I was cleaning out the ol’ email in-box, with its buildup of messages accumulated while I was under a rock for a couple of days. There was one message that my email software thought was spam, and the from address certainly seemed spammish. The title was “Multimedia Message”, and the from address appeared to be gibberish. The content of the message was a photograph, nothing more, with no links, which could certainly still be spam.

Then I looked at the picture:

(I blocked out the phone number to protect the privacy of the dictionary seller.)

The number looks a lot like a Lost Alamos number (almost all of them start 662-). I expect that someone saw this message and thought it was funny enough to photograph with their phone camera and send to me through their telephone provider. But who? As I edited the picture the phone number itself started feeling eerily familiar, and now I’m wondering if this is a message for me to call that turned out to be a bit more clever than I am.

As an aside, I laughed almost as hard at the “Free Cat” message.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I am sitting at Pizza Hut right now, the only customer in a crumbling building (I stepped around buckets to get to my table), working on a blog episode that will appear above this one, so you’ve probably already read it even though right now I haven’t finished writing it. Time’s a trip, man.

Although the place seems pretty quiet, I just heard this from the people working in the kitchen:

“We’re out of Pizza.”

Sweet!

Thanks!

OK, so, I’ve been mucking around with a business card to give to people who are interested in my blog. It came time to try to print the dang things out, and I was a bit stumped. Microsoft Word has template files you can use to lay out a page, but I don’t have Word and really all I wanted was something where I could say, “Template 8371. Here’s my image. Go.”

I started by looking for a template someone has created for OpenOffice (you know it has to be out there), but I wasn’t getting results. I eventually went to Avery’s site, and searched for a template there, or the exact dimensions of the page if I had to make my own. I wasn’t having much luck when I saw something called “Print From the Web”. I signed up, told it the product number, and was thrown for a moment. I had to pick a pre-designed template. Finally I chose one, and on the next screen deleted everything in the template and added my image. Bing-bam, I had a PDF that exactly matches their paper. Except for not having a tabula rasa or single-image template, it could not have been simpler.

Good job, guys!

Unfortunately I seem to have a design that brings out the weaknesses of Ink Jet printers. Lots of light colors that require mixing in white – which is done by dithering the darker ink. Still, it’s better than nothing. There are probably printers that would do better, but to really get it done right, I guess I’d have to go to a professional shop. Not exactly in my price range for something as unimportant as this. Springing for the paper was my limit.

Here’s what I have right now. It’s funny how (at least with this printer) the MuddledRamblings.com stands out much more in print than on the screen. I had to boost up the background lettering quite a bit.

It’s a lot cleaner now, in it’s jumbled fashion. I just had to have a watermark so I used a question mark — not sure about that one. Then I just have to decide what email address to use (anythingnotalreadytaken@mac.com/), and I’m golden.

Here’s a list of the words in the background, roughly from top to bottom. Kids! See who can find them all first!

• Culture Shock
• You can’t read this
• Elephants of Doom
• Jer’s Novel Writer
• Fiction
• The American Road Myth
• Feeding the Eels
• Writing
• Eggs over-easy
• Sex
• Death
• Words
• Pirates!
• Beer
• Suicidal Squirrels
• Guest Poetry
• Stuff
• Books
• Rock Stacking
• Bars of the World
• Half-Baked Ideas
• Muddled University
• Idle Chit-Chat
• Rhymes with
• Accidental Actor
• Get Poor Quick
• Prague
• Secret Laboratory
• All For Me Grog

Sweet!

Thanks!

Every once in a while someone asks me for a card, or they want to know the address of my blog, but neither of us have anything to write on. The people that ask for the blog address inevitably ask again later. I figure having a card to hand those people will help.

For the last couple of days I’ve been spending a bit of time poking around in Baby Photoshop, and I think I’ve just about hit the limits of my graphic design abilities, such as they are. Here’s what I’ve got:

Obviously this image isn’t actual size, I made it bigger so you could see the words better at screen resolutions. I started with my name much smaller and over to the side, but then I made it stand out more so people who look at the card later will be more likely to remember where it came from.

Of course, I’ve spent way more time on this than I should have. The first step was searching for fonts. I don’t have the original photoshop file for the logo at the top of the blog, nor do I have the fonts. There are some excellent sites chock-full of really cool free fonts, but I couldn’t find two of the ones I had used originally. Oh, well. Then came a long process of shifting things around, tweaking color and transparency, letter spacing, and on and on.

Photoshop was a little annoying while I was working on this. When I saved and reopened the file most (not all) of the text layers were converted to bitmaps, which meant it was much more difficult to edit them. Perhaps I should have used The Gimp from the get-go. It has it’s own annoying features, but now I’m afraid to close the file in Photoshop for fear of more bitmap conversions.

So what do you think? I’d very much like to hear from anyone who has an opinion about this sort of thing. I’ll be test-printing today to make sure that the smaller text is easily legible. (The part at the bottom reads “Sucks less than most blogs!”) The background text has a couple of holes in it, as well. Any suggestions for short words or phrases that apply to MR&HBI that I could fill in with?

Sweet!

Thanks!

Puttering around on errands today, I saw a bumper sticker that read, “186,000 miles per second. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the LAW.” On the right side was a little picture of Einstein.

Sweet!

Thanks!

Today I was cleaning out the pockets of the shorts I’ve been wearing. Here’s what I had:

$2.05 in small change (including some nickels that seem to be stamped wrong).
1 padlock key
1 California Angels bottle opener key ring with a miata key and a padlock key.
1 free-range Miata key
4 receipts crumpled to illegibility
1 battered Sony Ericsson mobile phone
1 Milk bone dog biscuit
1 Wallet with the usual stuff, including phone chips.

Of course, it’s the dog biscuit that got me typing. All but the wallet were in the front right pocket, as the left pocket has nothing but a gaping hole.

Sweet!

Thanks!

Happy Road Trip Eve, everyone! Remember, if the first words out of your mouth tomorrow (3:0 in the Muddled Age calendar) are “Elevator Ocelot Rutabaga”, good fortune will follow you for the rest of the year. Set an alarm for midnight, so you don’t forget!

Sweet!

Thanks!

An excerpt from an email I got a couple of minutes ago:

The head-cracker will still be in place, though I expect they’ll finally paint over Jer’s blood.

Sweet!

Thanks!

I was invited to a party tonight. It promises to be a good one; it’s the 30th birthday of a friend who has been around for a while, and who as a result has plenty of people to invite to a shindig like this one. It’s at a shiny, popular bar somewhere in the center of the city.

I’m not going to go. It’s just not the right day for alcohol, noise, and forced gaiety. As the appointed hour approaches, I find myself sliding in the opposite direction, toward quiet introspection and the gentle melancholy that sometimes heralds better writing. Already I have a short warm-up mood piece I quite like.

Me blowing off a party is hardly noteworthy, but I’m pretty proud of the way I weaseled out of this one. I sent the hostess a message saying, “Would you forgive me for not coming to your party if I bought you lunch next week?” I explained that I was in a write-sad-things sort of groove.

“Perfectly understandable,” she wrote back.

So now I’m off the hook for tonight and I’m meeting a pretty woman for lunch on Monday. That worked out pretty well, I think.

Sweet!

Thanks!