nosuch.org

Behold, my new shirts from Natalie Dee! I couldn’t decide so I ended up with two.

I couldn’t reduce the next one, for fear of concealing a key detail.

I am disappointed to report the writers’ strike induced “Big Brother: ‘Til Death Do You Part” is quite the let-down. Turns out there’s no actual executions.

After enduring two episodes watching this group of romper room rejects struggle vainly with things like fundamental cognition and sentence formation I was getting ready to kill myself. Luckily I realized I could just avert my eyes from the train wreck and turn it off.

CBS’ casting for Big Brother is consistently horrible. Here’s a free tip for them: a diversity of ages and experiences in the contestants makes for a better show. It also might be time to replace the moronic Julie Chen-bot with a human host that isn’t completely inept and wooden when she’s not glued to a teleprompter. That damn woman can’t even ask questions off of index cards without screwing it up.

Frequent visitors here know that I spend a bit of time on Xbox Live. Since I almost exclusively play with folks I know, making game time happen can be a bit like herding cats. If I’m not actually using the Xbox, the only way I can tell if I am missing out on something is to refresh my friends list on the xbox.com website. Since I use a Mac, I can’t use some of the Windows tools that integrate instant messaging with an Xbox Live friends list. The closest thing on the Mac side is the very flaky and unstable Xbox Live Friends.

I did manage to find a nice dashboard widget that allows me to see which friends are on. The imaginatively named Xbox Live Friends List Widget lets me see what’s sort of gaming action I could join with just one key press. The widget isn’t linked to a friends list, which is why it works well. Instead of logging in to the Xbox.com web site (and deal with the crappy Microsoft Passport authentication) to get friends info, it requires you to put in each of the gamertags you want to monitor. This means you can just focus on a subset of gamertags you want to watch, something I find useful. The widget provides a one-click shortcut for sending messages over Live via xbox.com, which is a nice bonus.

Our dog Leo is always happy when the Fresh Direct delivery person comes by. To be honest, Leo’s pretty happy when anyone comes by, but I think he’s got a few extra wags for the Fresh Direct folks. He knows every time we order anything from them, we make sure to order these:

It’s a healthy treat for him, keeps his teeth clean, he loves it, and it’s cheap at about .50 a treat.

Last night was the first time we had a complete Rock Band session, with three people playing at once. Ideally it would be 4, but we don’t have the extra guitar controller (yet.)

Conny and I have a great time playing it, but it’s clearly a case where mo’ people = mo’ fun.