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While in Chicago, we went for lunch at Navy Pier. What can I say? We were tourists. As we were lead to our table, one of the waiters stopped me and said, “I love your shirt!” It was my microformats icon shirt, and it turned out he had no idea what it was. He just liked it.

A couple of days later, as we were passing through security at the base of the Sears Tower— Carolyn’s pick for what to do that morning— one of the guards burst out laughing and, pointing to my shirt, said “That’s right on, man! I heard that!” The source of his mirth was my ALA “Please code responsibly” T-shirt, the one with the car-off-a-dock icon on the front.

It’s literally been years since I had a random stranger comment on a shirt I was wearing. Is there something about Chicagoans that they’re more conscious of other people’s shirts?

In keeping with Molly’s recent conversations with comment spam, I present to you a back-handed compliment (or is it?) that I found in my moderation queue:

A great site where one can enjoy the thought of a great mind long departed. Cheers for the good work!

Wow. Harsh.

If you’re bothered by the fact that you weren’t bothered by a thought you just had, isn’t the thought just bothering you by proxy?

Thanks to The Wolf’s pointer to The Other Wolf’s post, I now bring you “Unfortunately Eric”.

Unfortunately, Eric mentions it, but doesn’t really discuss aa major concern of many…

You mean your misspelling of the word “a”? I didn’t want to harp on it.

Unfortunately Eric Doesn’t Look Old Enough to Remember MS C 7.0…

Sure I am. I just don’t want to remember it.

Unfortunately, Eric and Felecia are now against Lisa and the Wildlife preserve.

They started it!

She and Eric had been living with Dan in Hawaii for a while, but unfortunately, Eric had to go back home for a family emergency before we got there.

And that’s how she and Dan ended up together, whereas I ended up on the streets. Crazy times…

Unfortunately Eric takes several wrong turns on the twisty, identical, unlabeled streets leading to Dog Boys (entirely due to a lack of preparation)…

In my defense, I was totally prepared for Cat Boys.

Unfortunately Eric has not released those precious gems of 415 golden songs, nor the EMB II album, as Eric left the group for other projects…

They weren’t very danceable anyway.

Unfortunately, Eric didn’t receive the letter until after the dance.

Story of my life.

Unfortunately, Eric had a couple of problems.

Your count seems a bit low.

Unfortunately, Eric had an appetite for destruction - which he never had the opportunity to quench…

Eric SMASH!

unfortunately eric is not only drop dead f*cking gorgeous he…

Oh, stop.

Unfortunately, Eric did not live long enough to witness the legend he created.

Aw crap. Did I drop dead again?

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for this post to throw Google’s results out of whack. (Answer: three days.)

Excerpt from an IM session that just now concluded:

Molly Holzschlag: you seem to be a bit more organized than I do

Molly Holzschlag: although your office looks a lot like mine :)

Eric Meyer: My data is organized. My life is not.

What is it about the Japanese that they loooove to blend colors?

Lest you think I’m indulging in some sort of bizarre racial stereotyping, I submit for your consideration the Technorati search results for blogs and other sites pointing to my Color Blender. The Blender been moderately popular ever since its release, but so far as I can tell, the Asian market is just eating it up. If I see a new Japanese site appear in my egorati feed, the odds are 49 out of 50 that it’ll be linking to the Blender.

So what’s the deal there? Anyone have insights, specuation, or even translations that might shed some light on this little enigma?

(Note: it turns out that these are Chinese blogs using Japanese fonts, and not Japanese sites as I originally thought. I’m leaving the original entry intact rather than update it. Still, this means that the essence of the original question remains, even if the geography was off by a bit.)

When you own your own business (or just work independently), there’s an extra-special feeling of frisson when the mailman arrives bearing an envelope from the Internal Revenue Service. I recently got one, though, that made me laugh out loud, despite being about the possible loss of my third-quarter payment. No, really. It still makes me chuckle every time I read the second paragraph:

On Sunday, September 11, 2005 an accident occurred on the San Mateo Bridge near San Francisco, California involving a courier transporting payments to an IRS Payment Processing Site. A truck carrying tax payments overturned, causing approximately 30,000 Form 1040ES quarterly estimated tax payments to be ejected into the San Francisco Bay.

And people say the IRS has no sense of poetry.

After a lovely Sunday morning breakfast at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, Kat, Carolyn, and I strolled through The Grove to check the sights and pick up a gift card for some friends. As we neared the center of the main drag, Carolyn suddenly pointed and shrieked delightedly, “Daddy!”

She was pointing directly at the large white logo in the middle of the silver façade of the Apple Store.

I’m thinking that maybe I need to spend a little less time on my PowerBook.