I like when people comment on the website. A lot. Using the address at the bottom of the page...

So this guy wrote in to say he enjoyed the site and would we link to him? My answer? Sure!

If you guys have thoughts about his site, post them to this thread...that way he gets some feedback.

Here's your daily dose of photo phun:

Yeah, those employees at Target really shouldn't leave objects with letters lying around. I wonder how long the display lasted like this after we set it up...

This is amusing. A little draggy at parts, but a cool concept.

Even more snow today. Walking to the metro I couldn't open my mouth without having several flakes be blown inside. It was still fun, regardless, kind of like shooting cows with a high powered rifle. The window across from me is solid white.

Sometimes Google overreaches a bit. So I'm shutting it down, preemptively on my end. As a result, the auto-link feature still can search the pages for addresses, etc., but it doesn't actually create links in your page. You just have to use the toolbar to see the maps.

In general, I'm not a huge fan of scripting. Sometimes, as with googlemaps, the scripting is cool. But too often, pages just need to do something simple without scripts.

So I just finished uploading the last two weeks' worth of pictures to the imageserver side of the site. Here's a glimpse:

I'll try to post at least one new one for a day for a bit, for all you lazy people who don't like to peruse the images themselves.

Dear Dredwerkz:

I was in a lesbian relationship for almost 4 years. It ended recently. I’m not quite ready to date again, but would love to meet some new people. Where can I go to meet some hot chicks who are intelligent, fun to be around and funny as hell? I’ve all but forgotten the finer points of dating and am uncertain how to get back in the saddle again.

The Quizzical Dyke

Helena Replies:

Edward's idea's are good ones...making friends with the friends you already have works remarkably well and when you have enough in the mix, they start to multiply like bunny rabbits.

My other suggestion is to take a cue from Charlotte York and meet your lesbians Sex and the City-style. Attend the gallery opening of a lesbian artist, meet lesbians, be invited to their lesbian clubhouse, and you're done. Since you *are* a lesbian, you won't get kicked out like poor Charlotte. A well-chosen reading or play could find you in the company of this same club. There is a club, right? With cocktail parties and ski trips?

Edward Replies: Well, I'm not sure if I should be giving anyone "the finer points of dating". Instead, I'm going to focus on your first request, namely, meeting funny intelligent women. (I am of course excluding the women who frequent 'werkz parties, of course, because they're already classy, attractive and witty. So the short answer should be to attend a party her...but I digreess.) First off, don't go the bar route. You'll get depressed at the lack of choices quite quickly. Second, have you fully exhausted the work friends? Having a company happy hour and inviting other people to join is a great way to meet people that you can use, six-degrees style, to get into other social circles. Sadly, most parties won't allow you the freedom to talk to a large group of people the same way crashing someone else's h-hour does. So, thirdly, you really have to hit up your friends. If you don't have any/enough that's a different problem. But assuming you do, it's often profitable to move one circle beyond their immediate circle to find interesting folks.

Finally, the best and easiest way to meet more people is to discover someone who's a central node of connections. It may take an exhaustive search of your friends, but chances are everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows everyone. That person is the person you need to hang out with. Go find them!

Brad Replies:

I'm not so sure about pilfering the work ranks, because it allows for the possibility of dating someone with whom you work, a capital offense in my book because of the inevitable collateral damage upon dissolution. Also the bar scene can be good if you know what to look for and where to hang out, and because the obvious inhibition-lowering quality of alcohol makes asking out those intelligent hot chicks a lot easier.

But really the easiest way is simply to tell your male friends that you're available, and voila! presto! actionable intelligence will reveal itself. the reason? every guy knows another guy who brags like crazy about having some sort of connection to a circle of hot lesbians. for instance if you were in cambridge, i know this crazy dude who lives with four women, so you could talk to me, i could talk to him, and all of us could go to a party where you might meet some good targets. how's that for advice!

It's time for some housekeeping notes.

First off, someone provided a solution to the homer cube problem. A special shout-out to reader MC for the help here.

Second, a few weeks ago, some contributors posted to the "origins" subpage. Bad idea. Those little drop-down boxes on the back-end are there for a reason. Likewise (and linking to below)...there's a specific format for the "advice" subsection. Read some past highlights to see the general format. Got it? Good.

Third, several people have submitted some advice columns lately, over the internets! I'll post them shortly.

So this weekend, in between all the craziness, I managed to finish the final episodes of Buffy that I began watching here. Maybe I'll throw up a review sometime. And let's just say I'm not the biggest fan of Marti Noxon's influence.

Having only seen a few episodes (and none of the arcing plot lines) before I tackled all seven seasons, I can honestly now say that they were, on the whole, some of the freshest writing around.

Yeah, I hate cash. But until the day someone jams an RFID chip in my hand and I can remove all my cards, I'll need to carry some credit. But as this story in the Post indicates, there are still some idiotic merchants out there:

For years, Marcia Levi refused to accept either credit or debit cards for purchases under $10 at her downtown gift shop, Chocolate Moose. Customers complained. She lowered the threshold to $5. Customers still complained, so two years ago she gave up on any minimum.

"People come in and charge $2.25 for a card or $1.75 for jelly beans," said Levi, who co-owns Chocolate Moose with her sister Barbara. "It's annoying. In the past two years, they've just whipped out the card without thinking about it, no matter how small the purchase."

Yeah, you see "without thinking about it" means "not willing to pay cash for an item that costs the same with a credit card". Got it? Why wouldn't they pay with credit? Because it hurts your feelings? Later...

The mentality "absolutely drives me nuts," Levi said. That's because each time shoppers like Keo swipe plastic at her store, Levi pays a hefty fee.

And later

Levi said she easily pays 55 cents in fees on a $2.25 greeting card, depending on the brand of credit card used. That's more than half of her $1 profit margin, she said. For debit cards, she pays a flat fee of 35 to 45 cents per transaction.

"It may not sound like much, but if you do that 100 to 200 times a day, that really eats into your profit margin," Levi said. Her best hope is that the larger purchases offset losses on the smaller ones.

Okay, so I've heard this argument before. 55% of your profit is a large chunk to see go unused. (Although to be fair, the fact is she's normally making a 44% profit off of each card she sells...down to 24% with a credit card, which isn't that ridiculous at all.) So lets see, what if someone offered her a much lower merchant fee? Would that make a difference? Say they offered the ability to aggregate purchases (slap a whole bunch of those cards together into one mega-purchase and the 55-cent fee suddenly isn't that large anymore...)

For merchants who don't have that kind of volume, third-party vendors have stepped in to fill the void. Among them is Peppercoin Inc., a two-year-old firm outside Boston. Two leading U.S.-based banks now promote Peppercoin's services to the merchants they work with, a sign that the bundling idea may be catching on as a mainstream concept, Kountz said.

Levi, the card shop owner, said she considered aggregating but found it prohibitively expensive. (Peppercoin, for instance, charges 5 cents per transaction for its services.)

Until the banks lower their fees, or the aggregators drop their prices, Levi copes with micropayments as best she can. She gently nudges shoppers to consider cash. Or she gives them "the look." Occasionally, if the item is particularly inexpensive, she even pays for it out of her own pocket, she said, figuring it's all the same in the end.

"People just don't have as much cash in their wallets as they used to," Levi said. "I don't have much choice."

Hmm. 5 cents per transaction. That would mean that gift card went from being a 44% profit to a 42% profit. Seems smart enough to me. It certainly seems far from "prohibitively expensive". In fact, it makes Levi look like a chump. How much lower could you get? 3 cents per transaction? I mean...an aggregator has to make money somehow. (With a 5 cent fee, an aggregator would need to combine at least 11 purchases per transaction just to break even on the aforementioned gift card)

All things being equal, I think Levi needs to wake up and realize that in the system of capitalism the consumer is king. If she doesn't offer credit card support, I'll go somewhere else. Actually, just reading this article made me never want to shop at her store again. To think that after I purchase an item, she's slipping money into the till....how idiotic is she?

Helena's visit, a big party and a lengthy recovery. All part of a fun weekend. I'd post more, but pizza and Tuesday Salon beckon...