Okay ,we’re going to check out the SAN FRANCISCO MART WHOLESALE HOME FURNISHINGS CENTER Sample Sale next weekend. Never been to anything like this – my expectations will be low, and of course, the stress of potentially seeing something we like and having to make a snap decision is a bit challenging. Should we measure something before we go? Bring samples or photos of something?

It’s all new.

TheSimpsons.com has the world’s lamest game up on their site. Zombie Shootout. Go ahead, try it. Shoot 10 zombies in this first-person shooter (see how down I am with hard-core gaming?) and the game ends. Congrats.

It is nice to see Zombie Shakespeare from many years ago, but really, this was a lame use of 3 minutes of my life.

And the music alone could drive some people insane.

No guarantees how long this game will actually still be up.

They’ve posted a nice writeup of my recent CHIFOO talk Whose Line is It Anyway.

RoboMaid is obviously a piece-of-crap product, but hey, it’s only $10 – but what I really like abou tthe TV commercial is that they offer you that price only if you agree to tell someone else about it. Obviously, that’s not enforceable, but the idea of including worth-of-mouth in the purchase process itself is pretty interesting.

LukeW posts a really nice summary of my talk at eBay here.

Metafilter has an item about wacky food items in Hawaii . I link to the MeFi site rather than the article directly because the comments are thoughtful and funny, as usual.

If you use the Bill Pay feature on Wells Fargo, they ask that you give at least FIVE BUSINESS DAYS – this is even for a payment from a Wells Fargo account to pay off a Wells Fargo credit account. Does it really take this long to transfer funds electronically? One could write a check and mail it 2 days before and never have to worry.

The promised benefit of doing these bill pay things is not simply saving the money for a stamp, it’s also planning ahead and scheduling it all at once, but the ridiculous calculation (at least if they told you when to schedule it in order to guarantee payment by a due date, that would help) and poor service seems to limit the value.

Bah.

Nice article about the pumpkin harvest and pie-baking/tasting QA that they do. I enjoyed this description:

Ackerman sows his crop about mid-May, usually after the rich, silky clay soil thaws from the last freeze. As the months pass, the plants creep across the ground, their thick vines twisting and climbing into open crevices. Flat leaves, the size of a man’s head and shaped like a palm, cover the fields in a wash of green as they hide the pumpkins.
‘They get into the ditches, the roads, everywhere,’ said Yvette Ackerman, John’s wife.
By the time the pumpkins ripen, the leaves have wilted, and the vines, once several inches thick, have shrunk to near-empty husks. Hundreds of thousands of pale-gold pumpkins cover the ground. At this point, Libby’s takes over.

It reminds me of our local Half Moon Bay pumpkin scene – where previously empty fields are filled with semi-evenly spaced pumpkins to suggest that you can pick ‘em up and take ‘em home right from where they grew. It’s a bit of theater – but then with petting zoos and garish decorations and ridiculous insane traffic, the whole pumpkin season is a bit absurd, so there ya go.

The slides from my recent CHIFOO talk (Whose Line is It Anyway: Innovation, Ethnography, and Improv) are available at that link in a few formats: HTML, two flavors of PowerPoint and PDF. Check it out!

I get a really nice mention in this post on SFist, regarding my search (and now theirs) for an old SF ‘zine called big Whoop!

A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken’s neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday.
It said 67 year-old Constantin Mocanu, from a village near the southeastern town of Galati, rushed out into his yard in his underwear to kill a noisy chicken keeping him awake at night.
‘I confused it with the chicken’s neck,’ Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. ‘I cut it … and the dog rushed and ate it.’
Doctors said the man, who was brought in by an ambulance bleeding heavily, was now out of danger.

Restless Legs Syndrome is an overwhelming urge to move the legs usually caused by uncomfortable or unpleasant sensations in the legs.