[d] enclosed in brackets chaotic perfectionist for hire

It's Friday, and we need something else to do, right?

I received a couple of files over Pownce of avatars created by various people, and decided to make one of my own (as I'm sure plenty of others have done). For the few of you who have actually seen what I look like, how'd I do?

It's from Face Your Manga, and it's pretty fun. Yes, it's another "make yourself into..." site, like the Simpson's Character Generator and the South Park character generator (among others). It also feel a little "Mii"-like, but that's ok. I don't have a Wii yet.

I'd like to see more of them... So make one, save it somewhere, then post the picture for everyone to see. Flickr works well for this, from what I've seen. Good luck, and have fun.

I signed up for another service. (wait for shocked looks to fade)

It's lifestream.fm, and so far I like it. This started from mentioning that I was posting to about 10 different places - I actually got one reply, and she mentioned that she used this service. The idea is what I wanted to do here, but a) haven't tried too hard, and b) haven't looked that much into it. For example, the following shows the last seven updates for my lifestream page - and there are definitely some duplicates from using ping.fm, but that's ok:

I like that I can see what I've been doing in all those places I post various types of content to (and hope I'm not spamming by doing so). Sure, it's not a really new idea, but it works and it's usable. What else are people using, and how do you keep track of what's going on?

The ideas that I write about seem to come in waves. It's not like I have something to post every day, but sometimes there will be several things I want to write about in a whosrt period of time, then nothing for a while - just look at my posting dates to get an idea of this.

While writing last week, I thought it would be good if Drupal had the ability to write something up and save it as a draft (saved, but not published). It was brought to my attention again while writing my this post when Firefox (3b3) crashed and I lost what I had written. Blech. There have been discussions on the Drupal site for a while, but nothing that was "in place" for it. Then I found this site, which suggested I use the Views module (which I have and am still learning about). Why didn't I think of that earlier?

The Views module allows you to create different content pages (among other options) with a defined set of nodes on it. In the case of creating Drafts, I set it up to show any nodes (postings) that aren't marked as Published. Now, instead of worrying that I'm not going to be able to recover in case of a Firefox crash (or anything else), I can save an unpublished version of what I'm working on and finish it later. It also works as a kind of "Save as..." in the meantime.

Sure, other CMSs out there already do that, but we'll get there.

I like tea.

There's something about it that just makes me come back for more (no, not just the caffeine). While reading ThinkGeek's newsletter earlier today, I found Monkey Picked Tea for sale. Yes, it was covered by Digg about four months ago, but it got me thinking about how many options there are for tea... and that you can get tea (not cheaply) that's picked by a monkey.

My favorite (right now) is probably still Earl Grey for hot tea, and I haven't picked something for an iced tea. I usually just use whatever I can find, which has ranged from good to flavored sawdust (I didn't realize how old it was before I used it). Any suggestions? I'm looking to make the transition from bags to loose tea, and any links or info would be great to have.

The other option would be to grow my own tea, but I think that's going to have to wait for now, at least until I'm in a house (or have a window that our cat can't poach from).

Firefox has been crashing on me lately, probably something to do with the 35+ extensions I use (more on that in another post). I already have IE (yuck), Seamonkey (formerly the Mozilla browser), and Lynx (text browser, through Cygwin)... and haven't used Opera since they had ads built in (although I had it downloaded and ready to go when they stopped with the ads).

The install was pretty standard, but in opening it for the first time, it's improved quite a bit since the last time I fired it up. There are the usual features built in (like tabs and mouse gestures, which I love), but then there are more things - the Speed Dial is great, and Opera itself seems to be quick and light. Maybe too early to tell, but it's winning me over for some sites. This is also the "out ofthe box" version, so I haven't messed it up yet.

I've signed up for a lot of things.

In the past 10+ years, I've signed up for a lot of things on the Internet. I have webmail, shopping accounts, banking, financial stuff... much like a lot of people. Then came social networks and community sites.

I think it was geocities first, then came Xanga (Bianca, anyone?), then more. And More. And More... Then I realized that there's not enough content generated (or time) for me to do all of them.

For those of you with more than a couple of accounts, what would be your "core" places to use for posting content?

Getting this pen is going to be a problem... but in a good way.

I saw this on 43 Folders (specifically on the wiki) first, which referred me to a couple of other places, after describing these seemingly wonderful pens. They come in .25mm, .3mm, .4mm and .5mm sizes. With the exception of the .5mm, this is a lot smaller than the pens I normally use, and those that I normally get... but the ink is very permanent, and is good for a lot of things.

The first place mentioned was Jet Pens. I only looked for a little while, but it looks like they have just what I was looking for. You can even order 10-packs of some of the pens (black only, I think).

Site number two came up on a google search for these pens, and is the moleskinerie (the Moleskine is something I'll cover another time - excellent notbooks). The page on the Hi-Tec-C pens actually refers to Jet Pens, and how great these pens are.

If anyone ever wanted to get these for me, I'd be more than willing to accept them as a gift. Ooh, maybe I can put that on my wishlist for the holidays...