If you have a car or a large price item, and decide to sell it, you should ask for payment in two-dollar bills only. Imagine that, a lifetime supply of two dollar bills. Anytime you pay for something, you can shell out two-dollar bills. People will love it! Everyone loves the two-dollar bill!!!

One of my friends is a designing his first webpage, and he's not a designer. He says he wants "some neat little animated buttons here and there just to get some movement on the page." And I said, "oh dear." He was like, "what?" He didn't understand why i thought having animated gifs all over would be bad. So i told him he should make his webpage look like this: http://blueballfixed.ytmnd.com/ (thanks to erik for posting this link before)

Or i coulda sent him the hampster dance too http://www.hamsterdance.com/classorig.html

He says he's considering this site: http://www.takamagahara.com/printin/

(CC, if you are reading this, thanks for the good laugh!)

Because it starts with an "A" it starts off the list of bookstores. Top of the list baby!

I realized this while looking at a site I designed last year for Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.

It's quite surprising that nobody has made an ical calendar that lists all the fun and goofy holidays, like World Hello Day on November 21. Hmmm, i'll add that to my to do list.

Going out for all-you-can-eat sushi with 12 people will take some time for the chefs to keep up with your order, but it's lots of fun to order whatever sushi you wish without worrying about price. Sushi Para II in Chicago offers an all-you-can-eat sushi for $17.95. Eating that much overflowing plates of sushi is like having a Sushi Thanksgiving!

I have a 30% employee discount at the Tribune Tower store during Monday, November 28 through Saturday, December 3. Does anybody want anything?

When riding in an elevator going up by yourself, stand exactly in the middle of the car. By doing so, you will be able to better imagine the feeling of being lifted up. For some reason, this just doesn't work as well when you stand off to the side.

There this site at http://thesurrealist.co.uk/joke where you can make a joke about anything. All you do is put in the topic and some keywords related to it, and pow! It'll give you a bunch of jokes--although they are so bad! (but so bad, they are actually good--in a weird way).

Here's some examples.

Subject: a garbageman
Keywords: trashcan, trash

• What's a garbageman's favourite song?
  I Trashcan't Get No Satisfaction


• What's a garbageman's favourite film?
  Mr. Smith Goes to Trashington

Subject: a designer
Keywords: font, kerning, photoshop

• What's a designer's favourite film?
  All Quiet on the Western Font


• What's a designer's favourite film?
  Kerningin' in the Rain


• What's a designer's favourite book?
  David Photoshopperfield

I often get asked by people where is a good place to host their site. I'll tell them not to go with olm.net (i've had major problems with them), or nomonthly (their basic plans do not include MySQL). Generally $10-$12 is a good deal for a basic site.

I am currently with data393 and have a plan that allows for 30 domains. It's been nice and fast. 100% uptime the past month! If anyone wants their site hosted on my plan, I'll throw you on.

But the point of this post is not to sell my services, but rather it's an idea. There should be some site out there that pings a ton of websites and keeps track of where they are hosted. So then you can truly see what the uptime percentage is with certain hosting companies. Currently, I'm using dotuptime.com, which is a free service where you can enter in a bunch of URLs for them to ping every 20 minutes. They will tell you how much downtime there is, and the percentage of uptime over any period of time. You can even get emails when any of your sites are down. And it's free! (The catch is if you want it to ping your site more than 20 minutes, you have to pay.)

But it would be nice if there was some site that tracked a TON of sites and let you know what hosting companies are the best. Anyone know of any service like this?

From the olympic site:

"Neve": she is a gentle, kind and elegant snowball; "Gliz": he is a lively, playful ice cube. They are the two symbolic characters of the XX Olympic Winter Games. They complement each other and personify the very essence of winter sports.

The mascots were born from the pencil of Pedro Albuquerque, a 38-year old Portuguese designer who won the international competition launched by the Organising Committee for the Olympic Games in Turin (TOROC) on 25 March 2003. He was inspired by his passion for water and the incredible shapes this element takes on when it is transformed into snow or ice; by his research into the Italian spirit and the places hosting the Olympic Games; by the Olympic values; and by the technical characteristics of the various sporting disciplines of the Games.

"Neve" and "Gliz" reflect the spirit of the Italian Olympic event: passion, enthusiasm, culture, elegance, and love of the environment and of sport. They are the symbol of a young generation that is full of life and energy.

Instead, I suggest something more Italian. The Meatball. And the roundness of the meatball goes well with the five rings in the olympic logo. Just 85 days until the Winter Olympics! Get your meatballs ready!

There's this site called Cassette Jam '05 where there are over 170 different images of old cassette tape designs. Here's three of the tapes on that site that I have used.

I recently showed someone my list of Amateur Sport Event Calenders in Chicago and he replied, "laser tag is not a sport!"

But I would say the formula for sport is:
physical activity + competition = sport

SmarterChild is an instant message bot that you can ask questions. You can also IM the word "poll" to SmarterChild and it will ask you a question. Then it will give you the percentage of what others responded. Here's a recent poll it asked:

Do you read at least some of the comics in the newspaper every day?

682 people have voted so far
Yes: ]]]]]]]]] 27.57%
No: ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] 72.43%

Wow 72%. That stinks for comic strips. But hmmm, 27% actually sound pretty good. A) To have some pick up a newspaper EVERY day. B) To have someone read some funnies.

It gets so windy in our windy city of Chicago, that we have signs like this one at the brown line Western stop.

While walking to work, do you ever spot someone up ahead of you and make it your goal to pass that person before you get to work?

This was rather funny. Walgreens is selling cubbie bears wearing white sox shirts. Do you see the irony?

Many towns have a Main Street, but not Chicago.

Ha the "soccer bowl" that's a funny phrase... "I want to win the SOCCER BOWL!!!"

And the soccer ball at the end of "sting" makes it look like it's spelled as "Chicago Stingo"

It's 100 days until 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino Italy

All-time Winter Olympic medals
1. Norway 263
2. United States 193
3. Austria 162
4. Finland 142
5. Germany 125 (1928-36, 52-64, 92)
6. Sweden 108
7. Switzerland 103
8. Canada 96
9. Italy 89
10. France 72

medals per capita
1. Liechtenstein 266.92 per 1 million people
2. Norway 57.26 per 1 million people
3. Finland 27.18 per 1 million people
4. Austria 19.79 per 1 million people
5. Switzerland 13.75 per 1 million people
6. Sweden 11.99 per 1 million people
7. Luxembourg 4.26 per 1 million people
8. Netherlands 4.20 per 1 million people
9. Canada 2.92 per 1 million people
10. Estonia 2.25 per 1 million people

Estonia!!!

It's just 101 more days until the 2006 Winter Olympics start. And did you know that there are no websites with the phrase "oly em picks" or "oly em pick" or "oly em pics" or "oly em pic"? Crazy.