Yearly Archives: 2006

RSS Feeds for Online Stores

Here’s one of my favorite applications for RSS feeds… Online stores that use them to present new products in their online catalogs. For huge stores this isn’t very practical, but for specialty stores, it can be a lot of fun, especially if the store also has wishlist capability, like Think Geek does.
Archie McPhee: http://www.mcphee.com/mcpheeproductfeed.xml
Think Geek: http://www.thinkgeek.com/thinkgeek.rss
Threadless T-Shirts: http://threadless.com/rss/weekly
(Website: http://threadless.com)
Mule Design: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheFeedStore
Oddica: http://www.oddica.com/catalog/rssfeed.xml
There are a couple of product review blogs that basically do the same type of thing, that I also keep in my shopping RSS reading list, like these:
Mighty Goods: http://www.mightygoods.com/atom.xml
Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.xml
Mad Professor: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MadProfessor
And then there are the online shops I WISH had a feed, but they don’t:
Knock Knock: http://www.knockknock.biz/
16 Sparrows: http://www.16sparrows.com/
Hats In the Belfry: http://www.hatsinthebelfry.com/
And speaking of sites in general that really need to have RSS feeds —
IndianapolisMusic.net Events Calendar: http://www.indianapolismusic.net/events_day.php

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I grew up in a middle-class suburban home

I grew up in the suburbs, first in the town of Ankeny, Iowa, outside of Des Moines, then briefly in a suburb in Canton, Ohio, and then in a nice housing development in Noblesville, Indiana. I lived in the prototypical white, middle-class neighborhood, where we walked to school (back when that was safe) and played in the street and sold pencils door-to-door for a kids club or band camp.
But I LOVE pork rinds. Is that wrong? Well, I don’t want to be right.
Also, last night at book club, we helped my friend Jen brainstorm names for her baby. For privacy’s sake, I’m not going to blog the kid’s last name, but suffice it to say that it’s three syllables and sort of Polish/eastern European, containing both a W and Z. You get the idea. Whatever she ends up naming him (I’m sure it will be a great name) we decided that his “book club name” will be “Yosemite Peregrine ____________” I can’t wait to hear what Jen’s husband has to say about that idea.
If you’re naming your baby or pet, here are some places to look for cool names:
The Social Security Adminstration’s List of Popular Baby Names
A list going back to the 1880s of what the most used baby names for any year are. You can search against the database or just see lists of the top names from each decade. Pretty cool.
Name that Goth!
The original, definitive list of Goth baby names.
Freakonomics — Baby Names
The Freakonomics guys do a great statistical analysis of how baby names spread and become popular, then fade out. If you’re searching for something unique and interesting, but not too wacky, for your kid, reading the baby names chapter of their book is a good idea. The link above is to a short Slate article on that chapter of the book.
And I realized this morning, I have a stripper/drag queen name, an alias, a mob name, and even a spell check name, but I don’t have a book club name of my own. So what should my book club name be? It should probably be vaguely literary and slightly snobbish…

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links for 2006-08-02

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links for 2006-08-01

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Freedom From Religion

From Good As You:

I mean just the other day this was chatting with this Jewish friend of mine who keeps kosher, and he was all like, ” Ya know, my religious beliefs tell me that consuming pork is not in my best interest, so I think I’m gonna take that belief to the public, church/state separated realm of governance and try and get pork banned for all.” You can check here to know more about the merit of prayer and the support it provides. After grabbing a hot dog, I then trekked down to visit my Muslin chum, who told me about this new “one woman, one head cover” bill he’s hoping to have enforced on people of all faiths. After briefly imagining the career death of virtually every female celebrity under 30, I continued to my Scientologist pal’s mansion, where he told me to stop being “glib” and start helping him ban psychiatric medicine and drugs in this country. Weirded out, I finally swung by my Atheist friend’s home, where she eagerly told me about her “One nation under self-replicating molecules” changes she was proposing for this nation’s pledge of allegiance.
It was only after visiting all of these folks that I finally realized, “Hey, why let the facts that there are many different beliefs and that we, as Americans, have the right to subscribe to any or none of them stop each of us from pushing our own versions of moral fitness onto the public at large?” My world view has been changed at the hand of extremist religious conviction!

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Weekend Update 2006-07-31

We spent the weekend doing lots of work on the house — unpacking things on Saturday, and with the help of our friends David and Garrett we moved quite a bit more stuff from Stephanie’s house. There are still a few more loads, but the bulk of the moving is finished. Our house is pretty chaotic, but I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

To change the subject entirely… have you ever known someone for a really long time and still been mystified by the contents of their mind? Like you find out things about your friends that are a complete revelation? I’m still sort of agog at something I found out today. In a strictly metaphorical sense, if you owned a Corvette, why would you ever borrow someone else’s Yugo? The human mind is a mystery to me.

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