back with this:

Command: Data…
Response: 550 SMTP connection refused

Strange.

Think maybe I hit some obscure file transfer size limit? I tried sending it from my work email as well, same error.

EDIT: Curious! I sent one of the mp3s that worked the first time, and it went through successfully. What could be different about these files?

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I’ve had my phone for six months and only NOW have I realized I can email ringtones to myself, quick as spit.

First step – sending my old ringtones to my phone. Next step (to be performed tonight) – make new ones! muhahaha… I wonder if I can find anything from the skenncon videos.

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” … makes great krushiki, which is a Polish crispy wings thing, with pastry. It’s great.”

Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever had that. I wonder if there’s a place that does that in ham-town.

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As a result of the burning of coal and oil, the driving of cars, and other human activities, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at a rate of about half a percent per year. …

The physical effects of carbon dioxide are seen in changes of rainfall, cloudiness, wind strength, and temperature, which are customarily lumped together in the misleading phrase “global warming.” This phrase is misleading because the warming caused by the greenhouse effect of increased carbon dioxide is not evenly distributed.

In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on the transport of heat by radiation is less important, because it is outweighed by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor. The effect of carbon dioxide is more important where the air is dry, and air is usually dry only where it is cold. The warming mainly occurs where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.

To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading, because the global average is only a fraction of a degree while the local warming at high latitudes is much larger.[20] – Freeman Dyson

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I must be having an avoidant day – repeated refreshing of my LJ and gmail are doing me no good.

Woot.com , so’s you know, is doing 2 gig SD cards for 6 bucks plus 5 bucks shipping, today only. Haven’t decided if I’ll take them up on it or not.

EDIT: At that price, I could see someone custom-building an SD array – wouldn’t that be cool?

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“The amount of music legally bought from online music stores was up — 29 million people bought music online last year, a 21% jump from 24 million in 2006. But that boost didn’t offset the drop in CD sales and the effects of people illegally downloading music. Last year, about 1 million consumers stopped buying CDs, according to NPD.

Going to a store and buying a CD is no longer a rite of passage for many teenagers. But illegally downloading a song might be. Last year, 48% of teenagers did not buy a single CD, compared with 38% in 2006. And illegally downloading music continued to grow among teenagers, the report said.

The average Internet user acquired 6% more music last year via legal downloads, CDs and illegal file-sharing, the report said. But they spent 10% less on music — $40 per user, compared with $44 a year before.

The report underlined a generational split. The increase in legal online sales was driven by people age 36 to 50, the report said, giving the music industry an opportunity to target these customers by tapping into its older catalogs.” – LA Times

This article presumes that basic numbers tell the entire story, without any skepticism for correlation. Are people purchasing entire albums online, or a la carte songs? Because while it may hurt the release of more experimental music, there are plenty of people who aren’t interested in spending money for songs they won’t listen to, and having the option not to spend 15 dollars on an entire album when you can just buy the 3 singles you want to hear certainly changes the way revenue is made in the music industry.

Perhaps this report (source not specified in the article) surveys students to find out how much they’re illegally downloading, but there’s no way to tell that it isn’t just another statistic produced by the RIAA that is as fallacious as their “lost sales” figures, which presume that every person who downloaded a song would have purchased that song, as if some 13 year old who downloads the entire Aerosmith collection on a lark could possibly afford to purchase all of the music he is downloading.

I guess my point is that I read articles like this that make declarations about youth trends without a way to trace these figures as being (however unintentially) marketing for the Recording Industry Association of America.

EDIT: I sent a similar comment to the author of this story, who replied with “wow, great points. do you want to post online?” Heh. She said the LA Times will turn on commenting in a few. I guess it really is a modern world.

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That belt that I was so excited about the other day has been nothing but trouble to acquire.

See, I ordered it through amazon (before I posted, being no fool), and the company it came through, backcountry, ended up emailing me with apologies and a discount coupon because, they said, amazon didn’t update fast enough to tell people it was out of stock.

Boo. Okay, try again, plenty to be found with froogle, right? Find a new place, O2. Order. Day passes. Pull emails from my spam box, call to change my delivery date. “Well, let me just check really quick here, we’ve been getting pretty low…” “… oh, I’m sorry, we’re out of stock on that, we only have the brown ones, someone made a mistake.” Cancel that one too.

Now I’m on number three, and I’m getting to that point where I’m ordering this belt out of sheer indomitable WILL.

That’s what happens when Gizmodo highlights a product that isn’t produced in incredible quantities, I suppose.

EDIT:

“In stock and shipping today. I personally pulled your order.

Best Regards,
Melanie Loveland
www.daddiesboardshop.com”

YES

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