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Reading is fundamental: AJ's Summer Reading List

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:46:00 GMT

Recently, while I was reading and enjoying Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand), I came across a list of books somebody suggested everybody read. Unfortunately I have forgotten where I saw it... But, I took his list, massaged it a little, and came up with my own.

Here is a list of the next 10 books coming up from my list:

Title	Author
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Prince	Niccolo Machiavelli
Slaughter-house Five	Kurt Vonnegut
1984	George Orwell
The Republic of Plato: Second Edition	Plato
The Brotherrs Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger
The Wealth Of Nations	Adam Smith
For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde

My uncle's first shirt.woot.com sale

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:22:00 GMT

How cool?! My uncle, Jim, has been creating pieces of art in various forms for as long as I can remember. Lately he has been creating t-shirt designs. Tonight at midnight, his first approved shirt.woot.com design goes on sale.

He has titled this piece Feed The Whale.

Jim describes it as "a kind of Haida and Tlingit
Indian influenced thing"

From what I hear, the shirt will be a creme american apparel shirt.

Very cool, and way to go Jim!

Check out more of Jim's art at his flickr page here.

Today I found a reason to actually have a webcam

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:04:42 GMT

Sandy, a co-worker of mine (you'll see her pic later) just got a Mac Book and today she brought it to work to let me play with it. As luck would have it I opened an application called Photo Booth. Well, if you haven't had time to play around with that app, you should because it is hilarious.

Here are the the pics we ended up with...ok, back to work!

Dave

Conrad

Sandy

What is the @ sign called?

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:52:27 GMT

I was looking at some text today that contained the oh-so familiar "@" sign and I tried to say it out loud and realized I didn't know what to call the character, except to just call it "at sign".

Other characters have their own cool names:

#is called (among other things) "pound sign", "number sign", "hash / hash mark / hash sign".

& is called "ampersand" or "and sign" and has the special privilege of taking on a few different shapes.

So, it seems that our good friend @ should sport some cool alter egos right?

@ As far as I can tell @ is simply referred to as "at sign".

There goes 15 minutes of my life I will never get back.

Divorce humor at Wal-Mart

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:39:35 GMT

As I was driving around the parking lot at Wal-Mart this weekend while my wife was in the store, (I hate going in there) I happened upon a pretty humorous scene.

Disclaimer for the overly sensitive people: Yes, divorce is wrong, don't do it and stuff. But, what you are about to see is still pretty funny.

Vista comes to town: AKA Dave loves Microsoft

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:57:37 GMT

Recently the Vista tour bus/van/thing came rolling by the place of our employment. Seeing the perfect opportunity for shenanigans, I thought "Lets go slap some Ubuntu stickers on that thing!"

Well, unfortunately neither Dave , Conrad or myself had any stickers left so we were left with unarmed and unhappy.

We didn't really care to go in the actual bus itself, but I did happen to capture Dave displaying his true feelings about Microsoft. (The truth comes out Dave)

ShieldZone screen shield for my Blackberry: First Impressions

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:52:09 GMT

I just received my ShieldZone screen shield for my Blackberry Pearl phone, and so far I am pretty pleased. A friend of mine turned me on to ShieldZone after he got one for his mp3 player and had nothing but good things to say about it.

It looks a lot like the usual vinyl stick-on screen protector stuff, but this is supposedly a completely different animal.

From ShieldZone.com :
Made from a unique material originally made for the military to protect the leading edges of helicopter blades, the invisibleSHIELD™ offers consumers protection that other screen protectors can only dream about. With over 600 copyrighted, precision cut designs for a variety of gadgets, ranging from MP3 players, to PDAs, to the newest cell phones, the invisibleSHIELD™ offers optimum protection. If we don’t already have it, we’ll do a custom design for you. And we don't only protect screens; many of our shields are designed to cover as much of the gadget as humanly possible.(Patent-Pending)

The shield itself was fitted very very well to my phone's screen. It is hard to even tell it is on there now, and I bet nobody would ever notice it if they didn't know to look for it.

The installation is interesting...you get some mystery spray bottle that you coat the shield with, the shield, and a mini-squeegee(sp?) thing. The spray I think helps clean the surface, allows you to position the shield, and then maybe helps bond the shield to the screen. Because it is really on there...not sure if it's gonna come off :)

Demo of how strong the material is from their site:

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!