You finish off a bag of Chex mix, but then there's those parts that are all ground up at the bottom. Who eats those? Most of the time I would just pitch them. But you can pour them into a bowl and eat it with a spoon! It's so much fun!

An ad on craigslist:
Head out to Delilah's on February 2, 2006, 7:30pm for an information session. You'll get all the info necessary to find out whether you have what it takes to be a Windy City Roller. Following the meeting, there will be a fundraiser to help send our all-stars to compete nationally in the first ever flat track derby tournament! Come for the information, stay for the fun!

I want a Firefox extension that can do the following. Let's say you are leaving a comment on someone's site, and you want to make one of the words into a link, you have to manually type in the a href=url blah blah stuff by hand. It would be nice if you could:
1) Copy the URL onto your clipboard
2) Highlight the text you want to be a link
3) Right-click on the selection and hit "make into url using clipboard"
And then it would automatically add the a href=url blah stuff to the text.

I tried searching Firefox's extensions for: highlight, clipboard, right-click link, and right-click url. But no luck. The closest thing is FarkCode and that does it in BBCode, not HTML.

Does anyone know of a Firefox extension that can do this?

Dude. This Jedi Starfighter vehicle is so cool. Just look at it! firing blaster cannons, spring-open wings, opening canopy and retractable landing gear.

An unusual two-toned rock on Mars was found a few days ago. What could this be? It looks like some sort of ancient crystal covered in snow! What do you think it is?

You're buying something on Amazon, and if you buy it through an associate (like me), I can make 5% of the order at no extra cost to you! So I've made a bookmarklet that will stick my associate code onto the Amazon items you're about to buy. It works like this:

1. Drag this link to your bookmarks bar: mattazon!
2. Go shopping at Amazon.com
3. When you get to the product page for the item that you're going to buy, click the bookmark. You will be redirected and my associate code will be added.
4. Click "Add to Cart" and checkout as you normally would.

So if you find yourself shopping on Amazon (and I know you do), think of your pal Matt and click the bookmarklet. I'll get a few pennies and you'll get that warm feeling that comes from helping out a pal.

(and if you have no idea what a bookmarklet is, you can just click the amazon box on the homepage of spudart.org, and then surf to your amazon product and that will work too)

Construction cranes probably have some sort of lightning rod at the top of the crane. Such a huge tall metal object is probably grounded, right? So then is the operating seat, like all covered in rubber or something?

There's this new transformer by Hasbro that changes Darth Vader into his Tie Fighter ship. It's so cool! It's part of the Star Wars Transformers Wave 1.

All the 4-letter words that have 3 vowels sound funny:
• aero
• aeon
• aery
• ahoy
• aura
• auto
• ease
• easy
• euro
• iota
• obey
• oily
• ooze
Can you think of any more?

Speaking of big stuff from yesterday, my color laser printer arrived. It's so huge! It came in a 32" long x 22" wide x 22" high box weighing in at 88 lbs. Mr. T was having quite a hard time moving it around my apartment.

In-depth research on color laser printers coming soon. One quick preview. Get the Dell 3100cn.

Carrying a 32-inch by 40-inch mat board around makes you aware how big other things are.

• The rack on the 2nd floor of the Metra train is just short of 32 inches.
• A Metra two-person seat is just over 32 inches wide.
• On a Metra train, there's a row of single seats by the wall on the other side of the bathroom. That wall is just over 32 indhes wide--the perfect place to stash a 32x40" mat board.

Yes, this oversized popcorn popper with wheels actually walked on the Moon. It was launched in 1970 even though it looks like something from the 1950s. And it was created by the Soviets. Ah those Soviets, they know how to make something look so-cool-old-school-robot style.

Imagine you are an alien.

You are approaching planet earth for the first time. You could totally end up approaching earth from any direction. What if you approached earth from what we call the bottom, and you see Antarctica first? You would think that our entire planet is based around this one continent!

In fact, if you camped out for a day before approaching (in case there are dangerous life forms) you would notice that the entire planet even revolves around Antartica!

Yahoo was talking about How did the phrase "out of whack" come about? and they mentioned that the phrase "in fine whack" had previously been used to describe something fit and sturdy. As John Hale describes Abraham Lincoln in 1863:

"The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once."

So next time someone says you are a wack-o, say thanks!

The library seems even more quiet than my apartment by myself. Even though there's more noise at the library--constant hum of the escalators, copy machine beeps, people walking. The fact that the people at the library do these activities quietly without saying a word to each other makes it seem all the more quiet.

Have you ever noticed how vector shapes in a pdf file tend to look bitmappy? This makes no sense, because vector shapes should be super smooth. Here we will get to the bottom of this problem.

Here are the things we will compare:
1) Address info (text converted to outlines)
2) White header lines (vector shape)
3) Red street (vector shape)


Acrobat Reader 5.0 looks bitmappy

See Diagram A:

In Illustrator CS, the vector shapes and text outlines and appear super smooth. But Acrobat Reader 5.0 appears all bitmappy. I used to think that there must be some setting in Acrobat Distiller or Quark or InDesign that would make the vectors look better when exporting as a pdf file. But there isn't.


Solution to Acrobat Reader 5.0

The solution is on the end user's Acrobat Reader program. In Acrobat Reader 5.0 there is a preference for "Smooth Line Art" that can be found at: Preferences... > Display > Smooth Line Art

Once the end user turns this setting on, everything looks beautiful. See Diagram B:

Why did Adobe release Acrobat Reader 5.0 with this "smooth line art" setting defaulted off? Who knows. Your average user will never know to turn this setting on manually.



Acrobat Reader 6.0 looks better

But in Reader 6.0, the setting is on by default. Hooray! But the odd thing is that it doesn't smooth all the objects. The outlined text looks nice, so does the red street. But the white header lines look like crap. Go figure. See diagram C:




Acrobat Reader 7.0 looks the best

In September 2005, Adobe released Reader 7.0 where the "smooth line art" is defaulted to on, and it actually works. Hooray! Now we just need everyone to start using Reader 7.0. See diagram D:




Summary

Acrobat 5 released 2001-04-16 defaults to looking crappy.
Acrobat 6 released 2003-05-26 defaults to looking half-way decent.
Acrobat 7 released 2004-12-21 defaults to looking great.

If you would like to see the original pdf file used in making these screenshots, you can download it here: maldre_resume_outline_2006.pdf.

In December I bought a used vertical file cabinet at a thrift store for ten dollars. What a find! It was literally an answer to a prayer (the filing cabinets we looked at other places were $75 and up).

The bottom of the drawers were lined with Chicago Tribune newspapers from 1997 (rather fitting seeing that it was from the Tribune that I got laid off). It was interesting reading the sports section when the Cubs were the 2nd to worst team in baseball.

Then in the last drawer in the bottom, I pulled out the newspaper and found a scrap of paper in the very back. I thought maybe it was a cut-out from the paper. What could it be?

As I took the paper out and unfolded it, it was a... ONE THOUSAND LIRA BILL. Wow! Was someone planting a little secret for this thrift store filing cabinet?

My internet was down at home, so I called several friends to see how much this is worth. But nobody was picking up. I looked over the bill and it had an image of M. Montesorri on it. Rather fitting because my mother was a montessori school teacher and my brother, sister, and I attended a montessori preschool.

My girlfriend called me back and she looked up how much this 1,000 Lire bill was worth. Could this be a nice surprise? Well, it was. But not the kind of surprise I was expecting.

47 cents.

Oh.

Which actually was a nice surprise--a surprise lesson about the value of money. Even though we may value money highly, it really ends up being worth not that much. There's other things in life that are more valuable than currency which eventually loses all its worth.

Whoever loves money never has money enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
This too is meaningless.
Ecclesiastes 5:10

Here's an interesting article about money and God. It talks about:
• For Those Who Are Not Rich
• For Those Who Want to Get Rich
• For Those Who Are Rich

mmmmhmmmm looks like a herd of animals, and one of them is sticking its head out to see what's going on.

CNN reports that the new largest prime number was discovered on January 4, 2006. It is 9.1 million digits long. (thanks Tom for the link)

If you were to print this number out on 8.5x11" sheets of paper, one-sided with 0.5" margins at 11-point helvetica, it would take 1,556 sheets of paper. That's just over three reams of paper.

There's this clever "KERN" sweatshirt being sold on veer.com. You unzip the sweatshirt to demonstrate how kerning works. neat.

I want to make a shirt that says "LEADING" and pants that also say "LEADING." To demonstrate how leading works, you just drop your pants.

(thanks to Tom for finding this link and posting it on erik's blog post about the kerning of "y?".)

McDonald's current tray liner promotes their new Arch Card. It very cutely lists what all the things the Arch Card can be. Some are very nice like "grandpa's morning coffee" or "my night away from the kitchen."

And then some are just weird, "i love you as a friend"? or how about "more fun than money". I can think of lots of things to do with money that is more fun than a McDonalds hamburger.

But the one that takes the cake is "wicked awesome." I have to applaud McDonalds for even daring to put "wicked awesome" on their promotional materials.

Here's the full copy of what was on the tray liner:

so, what is Arch Card?

Arch Card is:
• happy holidays
• thank you for baby-sitting my kids
• i love you as a friend
• my sister's birthday present
• lunch money
• grandpa's morning coffee
• my night away from the kitchen
• the perfect secret santa gift
• wicked awesome
• more fun than money
• reloadable, to keep the party goin'
• a great stocking stuffer
• my "wow, it's late" cheeseburger
• my excuse for a study break
• here

new Arch Card
load it. gift it. love it.

Metra conductors are on their feet all day long. Yet the majority of them are quite... thick. How is that? They walk and walk all day long. They should be in prime shape, right? It's because they are doing the same routine over and over. Your body becomes accustomed to it.

Plus, it's just nice to have a little variety in life. Every now and then my girlfriend sprints to the car, so I chase after her. Or doing some pushups in the morning. Or if you already do them in the morning, try them in the evening.

You can now export your Yahoo Address Book into a vCard format that can be used for the Address Book in Mac OS X.

Some people suggest that you export the Yahoo Address Book as LDIF format, but the thing with this is that you lose all your contacts' home email addresses.

To keep all your work and home email addresses, you can use the script I wrote: http://www.spudart.org/php/yahooaddressbook2vcard

It will convert over the following fields from Yahoo into Mac OS X Address Book:
--First
--Middle
--Last
--Nickname
--Email
--Messenger ID
--Home
--Work
--Pager
--Fax
--Mobile
--Other
--Primary
--Alternate Email 1
--Alternate Email 2
--Personal Website
--Business Website
--Title
--Company
--Work Address
--Work City
--Work State
--Work ZIP
--Work Country
--Home Address
--Home City
--Home State
--Home ZIP
--Home Country
--Birthday
--ICQ ID
--Google ID
--MSN ID
--AIM ID