Saturday morning links to leisurely click through over coffee…
Not Fooling Anybody – a photographic chronicle of bad restaurant and storefront conversions, mostly in the Great Lakes region (via Ernie)
Pathetic Geek Stories – online comic illustrating real-life pathetic geek stories
Marginalia and Other Crimes – a display of “damaged and defiled” books from the Cambridge University Library. While I admit to writing and dog-earing the pages of my own books, I’d never dream of doing it to someone else’s. I like books. (Link via MetaFilter.)
Daring Fireball makes a convincing argument that the iPod minis are going to sell like hotcakes:
“Everyone wants to focus on the $50 price difference between the iPod mini and the 15 GB iPod. I agree that the $50 price difference between the mini and 15 GB iPods is negligible. That’s exactly the point. Take it a step further and imagine if Apple cut another $50 off the price and sold the 15 GB iPod for the same $249 as the mini. I say, even then, there would still be people who would choose the mini. For roughly the same price, you get to choose between a significantly smaller footprint and 11 extra GB. If hard disk capacity were the only factor that mattered, we’d all be using brick-sized players from Creative Labs.”
I totally agree and I’d even go so far as to suggest he forgot another selling point for the Mini – the colors. It sounds silly and sexist, but a lot of females would rank the pretty pastel case as a more important feature than a huge hard-drive. I’ve gotta believe that Apple absolutely knew what they were doing with this one.
I know I’m about six months late to the party on this one (as usual), but I am loving this “Hey Ya” song by Outkast. I’ve had it on heavy iPod rotation all week.
Today I had my first Vanilla Diet Coke since discovering the joys of plain Diet Coke plus Absolut Vanilia and I have to say… it sucked. After the first mouthful I checked the expiration date just to make sure it wasn’t off. The vanilla flavour was just wrong. It’s not as sweet as the vodka version and the taste is more synthetic. I can’t believe I never noticed before. I’m now fairly confident in pronouncing that adding vanilla vodka to plain Coke is infinitely preferable to adding plain vodka to vanilla Coke. The contrast is just staggering. Vanilla Diet Coke is dead to me now.
Apple did it. iPod Mini is here. I’m not sure about that pricing though… Who the heck are these things aimed at?
Barbie and Ken as Aragorn and Arwen from Return of the King. Oh. My. God. (Link courtesy of Lucy.)
Did you know that black cats are more likely to cause allergies than white cats? I sure didn’t.
Another good article from The Age on fan fiction. I knew that “slash” referred to character pairings like “P/D” (Pacey/Dawson, of course) but I didn’t realize it came from the original über-couple “K/S” (Kirk/Spock). I also like the bit about how fanfic infuriates Anne Rice. Heh.
Fascinating article on albinism over at The Age. I didn’t know half that stuff before. I’m confused about the reference to the albino character in Attack of the Clones though… Who in the heck are they talking about? The Kaminoans?
Update: I looked through Biana Knowlton’s website (the girl featured in the article above) and there’s no mention of Star Wars in there. I’m still mystified.
