'Bred Crumbs

A Univers of Savings?

That nonprofit project that's driving me crazy continues to do so. Late in the game, they finally bothered to give me the style guide they are insistent I follow but didn't bother to mention at the beginning. Never mind that my project is for video and the style guide specifically discusses only cheap-ass printed materials (for example; one variant of the required font is forbidden because "it prints incorrectly on the [organization name] laser printers"). Also never mind that the style guide contradicts itself and the logos they gave me at the start. But on top of all that, I'm required to use fonts I don't have, and will probably have to buy.

Trying to find said fonts on the Web for free or ultra-cheap led me to this, one of the worst discounts ever:

Wow! Four whole dollars! It would usually be $560 bucks, but now it's just 556! I'm buyin' coffee tonight!

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It's the (Unavailable) Cola

Instead of giving away (or more precisely, having a fractional chance of its insurer having to give away) one billion dollars, maybe Pepsi should invest some of its bounteous extra cash in its apparently sagging distributorships. In the past two days, I have gone to four stores – three in my neighborhood in San Francisco, one in suburban Richmond – in search of a fresh two-liter bottle of Pepsi. Two stores had only bottles with expiration dates of May 31 or earlier (and lemme tell ya, the May 31 one had definitely expired before its appointed time). The other two stores had no two-liters at all.

Look guys, I'll switch to Coke if you want me to. I won't really like it, but just keep it up.

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NBTW, my new Blogger stats tell me that my previous post was my 666th one. Had I realized, I would have made it more, you know, evil. As it is, my site is somehow only 16% evil at the moment. Yeah, I know.

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Expectations of Grief, and the Widows Who Flout Them

New York magazine's portrait of the Staten Island widows of fireman who died on 9/11 is long, but a must-read: funny, truly touching, and a more realistic story of survival and hope than anything you'll ever see packaged on TV news. (Link via Slate)

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'Bredy for Prime Time

As much as I've been mentioning TV lately, you'd think I watch a lot of it. But I guess since I grew up obsessed with it, I can't help but be fascinated by the TV biz even when it's disappointing me. So I couldn't help but immediately latch on to Dewayne's idea of plotting your personal ultimate all-time prime-time TV grid.

I got more carried away than Dewayne did, charting not just prime time but evening syndication and most late-night programming. (No Friday late night? Hey, a guy's gotta watch his Netflix sometime.) And to work in some cherished short-lived shows, I really cheated at 10:30 Sunday. My fantasy network, my rules.

While my schedule does give perhaps a little extra weight to my few current favorites, there's plenty of quality oldies, and no good viewing diet is complete without a little cheese. And to answer your first question: yes, I am a woman on Tuesday night.

What does your ultimate network look like? Sketch it out on your own blog, or in my newly enabled comments. C'mon people, let's spread it like we meme it.

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Spent a lot of the weekend bringing my site up to speed with Blogger's upgrades. This meant a few subtle design tweaks. If you even notice any of them, assume they were made to make things work better and accommodate future improvements. The rebuilt archive indexes will return in a week or two; until then, the "previously" lists on the right ought to get you by.

Bringing things in line with the one-post-per-page world meant throwing out a lot of code I was proud to have written; but, it also meant throwing out some weekly manual maintenance I'd been doing. Easy call there. And I still got to add some scripting to edit Blogger's output, so that was, er, fun.

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Religion and iDolatry

"The choice to use a Mac or to be Muslim in today's world is not easily understood." In the San Francisco Chronicle today, an Islamic writer compares her religion to her hardware choices, unintentionally making both look even more dubious.

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