Aaron Weber

Feminine Hygine Software (or, He Finally Shuts Up About Real Estate)

Ages and ages ago, I thought, hey, mencal is way too simplistic, we need a complex algorithym for prediction of various portions of one’s menstrual cycle, available as a calendar plugin for Evolution or something. Sure enough, someone built a web app called CyclesPage to track cycles and fertility. They have a basic service where a lady puts in data about her periods and it guesses when she’s ovulating, and a premium service, where she puts in data about her periods and basal body temperature and all sorts of other stuff, and it gets more accurate, and it can also send her emails for ovulation season.

Along with BlogHer, the women’s blog conference, this is an encouraging sign that there are more and more women involved in technology– it’s hard to measure by, say, checking how many people sign up for gmail or something similar.

Discuss. And for homework, an essay on gender roles and technology in the workplace.

China Effect

I mean, I knew it was coming. I read about it in places like Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s Website and Fistful of Euros, but the Chinese currency revaluation didn’t really hit home until I got this email today (nearly deleted by spam filtering, of course) warning me that all the promotional plush penguins and ball-caps with the company name on them are going to be more expensive now.

Perhaps this is good news for the US novelty, gimmick, and gizmo industry. Or did we shut that down twenty years ago? Do we still have a novelty/gizmo industry in this country?

Commentless Links

This isn’t real content, but here’s some neat stuff:
Via Freakonomics, a page that charts the current mood entries of Livejournal users.

Bostonist. A weblog about Boston.

Deep-End Dining, a weblog about weird food. I’m pretty excited to try the live octopus. Because any food that bites back is sure to excite.

Origins of the Behind

Amazon sells badonkadonk. Which is, apparently, some kind of Burning-Man-related vehicle from a conceptual design firm. Now, of course, since they’re made-to-order, it’s not likely that more than one was ever built. It’s possible none were ever built.

My current guess is that this personal tank is named after the booty, and not the other way around. I have no etymology for the booty, though. Oh well.

Online Store

We got us some medical waste dot com. Now there’s a place with affiliate programs I want to associate with! I bet they get their parts from the Alabama prison system. That’s a great source of body parts I hear.

Badonkadonk

How do you spell Badonkadonk anyway? Urban Dictionary has one entry for bedonkadonk, used only as an adjective, and quite a few more for badonkadonk.

But Slate goes with the e spelling anyway in its review of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Most of the discussion about the ad campaign has focused on whether the women are beautiful, and whether media creates eating disorders, and so forth. This article focuses on whether the ad campaign is effective in promoting Dove, and points out that while it’s obviously gotten plenty of press, it risks becoming “the brand for fat girls” and you know that’s not good for business, even if AOL seems to have done fine being the brand for idiots.

I admit it, I really posted this because I wanted an excuse to use the word “badonkadonk.”

Enjoyment

I went to the gym yesterday. It was good. I got my heart rate way the hell up– somewhere around 180. I think this was partly due to disgust at seeing the Alka-Seltzer World Championships of Competitive Eating on the TV. I saw this man whose claim to fame was eating 1.5 gallons of chili in fifteen minutes, and I thought, I must run faster.

Then Sports Illustrated came on with a football-themed commercial. The URL was SinflOffer.com. That’s almost as good as PooLife, the pool chemical company.

IM Logs

C: damn i wish i could get myself to blog regularly
Verbal: the secret is a high-fiber cereal.
C: Hahaha.
Verbal: Several of my friends have signed themselves up for a “content challenge,” where they post at least once every day for a month, and it has to be real content– no quizzes, no random links to the NYT without at least some good commentary.
C: I bet your friends are “writers.”
Verbal: I don’t know what most of them do, actually. I’ve only met two of them. They’re just blogs I read. Does that count as friends?

Foodie Paradise

Yes, this review of El Bullí is on a website called Food Tourist. And this one from the Guardian is equally insane. Well, what can you do? I emailed and asked if a table was available in case of cancellation.

But I repeat myself. I think I’ve posted on this topic before. Do I repeat myself?

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes. There will be time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. There will be coffee spoons. There will be wine. There will be vitamins and echinacea and exercise and Serrano ham.

My friends say, bring back a leg of illegal ham. Bring back a bottle of illegal booze. Bring back a funny wooden mask with mystical powers, or possibly termites. Bring back a case of syphilis, the red light district is full of sailors. They should, you know, they go from port to port.

Kitsch

Over the years, my girlfriend has accumulated a variety of unwanted gifts. They can’t be gotten rid of, but they can’t be kept, either. The cut-glass figurine of a cat (“she has a cat, she must like cat statuettes!”). Inspirational books like “I can’t accept not trying” by Michael Jordan, and a book for college graduates with a picture of the last pope on it, apparently because every college graduate needs sentimental pope-paraphernalia. They live in the box of guilt under the bed, where they will not be spotted by friends, but where they can be found in case of an emergency visit by the relative of origin. This weekend we plan to bite the bullet and ebay the more saleable items.