So as you could probably tell from my last post I like making stuff!

So I made this fun message machine to sneakily leave messages laying around the house for Laura!

Normal people have lots of fun family activities like zoos, aquariums, state fairs, etc.

Well us nerds need family activities too! So Make magazine puts on a big fair each year where us geeks can have a massive show-and-tell!

This fair has everything from weaving looms to crazy art cars to robots to giant Tesla coils.

We spent all day last Sunday there. Laura took some fabulous pictures. Enjoy!

Hi everyone!

Sorry, our "contact us" page seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle in the last month or so, and some of you were reporting issues and bugs in the diaries.

So we've brought the contact us page back. You can get to it from the footer of the site and from the BFF Lounge menu at the top, and it has a lovely new category "Report Website Issue".

Ok now time to get back to the regularly scheduled program - building new and awesome features for the coolest site on the web!

We've had server problems, you guys all know it.

 

Like an omlette of fabulous, we throw a lot of ingredients in the pot and try to figure out what people like. Sometimes lots and lots of people like our omlette. So much so that the stove catches fire!

 

Like today for instance, everyone LOVES our best dress picks and nearly set our poor servers on fire!

I'm reminded of a scene in the Nerd classic, "Monty Python and The Holy Grail":

FATHER:

One day, lad, all this will be yours!

PRINCE HERBERT:

What, the curtains?

FATHER:

No. Not the curtains, lad. Splendora! It will be your kingdom, lad.

HERBERT:

But Mother--

FATHER:

Father, lad. Father.

HERBERT:

B-- b-- but Father, I don't want any of that.

FATHER:

Listen, lad. I built this website up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a website on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest website in these islands!

I'm pretty sure they were talking about Splendora. Anyway that's my pledge to you, dear reader: The strongest castle website in the land!

For no partuclar reason, I've been thinking about Legos lately. Everybody loves Legos, right?!

Legos are a great gift but just make sure you buy enough of them! If you can't build a Death Star from entirely grey pices, you don't have enough! And I'm not talking about those lame kits with doors and windshields and working transmissions. I mean just the plain blocks. Lots and lots of them!

What To Desktop: Ubuntu Linux

Here's a bit of nerdiness from your friendly Splendora developer, Mr. Fletch.

I have never been so excited or so happy about my desktop before now. It's just one of those things you stop thinking about: stick a pretty picture on there and forget about it. Even though you use it every day, it's just boring and functional. Much like a toilet.

But for the first time in 2 years, I installed a brand new Linux desktop at home, Ubuntu flavor. I added a neat piece of software called Compiz which is just amazing. It puts virtual desktops on the sides of a 3d cube. I launch a web browser, read a bit but then decide to get a bit of work done. Spin the cube, have a new clean place to work. Spin back and get back to my web browsing, exactly as I left it. It also makes my windows wobbly like Jello when I'm moving them around and has all sorts of other neat eye-candy effects.

This thing will even play my WindowsXP games through an amazing Windows emulator called Wine. It can even run the officy type apps, so I hear. I wouldn't know :-)

So, if Windows XP or Vista is giving you the blues and you have a nice fast 3D card in your comp, get the geek in your life to help you switch! It's sooooo worth it.

In summary: don't you wish your desktop was hot like mine? :-P

As you may have already heard, us poor San Francisco dwellers suffered a big power outage yesterday. Our hosting provider was affected and for some reason the magic backup generators failed to kick in. Probably gremlins. Some very big sites were taken down as well, including Craigs List, Technorati, LiveJournal, and Typepad. The hosting facility was completely swamped for a few hours yesterday, and couldn't get splendora.com back up just by restarting our servers.

So after many hours of back and forth with the hosting company, yours truly hops in the batmobile (also known as the #12 bus) and heads down there. By the time I arrived, the madness had slowed a bit, and I was able to get through the security station quickly. I ride the elevator up to our floor biting my nails in anticipation. Has this blackout killed splendora?! Oh no!! So I arrive at my cabinet and wipe the sweat from my brow. Phew well at least all the computers seem to be running! I plug in a monitor and can see that they all came up just fine. Except the one. The one that would cause *everything* to stop working: our firewall. This quiet little machine sits around all day doing nothing but protecting splendora.com from bad guys. And I've gone and neglected it for so long! After 2 minutes of poking around I found a backup of the firewall configuration. Copy the file into place, restart, and bang Splendora is back! Yay!

I look around me and see 3 other teams working on their servers who weren't so lucky. They appear to have been standing there for hours and were not happy at all when I fixed Splendora in moments.

The moral of this story kids, is back up everything no matter how unimportant or trivial it seems.

So we're back now, bringing you the fashion and gossip of the day. Never fear, fletch is here! Enjoy.

Hugs & Kisses

--fletch

This is so cool. Some rubber ducks have taken a 15 year voyage that us poor humans can only dream about. They've circumnavigated the globe, enjoying a life of freedom and sunshine.

The coolest part is that they are actually useful! You'd think 30,000 rubber ducks dumped in the sea would be a disaster, but it's actually really useful in tracking the currents of the oceans.

When I grow up, I want to be a rubber duckie on a fantastic voyage ;-)

Read more about it here.

You know, every Monday I come in here and someone asks me how my weekend was. Well, let's just take care of the rest of the year now. On any given Monday, my answer to "how was your weekend?" is "Awesome! I did absolutely nothing!".

Countin' flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all.

Actually, I do *some* stuff on the weekends. It's just - here's the thing - no normal human being in their right mind would want to know what that is! Maybe I spent it working on my home brew media center. Maybe I played video games. Maybe I tinkered with some artificial intelligence code for kicks. Maybe I worked on solving an interesting math problem I read about. Maybe I did some work on splendora.com. Probably I didn't leave my computer desk longer than 5 minutes at a time all weekend.

Playin' solitaire 'till dawn, with a deck of fifty-one.

That's the thing about being a nerd. Work time looks identical to play time to the casual observer. This has been the subject of discussion between myself and Laura on many occasions. Well, I say "discussion", it's more like Laura complaining that I have no social life outside of very nerdy IRC chat rooms. Thing is, I'm hard wired this way, I can't help it!

Smokin' cigarettes and watchin' Captain Kangaroo.

Next weekend, Laura wants to (gasp!) go see a movie! I don't think I can handle it! Not just a movie, a double feature! I'm all for Tarantino and Rodriguez - those guys are the best. But the peace and comfort of sitting in front of a glowing CRT with my cats on top is calling my name. Can't we just wait for the DVD?

Now don't tell me I've nothing to do!

There seems to be a trend happening here. Delicious and horribly unhealthy lunches! So I'll chime in with my newest favorite: What's Up Dog.

In the deepest part of my lunch-depression, I believed there wasn't a french-fry within a mile of Splendora headquarters. Just when hari-kari seemed like the only option remaining to me, Gina steps in and saves my life!

What's Up Dog is a taste of home for me. Chicago is famous for it's tasty hotdogs. San Francisco, not so much. Great fish and Mexican food and tapas and everything under the sun, but the hot dog has been sadly misrepresented in SF. So What's Up Dog is like a break in the storm, an oasis in the desert.

My fav is the polish sausage with a side of fries. Pure heaven. Oooh it's getting close to lunchtime [drool] :-)