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Dave Coustan
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I'm Rollie Fingers years old.

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Friday Heh Abbondanza

A bumper crop, making up for a couple of weeks’ slack:

Friday Heh

Heavy on the visuals and video today.

Friday Heh


  • YouTube Comment Or E. E. Cummings? – With an answer key so you can put your knowledge to the test. [via @dylan20]

  • Art On Money For Money – Brilliant. “My latest art project is pulling in the money quite literally. I’m currently doing a series of pieces on dollar bills. Not only is this a fun art project to work on but so far I’ve sold almost half of the pieces I’ve created making this a brilliant hundred dollar idea, I’ve sold 5 of the 11 pieces I’ve created thus elevating my professional credentials as an artist. It’s rather exciting.”

  • A For Hehfulness On A Parent/Teacher Conference Form – “Topics I would like to discuss” include “How to emulsify a sauce without starches or egg.”

  • Being A Dave Has Secret Benefits:

  • 1999 Called – A heh for anyone who lived and worked on the World Wide Web during its first ascent:

  • Animal Tattoos For Talking Hands – I love this because it’s like a simplified and purchasable version these hand paintings from several hehs ago. Could I get away with just an Animal Tattoo as a Halloween costume?

  • Bell Biv Dafoe – Now you know.

  • Two hehful tumblelogs I’ve started to read – Rappers That Suck and Lamebook.

Friday Heh


  • The Tauntaun Sleeping Bag Comes Alive – Loyal heh readers will recognize this as a hehful concept from ThinkGeek that appeared here in the April 9 edition. Now, thanks to a licensing deal with LucasFilm, it’s becoming a real product. [Pre-order from ThinkGeek.]

  • As A Goat Herder – The discussion page of the Wikipedia article on “Tickle Torture” is not to be missed. From “As a goat herder, I don’t see how the alleged Roman version of the torture would end up being painful,” to the back-and-forth on whether the woman depicted in the example photo can or can not move her legs laterally based on how she’s tied down. Good stuff.

  • Hotel Funny Time – That’s the only heh here, really. Good name of a hotel in Bucharest. [via Leah]

  • Dear Layout Designers – “Please look closely where you place items in a layout. The title of this magazine now only refers to one part of the baby deal.”

  • Every Day Is A Good Day – For Ice Cube.

  • The Breast Pillow – They really want to make sure you get what this is about, “Soft, supportive, shaped like a pair of breasts; Cover is removable and machine-washable, shaped like a pair of breasts.” [via grabmol]

  • The Fresh Prince Of Hot Air – The story of Falcon Heene told through the Fresh Prince theme song:

    [via Laura Ross]

Friday Heh

  • Swimming Is The Best@gavinpurcell and family auto-tune a masterpiece via the I Am T-Pain iPhone App.

  • Cutest Garbage:
    [ via one of my new favorites, Badder Homes and Gardens]

  • Sniff RFID Reader Dog – “Sniff comes in a cute Snoopy-like design, but he is actually an RFID reader. This digital pup can vibrate and make noises in response, making it endearing to whoever lays eyes on it the first time around.”

  • Merlin’s Open Letter To Adobe Developers – I wanted to highlight this passage in particular: “One (sometimes one of the extremely few) of the benefits of the annoyingly rabid Mac community is that we do talk to each other a lot, and we do absolutely have equivalents of pro wrestling’s faces and heels. Right now, Adobe is not regarded as a hero. No. Right now you’re the heavy guy from some country we don’t like who’s always with the folding chairs.”

  • Mr. Ray Lamontaigne:
    Hate the music, love the shirt.
    [via cpenney]

  • Pomplamoose, Single Ladies (Beyonce Cover) – If you haven’t seen this already, it should make your Friday:

    [via ohword.tv]

Another Elsewhere

Sometimes when there’s no action over here, there are still new things to be found and enjoyed on my newly created Tumblr blog – Extraface Marks.

Friday Heh

Flickr, From Yahoo

Anyone else notice the purpley Yahoo! branding now appearing prominently next to the Flickr logo on Flickr.com? This is new, right?

Awesome by association, Flickr and Yahoo

I assume it’s part of the new, more assertive branding campaign announced this week. Hrmf.

Share A Spreadsheet For Added Sticktoitiveness

I was just noticing that my friend Fox and I have been sharing a Google Docs spreadsheet humbly titled “Spreadsheet Of Ideas” for over a year, and it’s still active. It’s where we put ideas we’d like to hold on to, whether they are projects we’d like to share with each other or things we’re each thinking about on our own. The point isn’t to necessarily work together on stuff, just to collect the ideas we each want to keep. We stay out of each other’s hair and update it independently, whenever we think of it.

What’s nice is that on the main page of Google Docs, I can see when she’s been in the sauce, and any time I notice she was the last one in, that motivates me to dive in and see what’s new. Once I’m in it, it’s likely I’ll remember to add some stuff of my own. It’s inspiring to see progress being made by someone else. It’s like virtual co-working. Fox is in Australia and I’m in Atlanta, but we can still overhear and work alongside each other on our respective side projects and brainstorming.

It looks like we both went through a dead spell from December through June; not sure what that’s about:

datestamps

the datestamps

I’m glad to have it around every time I look in, and I can tell you it would have been long since abandoned and forgotten about if it didn’t have a co-owner.

So the protip here is for a document you’d like to keep alive for an extended period of time, find someone who you feel comfortable sharing and thinking with, and let them in on the document even if (and especially if) they won’t be collaborating with you.

P.S. Thanks, Fox!

A Clear Indication That Scoble Doesn’t Use Twitter Like I Do

“If you don’t read tweets for eight hours, don’t worry, all the big stuff you missed will be on TechMeme.” – (Scoble’s latest meanderings on the evolution of Twitter)

No, that’s not nearly it for me, or for many others. It’s not just a technology aggregator. It does that well, but it does so many other things well. Robert undoubtedly has scores of friends, loved ones, and colleagues on Twitter, and who have been there for a few years now, and yet he continually misses out on(or chooses to tune out) what makes Twitter great because he’s so focused on it as a tech news beehive. He starts out the above blog entry by celebrating that Twitter used to be “for telling all your friends you were having a tuna sandwich at Subway in Half Moon Bay” and is no longer. Incidentally, that’s the same argument newcomers make who haven’t yet immersed themselves in Twitter’s culture, which leads me to believe Robert really is only on the fringes while looking at his usage numbers you’d think he’s at its core. I’m thankful that sandwich talk is still a big part of what happens on Twitter. Robert dismisses birthdays as “small stuff,” of little importance if you miss it, and/since it’s not on Techmeme. I’d be pretty crestfallen if all of my friends dismissed my birthday as the small stuff. The “small stuff” is what I use Twitter for. The rest, meh, I can read in a zillion places that Adobe acquired Omniture. He’s got it backwards.

Any number of articles have been written, including Leah’s piece from the Spring on the value of phatic communications and how Twitter extends them to new territories — “Seemingly meaningless conversations that add up to a relationship being formed. It is the digital version of what’s up/fine in the hallway. Relationships include long conversations, sure, but the cement is often tiny interactions that keep the door open between long conversations. Twitter expands the hallway to the globe…”.

Another observation from the piece: “It’s very hard to say anything useful in 140 characters. Believe me, I’ve tried to spend most of 2009 saying stuff in 140 character bites. It isn’t satisfying most of the time.” For someone who reads so many Tweets and spends so much of his time immersed in Twitter culture, I was floored that he feels this way. He attributes the high percentage of tweets that have links in them to the fact that it’s difficult to pack something compelling into the short format, but I don’t see such a strong correlation between the two. A link isn’t necessarily used to expand on tiny thoughts; it can be an object that commentary is wrapped around. It’s the constraints of the medium that make it interesting. Even early on, I remember Robert struggling with this. He used to use ellipses a whole lot, to try to string together a series of Tweets into one thought — not sure if he still does that. At the time I made the remark to him at SXSW that there was a potential business model there. They could charge people like Robert who have trouble with brevity each time they use an ellipsis.

Robert has always described the world of technology through the lens of a very particular kind of person, perhaps even more particular than he realizes. When he decried the state of blogging in October ‘07, he did so in broad strokes and imprecise language but he was really talking about his friends and colleagues in technology, not the rest of the online world. When he “returned to blogging” earlier this year, it was as if no one had been using blogging tools since he’d “left.” When you haven’t read him for a while and then pick up something he’s written, it’s often jarring to what extent he uses general language to describe very narrow and focused behaviors and interest patterns.

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