A Deserving Link(s)

Since Katrina's attack on New Orleans, we've seen the effects here, hundreds of miles away, in gas prices among other things. While I am mostly grateful for the service and convenience gas stations provide, I often find myself fuming at the rocketing prices I am forced to pay. Well today I came across something that made me laugh it all off. Apparently this guy made a blog dedicated to bashing gas stations' websites. (I wasn't even aware gas stations had websites) I can appreciate this being a designer myself but I think I mostly enjoy it because I feel that at least someone is giving retribution to the matter. Gas stations have even contacted him and asked him to stop making fun of their websites. It reminds me of another favorite link of mine where Maddox rates little kids' artwork. Haha, goofy Maddox. So whether you need retribution like me or just would like a quick good laugh. Be sure to check these links out.

3 Cotton Balls

Tonight I had Dan and Jon over to have a sort of mini Halo 2 tournament, going through every map (including the new ones off xbox live). About half way through them Jon goes to the bathroom. No biggie, we kill him and start the next level. We come close to finishing that level and ask ourselves "What's he doing in there?" So we yell "Hey Jon, ya need any help in there? Hahaha" and he mumbles something that we can't hear over the blasting and blazing of the game. Well come to find out, there was no more TP and he was trying to tell us that he needed some. So Dan hesitantly asks, "well, what did you do?"

Jon: Well I found some cotton balls.
Josh & Dan: HAHAHA, really?!
Dan: The big kind or the small kind?
Jon: The small kind, I only used three!
Josh: How is that even possible?
Everyone: *laughter*
Everyone: *plays halo 2*

After they left I went into the bathroom and the funny thing is that there was toilet paper! It was behind the hanging towel directly in front of the toilet, which I think is a strange place to put it in the first place. Well, thanks for the laugh Jon!

Nice Mac RSS Aggregator

Ever since Dan started writing about cool things in his blog and inspired me to start my own) I've been half-looking for a good stand-alone RSS Aggregator to view his among other blogs and news feeds. Well last week we buckled down and finaly found one. NetNewsWire. To quote the website: It's an easy-to-use RSS and Atom newsreader for Mac OS X. It has a familiar three-paned interface (similar to Apple Mail) which can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news. I love it because you don't have to launch a browser and hit all the different blogs or news sites. Many news sources send out RSS feeds in shorter headline only forms which is nice for short-attention-spanned people such as myself. A downside to NetNewsWire is that you cannot view comments on blogs without clicking the article link which opens the actual URL in a built-in browser type window. Nonetheless, It still has my seal of pretty-good-ness.

Useful & Free

Today I cam across something I wish I had about 4 months ago when I really needed it. If I had a dollar for every time that happened...I'd have one dollar. I needed to capture a website for use in a TV commercial but the screenshot I took only got the part of the site that was viewable in the browser. I needed the whole thing. So what I did was just scroll down and take another couple screenshots and then Photoshoped them together. Well that sucks you say? Yes, it DID until I found "Paparazzi!" a free program for Mac OS X that allows you to capture an entire page no matter how long (height) the site is. The only problem with this program, however, is that when you need to capture a flash site, Paparazzi! takes a screenshot too fast and gets the page with a large blank spot in the middle where the .swf should be.
Try it out yourself here.