Borderline Fantastic

Is this a common thing? I haven’t seen it before and I want it.

I was looking around online at cars. My car is almost at its 3rd birthday. I’m not planning on getting rid of it, I can’t until I graduate. My last car was a 3-year lease, so I am just used to looking at this point in ownership.

I wound up on Ford’s C-Max site and am plenty intrigued. These should come out in plenty of time for when I will want to buy something. I want something efficient and VW has been terribly slow in improving things, besides diesel. But my future car thoughts aren’t why I brought you by.

Look at this thing! You just wave your foot under the bumper and as long as you have your smart key in your pocket, it will open for you.

Questions
1. Does it only open? What about closing? I have the issue of not having a free hand to close the trunk a whole lot more than needing to open it. I really had to think of a case when I would need this to open.
2. What could potentially set it off? If you get out of your car (meaning you are close enough for the key) and a squirrel runs under the car, might that open the trunk?
3. Why are we stopping at the trunk? How about opening the driver’s door for me?

I searched around and found this was first announced a few months ago. I also saw a bunch of comments saying this was a dumb idea. I don’t get the complaining. It’s an additional feature. It doesn’t change any usual usage and if you weren’t told about it, you probably would never even know it was there.

First, awesome:

Max Bemis Confirms New Two Tongues
Max Bemis has confirmed that Two Tongues will release another album.

Of course you know, so this is just reminding you. Max Bemis is in Say Anything, who has their own album coming out in the spring. Two Tongues is him and Chris Conley, his usual spot is in Saves the Day. Both bands are awesome and together, the first Two Tongues album (Amazon Spotify) was pretty great.

What could be awesomer?

2gether Reunite. Joe Deandrea is Stoaked.
The MTV created boy band 2ge+her is reuniting with a huge TV special.

Everyone’s dreams have come true. I’m in, if only to find out if they can top Calculus.

Ok, a song songs, unrelated, but these have been in my queue to share for a while (and I couldn’t choose between these two) …

That was the subject line of an email I received today from National Geographic. What has become of you NatGeo?

Click on the image to get to the photo gallery, it’s pretty cool. There is more of the showgirl chickens plus all sorts of other animals. At the very least, you now now this is a thing.

The fine folks at Oreo have figured out how to break my addiction to Golden Oreos … $4.50 a box! If I ever see them on sale, I’m buying a hundred. (This was the price at Giant, the same box at Target was $3. So I buy them there now.)

Would it be impolite to ask people what they are getting from Redbox? I always want to know.

I’m not a big fan of book clubs, maybe that’s why I never liked going to church.

I got my car detailed after New Years. My car is almost 3 years old. It wasn’t really dirty, but it sure needed a solid vacuuming inside. After getting it back, I had no desire to drive it. It looked brand new. All I can do is ruin it.

Also from the car detailing, when I got my car back, on the front seat was a wedding invitation to my friends Mike & Laura’s wedding, which was, well, a while ago. So look around your car and see what you find. I feel like the majority of findings would be wedding invitations.

I’m busy writing an open letter to everyone writing open letters on their blogs. You don’t need a hook for everything you write. Every once in a while, it is an interesting angle to use. You know what you call an open letter on a blog without an open and close? A blog post, what you probably every day without this quirk.

Very cool video about the first students at Penn State. Includes the original Old Main (it was much bigger than I knew) and how it wasn’t finished when school started.

Probably my favorite part is when President Pugh was asked by the students for a summer break. The original school year was Feb – Dec with no breaks. The students just wanted a 2-week break in the summer. Pugh’s primary concern in giving them the break was that they wouldn’t come back. After this the video takes its corny sales-pitch-y turn. I have so many more questions, starting with ‘were things so bad that Pugh knew the school was awful that he was pretty sure they wouldn’t come back?’

Found at http://live.psu.edu/youtube/kn6QmdTkduU

I’ve talked about this before. How Gmail is treated differently in just about every program (link) and I’ve been using the new Gmail iOS app to do any deleting of messages in Gmail (link).

First, I’m using Google Sync on my iPhone (and iPad). That enables me to have push Gmail and use multiple Google calendars. This has nothing to do with the Gmail iOS app. For Gmail, you setup your iPhone to what the iPhone things is an Exchange server to sync emails, contacts, and calendars. You use the regular Email app that comes with the iPhone to access your Gmail. The problem with this setup was when you attempted to delete an email, it only removed it from your inbox. It would still stick around in your ‘All Mail’ in Gmail. While I like having the ability to Archive things, I delete A LOT more.

I got home today and saw this tweet:

You can now configure Google Sync to delete messages on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. goo.gl/T9mSX

— Gmail (@gmail) January 12, 2012

After you follow that link, you are instructed to load up the Mobile Sync settings on your phone: m.google.com/sync. All you have to do it check a box for each device and then things actually get deleted. Also in this screen you can pick which calendars show up on your phone. There is a ‘send as’ option too, which I think lets you change your ‘from:’ field.

Is it sad that finding out about this was the best part of my day?

Not really, but they are moving the date line. They are skipping a day this week so they can move to the other side. They are doing this because they trade primarily with Australia and New Zealand.

This is similar to my problem with time zones. The dates and times are meaningless. If your country is trading so much with countries that have a slightly different schedule, then you can adjust. Who declared that Saturday and Sunday are the weekend? If you need to adjust and make Monday and Tuesday the weekend, what is the difference?

Besides that rant, I find this really interesting that a county (or territory, whatever Samoa is) realized there was a problem and agreed to skip a day on the calendar. So much fun information in the article …

Hotel guests won’t have to pay for an extra night, but employers will be required to pay workers for Friday. “For the business community, it’s very difficult,” Lesa said, “They’ll be paying for a day that doesn’t exist.”

As for folks born on Dec. 30 … well, this year they’re in the same boat as Feb. 29 birthday babies.

Two years ago, drivers were ordered to switch from right-side to left-side driving — to reduce the cost of converting cars brought in from Australia and New Zealand.

It’s also not the first time Samoa has switched sides on the calendar: Back in 1892, Samoans gained an extra day when they went from the west side of the imaginary Date Line to the east side. The king made the switch to please U.S. traders — and to celebrate, he gave his subjects a double dose of the Fourth of July that year.

Cool move by the King on that last one. If you are going to do this, have fun with it. They should have skipped a Friday that fell on the 13th.

Also, Samoa is different than American Samoa.

Found on MSNBC.

Erratic updates in 2011, mostly due to being busy with school and at my internship. Still, I think there are enough links to reflect on.

Inter-Dis Material
I’m most pleased that we were able to start up Inter-Dis Material in September. We missed one month, November, but had two December shows to make up for it. Once again we’ll shoot for every month in 2012, but I think we all know that won’t happen. Here are the links for this years’ shows.
September
October
December #1
December #2

Notebook
How did I only do one Notebook post this whole year? Terrible on my part. So I have little to choose from for my favorite Notebook entry:

On Cash Cab a contestant named David called his partner David. I hadn’t though of this before, but I’m against same name marriage.

From 12/10.

Question of the Day
Same goes for the QOTD, just one, and no responses.

What would you do with an old High School?

Top 10 Posts
1. Swanson Pyramid of Greatness
2. Robot Chicken: Footloose Peanuts
3. Breaking Bad on Netflix
4. Ice Cream Helmets have a home
5. Hulu – Saturday Night Live: Digital Short: Andy and Pee-Wee’s Night Out
6. Tosh.0 Viewer Video – Car Crash
7t. I was going to use iCloud email
7t. Robot Chicken: Mario Meets Parents
9. I was excited for iMessage
10. I Want: Philadelphia Union Scarf

One Last Link
Here’s where I drop a link that hasn’t been mentioned. While I was going through the old posts this is my favorite clip that I forgot about. It’s from Norm’s Sports Show that was on Comedy Central. A sad year for sports shows on Comedy Central. Norm’s was good and The Onion’s was really good, and they canceled them both. This was the best segment from Norm’s show: ‘Wait, What?’ This one features stick horses: Wait, What? Stick Horse Edition

No guarantees about tomorrow. Really, I’ve never heard a song on this subject (I don’t listen to country).

Before I figured out what was going on in this song I thought it was an attempt to see how many brands and products they could squeeze into one song. Once I figured it out, I was on board.

Also, they really remind me of MxPx in this one.

On Amazon
On Spotify

Not as good as Halloween, but still great.

I thought he should have waited a little closer to Christmas, but the kids seem to have bought it. I could say he should be careful not to overdo this, but if you just get a handful of them, you can do them again every year. The worry isn’t the kids knowing, cause they won’t, its the parents who want to get their kids on TV like the Halloween kids. Although it will be fun when it’s scripted by the parents and the kids get on the show and spill the beans.