Dan’s Blog

If you’re like me, you’re a Will Shortz junkie. You’ve several of his crossword books, and even remember fondly his time at Games magazine. You’ve also got a subscription to the New York Times crossword puzzle, but you don’t remember to download the puzzle on a daily basis. So you’re like, “Hey, I wish the puzzle would download to my computer every day, or, better yet, I wish it would show up in my inbox.”

I wrote a small perl script that does just that — it downloads the current puzzle, saves it where you want it, and emails it to addresses you specify. It’ll work best for OS X and Linux users, as it’s written in perl and requires a few external but fairly standard libraries that can be installed via CPAN. Download it here: NY Times Crossword Puzzle Downloader.

Short Directions:
Rename the file from .txt to .pl, make it executable, customize the variables, and add it as a cronjob.

Longer Directions:
…When I get a few minutes.

License: GPL, of course.

Jenny posts on how to have a spicy weekend. Apparently, it involves rock and roll, dancing, and roller derbies.

Alec — the man responsible for introducing me to indie rock and mix tapes — posts an animal-related mix over on his blog. The high point is, I think, “Ride Me Donkey”, which is surprisingly innocent, given the title.

This morning I realized that have everything necessary to create YouTube content (a MacBook with iSight and iMovie), so I decided to make a short clip. Being fairly lazy about the whole thing, it’s a clip of my cat drinking water. Enjoy!

Jessica has put together a Valentine’s Day card for y’all.  Enjoy!

Last week I finished up a website for One LA, which is an Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate located in and around the City of Angels. It was a fun site to work on, and it adds to the relatively small set of public-facing html sites that I’ve worked on that are still standing.

I recently finished reading Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, and I was impressed enough that I wrote a review of it, which I posted on Amazon.com. And now I’m posting it here:

Female Chauvinist Pigs is really about two things: sexual pleasure and freedom. Specifically, Levy wants to know why “post-feminist” freedom and sexuality — epitomized by Girls Gone Wild, Playboy bunnies, and the glorification of porn stars and strippers — looks so much like its opposite: a pre-feminist world in which women try their damnedess to please their partners (or crowds, or video cameras) without a strong sense of their own sexual desires.
Read more

Okay, so I only watched 10 minutes of the Bachelor, but I’ll tell you this: Moana is “America’s Sweetheart”. Like that lady in a different Bachelor season whose family member died during the filming, thereby forcing her to cancel a precious date. I think the Bachelor — maybe his name was Bob? Maybe he’s “reality TV famous”, and married a soap star? — felt that going to a family funeral was a sign that she wasn’t serious about dating him. It was also kind of a downer, and it took away from his camera time. That lady — whose name I can’t remember — now she was also “America’s Sweetheart”, but America has a short attention span and is constantly in need of new sweethearts. And now it’s Moana’s turn.

Pyewacket

Originally uploaded by Danathan.

Here’s Pyewacket!

Biking home tonight, I got mildly doored. (”Dooring” occurs when someone in a parked car opens their door as you’re riding by on your bike, quickly halting the bike and launching the rider.) My dooring was mild, as I was able to get mostly clear of the door — upon seeing the door open, hitting the breaks and turning turned out to be more effective than my inarticulate yelling — and so wound up on the pavement with my bike about six feet past the door itself.

I’ve been biking in city traffic on and off for about 5 years now, and I guess I was just due. Thankfully I’d read the Transportation Alternatives Guide to Dooring (or Getting Doored) so I had some sense of what to do. Also, thankfully, I was wearing a helmet. Turns out that they really are important.