Arranging Matches

Colors

From Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Holding Purses

Scott Adams wrote a blog post today on the best way for a man to hold a woman's purse.  Scott's solution is an invention sure to be on sale in the SkyMall catalog any day now: Purse Pliers.  One of Scott's commenters linked to an Uncyclopedia article with various suggestions on how to hold a purse like a man.  Both solutions are good, but neither of them have it quite right.

Things that should exist: Reducing salary to buy more PTO

Wouldn't it be nice if Americans had anything close to the standard four to six week paid vacations Europeans receive? Then maybe we wouldn't need Take Back Your Time Day every October 24 - by which time the average American has already worked the same amount Europeans work in a year.  I think Americans ought to be able to "buy" extra PTO days by reducing their salaries.

My plan is simple: Reduce your annual salary by 1.5% per year for every extra day you'd like of paid time off.  This would only be available as a salary reduction for a set amount of PTO days per year.  There wouldn't be a separate option for "buying" individual days with cash. 

Candles

From Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.

Airport computer (In)security

I was out of town over the weekend, and while waiting for my plane at the other city's airport, I saw one of the Windows-based arrival/departure displays reboot.  At first I thought it was funny, because that damned Windows just can't do anything right, can it?  Unfortunately, I couldn't get the camera out in time to snap a photo.  I'm no security expert, but I picked up some interesting (frightening?) security information while watching the machine reboot.

La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur

Things that should exist: Walking meetings

Wouldn't it be cool to hold small meetings of three or four people by taking a walk instead of sitting in a windowless, fluorescent-bathed conference room?  Walking relaxes me, clears my mind and spurs creativity.  Being outside in actual sunlight is healthy, refreshing and makes the rest of the day much easier.  Holding a walking meeting would be like taking a break, except that you'd be working.  Sure, you wouldn't be able to take notes, but my experience is that you usually come out of meetings with three or less new things to do anyway.  Walking meetings should definitely exist.

Update: John at Uneasy Rhetoric and John at RT Rider were both kind enough to continue and expand on this discussion by linking to my post. 

Look out - railroad crossing

 

Get yer event feed

Update:  Sacramento News and Review changed their calendar page, so the SNRUpcoming feed no longer works.  Dapper seems to be having some problems lately, but the other feeds should  work once Dapper works out its issues.  SN&R still doesn't have a working events RSS feed, so I'll try to create a new Dapper feed based on the new SN&R calendar page. 

I've long been annoyed that there are no RSS-capable event calendars for the Sacramento area.  I missed a David Sedaris talk a few months ago because I didn't know about it until tickets were already sold out.  I'm tired of missing cool events, so I rolled my own RSS events feeds using Dapper.  I make no warranties about any of these feeds.  They depend on Dapper continuing to run their free service along with Tickets.com and the Sacramento News and Review not changing their site designs.  That being said, here are the RSS feeds I created:

• Crest Theatre Upcoming Events
• CSUS University Union Upcoming Events
• Sacramento Community Center Theater Upcoming Events
• Sacramento Memorial Auditorium Upcoming Events
• Sacramento News and Review Calendar