fractalnavel

so me & self are pulling in the drive on the way back from the beer store, fog everywhere, and a nice cedar fire burning somewhere in the neighborhood, and self notices something on the dark porch.  "what's that?"  i wander over to take a look - and surprise, surprise - the xo is here !

i had pretty much given up on this until april at least, given some statistics & such that someone had recently worked out on deliveries.  but yeah, it just suddenly appeared, no knock or anything, and i was home all day (unless it got here before ten & i was still asleep).  i checked specifically yesterday, nothing.

somehow i was expecting a white box with green markings.  glad it was less conspicuous than that.

so now what ?  it's late-ish, i'm sipping suds, perhaps now is not the time to dig into the unknown and unboxing.  not sure why there's two boxes, though.  oh, ok, what the hell, i'll just do some unpacking then.  not like i'm missing anything good on tv tonight.  self says "take some pictures!".  fine. *eye roll*  "but first get another beer!"

well, here's box #1: hey - what the ... ?!  that's candy !!  aww, shucks, the olpc people are trying to make nice ;-)

no, wait a minute - that's an american express thing.  says "... please enjoy this ... as a thank you for attending one of our By Invitation Only^® experiences in 2007. ..." um, sure - where exactly have i been this last year ?  skiing, and a bunch of graduation trips that i will probably never write about (too rich for words).  but ok, whatever - chocolates are in hand, and they're never going back. 

in fact - i hadn't even used my ax platinum card last year - i haven't used ax for years, it seems - until a few weeks ago, when i forgot my usual card of current choice.  maybe it was a welcome back gesture.  or maybe someone's using my card - i guess i should check my statements. nope - nothing unexpected there either.

anywho, back on track - where was i ?  "*nudge* pssst - xo"  oh, right.  but the chocolates...

weird how those two packages arrived at one time.  man - peanut butter bonbons, "la parisienne" cocoa, "exotic" truffles, and a small bar of - what - "buddha leaf" - "malaysian pandan leaves + dark chocolat" - that one's not even on their lists.

best i can tell is that this stuff falls somewhere around $60-70 - !  just lifting the lids of the boxes - and not breaking the seals - the aroma is amazing.

hate to say this, but at the moment i'm more excited about the chocolate than the xo.  check the video on their about page.  i'm impressed.

so if you want to really blow away your significant other, get one of their $300-400 gift boxes - complete with champagne.

i'll get to the xo manana...

a hall of mirrors, kicked off by a story :

the brain is the vat !

who, 'me' ?

out of my mind

one focus of reading for the day, rabbit-holing into many related corners.  even found my way to "space settlement" at one point.

eh, self is back.  says we're out of beer...

pi day !

craig:

Sent: 2008.03.14 10:40:08 Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: happy pi day! 3/14
 

http://www.piday.org/

me:

first reaction: thank you sir, and same to you.

 

second reaction (after seeing where that link goes): oh no - they've commercialized it !   next thing you know, they're going to dumb it down for the masses.

 

on the other hand, should have thought of this myself.  except i'm not of that mindset.  easy enough to do, using those free produce & fullfill on demand shops.

 

see http://coolwhois.com/d/piday.org/20080314085304.  i can't get a decent response from the host domain name it returns.

 

ah, but ok, they've been around for a while, that takes a little bit of the edge off: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.piday.org/.  wayback has been slow lately...

 

this is also interesting: http://trace.die.net/search/?source=bm&q=http%3A//ord.dreamhost.com.  from there, get alexa info, and some interesting whois: http://whois.domaintools.com/piday.org (too bad a lot of these details are only available for a price - sometimes steep). 

 

looks like the site has had regular changes over the years, so at least the guy is somewhat committed to this.

 

and what about the guy himself ?  http://cbri.umn.edu/~kunau/?p=89 (they must know each other through choir) (interesting, that wordpress site looks almost identical to scott w.'s graffiticms site - see http://evil.che.lu/2007/4/6/skittlish-0-4-release-and-sightseeing (which is also worth browsing around on)), and mostly, his site: http://www.hellerich.net/  - he's a young'un, gradgitated in '05.  means he put up the piday.org site when he was 18 or so - !

 

but "official" site for pi day ?  gimme a break.  surprised there's nothing _on_ that site _about_ the site; i wouldn't have done all of the above ;-)

 

btw, relevant to a recent discussion of ours and to your employer / customer: http://cbri.umn.edu/~kunau/?p=143 (linked paper: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/).  worth checking out other stuff from that guy's site and his outbound links, etc.  he's in the bioinformatics field.  also check out his department: http://cbri.umn.edu.

 

anyway, thanks for triggering that tour, interesting stuff out there.

i think that's what you might call a disproportionate response ;-)