Dr. Thinky

2004-08-03T14:43:00.000-05:00

Dr. Thinky has moved! Try this one Dr. Thinky

2004-06-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

I love neal pollack, I think he is an extremely funny writer, the Anthology then Beneath the Axis of Evil and his briliant Nevermind the Pollacks, it's a mix of cheap humor with a scathing look at american culter. Imagine my pleasure in reading find this article on bOINGbOING: Church & State by Neal Pollack (06/10/04)
Great stuff!

2004-05-12T22:03:00.000-05:00

This is pretty awesome - Bento Pictures from boingboing

2004-05-12T20:48:00.000-05:00

So I've been running a lot more lately, a new initiative to get me more active & ready for summer fun. I'm going to try and start playing pick-up regularly and have a big charity bike race in August. I have a pretty good route that I run now, nice back streets to jamaica pond & back. Problem was that I could never tell how far it was, roundtrip. All I could figure was it takes me 25-30 minutes at a pretty good clip. MapQuest isn't made for complicated routes like this, luckily I happen to have a (legal) copy of ArcView, a badass mapping program. I still can't understand what half the buttons do. The instructions on how to change the font includes gems like this:
if (thm.is(BaseMapTheme)) then eh?
But you can make some really pretty maps with it. Look at this

2004-05-12T19:59:00.000-05:00

I've become quite the gizmodo junkie lately, they have some really cool, useless & wacky stuff there, like this absurd seven tuner/one terabyte pvr and this amazing ghostbusters replica
Oh yeah, and the guy is pretty fucking funny too....

2004-05-04T22:47:00.000-05:00

Here's another little gem - Special Nature Photo Collage I took all these on Saturday & Sunday (and most of those names are wrong)

2004-05-04T22:28:00.000-05:00

I finally good my shit together enough to put up some thoughts on my recent NM experience. Horns has already written extensively on the trip, I thought I'd try to capture a single night. yeah, it's pretty fucking long and maybe only funny is you like potty humor and drunken antics, but I had to share: roswell 4/7 No fancy Dreamweaver stuff either!

2004-05-02T13:52:00.000-05:00

This is awesome: Eagle Attacks, Carries Off Bear Cub

2004-04-26T18:51:00.000-05:00

So, I spent two summers in turkey, doing some archaeology, drinking a lot of vodka tonics, digging up cat skeletons, billions of sherds (the British spelling) of pottery & bone, some walls. and a bunch of other fancy things. It was slow work, disagreeable weather and long hours, but it was awesome. Now these 'dumbasses' are going over there and in one month, they'll discover Noah's Fucking Ark? That's ridiculous.
CNN.com - Expedition to search for Noah's Ark
ha, what they haven't done yet. getting a research permit in Turkey is an painful process to say the least. The site (Gordion) I worked at had about 25 distinguished archaeologists from around the world, the site is supported by U Penn and has been there for over 50 years, and every year the permit office has to wait to literally the last day before they grant the permit. And that was a permit for an actual legitimate project. I don't think these suckers from Shamrock - The Trinity Institute have any idea what they are in for, haha. I hope they get charged the 'stupid american' fee, haha.

2004-04-26T18:35:00.000-05:00

Jesus Christ, that's a great idea CNN.com - California cops want spider guns - Apr 26, 2004

2004-04-25T00:26:00.000-05:00

I'm in the process of reading Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. When I was reading Gravity's Rainbow, one of my all time favorites, I rapidly came to realize that he uses an incredible amount of obscure references, quotes and events fluently without any context for regular folks like myself who aren't intimately familiar with the internal functioning of the British SAS and the interworking of the V-2 rocket engine. Luckily this site exists with a huge glossary of events and terms, so I don't have to pretend anymore

2004-04-21T19:59:00.000-05:00

It seems like every day something new and incredible happens in the world, it gets reported somewhere on the inter-net & I read about it and almost soil myself. Today? This is very impressive: mousey with no daddy but this takes the cake:pimp your ride w/ hello kitty

2004-04-17T23:56:00.000-05:00

Extreme Japanese Yo-yo Music Videos? Hugi - H�hra�

2004-04-17T18:44:00.000-05:00

A very interesting article on the reality of security contracters working in Iraq:Salon.com News | Outsourcing the war. You have to wonder how much they are being paid to make it worth it...

2004-04-14T22:38:00.000-05:00

This is one of those things that you can't help but enjoy.
Armed Forces Journal Shootout Videos
Those boys down in R&D are never content to rest on their laurels!

2004-04-14T22:00:00.001-05:00

Today I received a little gift from heaven: Oly 5060.
Except I actually bought it myself with a little help from lil' tax rebate. After reading these literally exhaustive reviews by DCRP & Imaging Resource, I felt pretty good about dropping the $$$.
Anyways, I was obsessed with this thing way before it reached my doorstep, and it's good to see my pinings were justified, this puppy is amazing. Just some simple photos in Boston Common turned out exceptionally well. It's pretty amazing to see a realtime histogram or exposure chart while framing a shot, I think this is going to be a really good toy.

2004-04-12T19:57:00.000-05:00

Let's just say I do many mail merges at work. I'm talking thousands & thousands of merges for just about everything, I can never go back. I have to admit, there is some visceral thrill in seeing some insanely complicated mind-erasing spreadsheet turned into a simple, elegant... beautiful word document... kinda takes your breath away.

I generate a lot of acknowledgement letters for donor, usually about 20-50 a week. Usually I export a list of donors from our database program (yes, we are rocking Paradigm 5.0!), open it in excel and divide the amount of $ by 5 to find the number of meals per gift. Resave and procced with mail-merge loving.

So, the ack letter would read "Dr. Thinky, your thougthtful generous gift of $30.25 means delicious meals for 6.05 clients".

The other day, while using the facilities, inspirado struck: I realized that you must be able to carry out simple mathmatical equations within the merge fields themselves! That's like the cow milking itself!

I found my answers in some archaic MS Knowledgebase Article (the lord works in mysterious ways).
All you need to do is set up your merge document, click on the merge field of the data you wish to "massage", then "toggle field code" and follow this formula:

{= ({MERGEFIELD "mergefield_name"} mathmatical equation )}

In my case it was:

{= ({MERGEFIELD "last_gift_amount"} / 5 )} (which equals the number of meals per gift)

Yes!

2004-04-12T19:31:00.000-05:00

This is such a bad idea...