blogwaffe

I thought this was a joke at first. I have not tried it.

Green Plant Drink

Hm… food beverage….

Every year around this time I think about how much the internet sucks.

I access all my financial stuff from each of various institutions online. I access my salary stuff online. I do my taxes online, and I eFile.

So when I do my taxes, why do I have to fill in a hundred little forms all by hand every year? Why can’t I just go to the IRS and say: here are the financial institutions I patronize, and here are my places of work, I will now click this button and you will generate my tax forms for me right here and now?

It’s all online, why can’t someone aggregate it?

PS: My taxes are simple, other people’s are more complicated. I get that.
PPS: Dear implementer of above idea, do it right. Do not give the IRS (or H&R Block or whomever) my account numbers. Love, Mike.

You know in Junior High when you saw one of your teachers in the grocery store and you were all surprised? “Woah! Teachers are real people?”

I have just discovered the adult equivalent. I saw one of the Amigo’s bartenders drinking shots at La Fiesta Grande.

After ascribing more than 50 separate identities to the culprit believed to be Ireland’s most reckless driver, who had accumulated speeding tickets all over the country but gave a different address each time he was stopped, Garda finally realizes “Prawo Jazdy” is Polish for “Driving License” and not the name of some dangerous road hog.

via @tellyworth.

Especially funny to me considering my visit to a lovely, countryside Polish castle in the spring of 2001. I saved my ticket, so that, upon my return to the States, I was able to label each of my photographs with the castle’s name as printed on the ticket: “Castle Jednorazowego Wstępa”.

Only later did I realize that I had painstakingly marked each picture as “Castle Single Admission”.

Castle "Jednorazowego Wstępa" a.k.a. Niedzica Castle

Inspired by Emily, we have, from the kitchen of ChefWaffe, a food blog.

Unlike her typical fare (such as Spinach, Peach and Walnut Salad and Winter Panzanella), the subject of my first entry is pizza. And fried. Fried Pizza. I think that pretty much sums up the differences between our respective levels of gastronomic health and culinary prowess.
Read more…

On Greg and Michelle’s recommendations, I read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (check out his blog) a few weeks ago.

It’s the best book I’ve read in a long while. Unnameably good. For realies.

So good, in fact, that I left my living room, walked the mile to Borders on the 17th to see the author in person at a book reading/signing. So good that I “fanned” him on Facebook. So good that I’m actually blogging for once.

If I were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book with me (that’s a choice I get to make before getting stranded? that’s stupid), I would take a frisbee instead just to spite all those ego-hungry authors begging me to take their books. But I’d really think long and hard about The Name of the Wind first.

Pat is totally cool. He has professed undying love for Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, and Jamba Juice (not necessarily in that order) and signed Greg’s book for me with just that little extra something.

Dear Greg,
I will cut you open and dance in your entrails.
Love Pat <3 xxoo

Now, if only I could get him (and his publisher?) off Blogger and onto WordPress. Hell, I could probably swing him a VIP on WordPress.com.

A simple two step process (for Firefox users).

1. Set Firefox to use Gmail as the default application for mailto: links.
2. Tell Apple’s Mail application to use Firefox as your default mail reader: Open mail. Go to the “Mail” menu and select “Preferences”. Click the “General” icon/tab. Click the dropdown next to “Default email reader” and choose “Select…” from the list. Browse the Applications folder and pick “Firefox”.

Now, Firefox will send mailto: links to Gmail when you click them from within Firefox, and OS X will send mailto: links to Firefox when you click them from outside Firefox. I imagine something similar can be done with other browsers.

The other methods I found online both required an extra application running on your computer, which I didn’t want. Google’s official solution to the problem for Mac and Windows is Google Notifier, which does have some extra features. I also found many references to Gmailto, but it apparently doesn’t exist anymore.