The Rotato spirit embiggens us all!

Happy Birthday, MeFightClub! Thanks to Doc and Stav (why he ever went by "elcraptastico" in the beginning, I'll never know. Everyone called him Stav anyway!) for getting us started, and to Chundo for adding the pubbie, where we mingle with the un-MeFied masses.
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 3:28 PM on October 11, 2008

sgt.serenity, the pass is on HerrDoktor's profile - the first link in the post.

We had an AWESOME birthday bash on the server last night. There was singing, and a motley crew of people virtually killing eachother throughout the night. GGs all.
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 10:27 AM on October 12, 2008

Portal is totally amazing and highly recommended. But the Orange Box has Half Life 2, which could potentially be an issue. TF2 might be as well, as it's also an FPS.

Katamari is a great recommendation. You might ask them to check if there are any downloadable games that might work as well?
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:34 PM on October 11, 2008 marked best answer

Both FedEx Kinkos and Sir Speedy do this. Contact the one closest to you, ask for them to give you an estimate for printing and binding into a 3-ring binder (or just to print to 3-hole drilled paper, and you buy your own binder), and then ask if they offer local delivery. If they don't, then you can get them to ship it to you.

It should be fairly reasonably priced since it's not in color. I just did a job of 200 copies of 70 double-sided pages for $600, which works out... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:28 PM on October 11, 2008

Did you try out Modista (as linked from the last podcast)? I found some perfect-for-me shoes using it!
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 5:41 PM on October 7, 2008

I would recommend a Fishing Pond (a staple of fair type things where I grew up, where it is called a "fiskdamm").

Basically, it's a little fishing booth, where the kid uses a makeshift fishing rod and line to throw the "hook" (something like a clothespin) into a smallish booth (easily made with a sheet, decorated with blue and green craft paints as if it was a pond, or with an underwater theme). An adult sits on the inside, grabs the line and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 5:08 PM on October 7, 2008 marked best answer

I have a Swedish phone number through SkypeIn that forwards to my U.S. cell phone if I'm offline (if I'm on Skype, which is hardly ever, I answer it there instead). I talk to friends and relatives that way all the time, and it works really, really well. The call quality is excellent, it's cheap for them, and not particularly expensive for me.

SkypeIn for three months is US$18. Add some Skype credit to pay for the forwarding, and you can try it out for a fairly... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 4:42 PM on October 7, 2008

Did you just come back from spending time at home, by the way?

My parents, brother, and entire extended family lives in Europe, and every time I spend time with them I entertain thoughts about returning home to Sweden again. It becomes kind of a burden for a while after returning to work and home in the U.S., but then that feeling fades as I do my own thing with my husband. I love my in-laws (who live close by), but nothing compares to my actual family, particularly as... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 5:21 PM on October 4, 2008

I had never even heard of miniature horses as guides before, but it seems like a bad idea. A good guide dog is like an extension of the person and companionship all at once - it's poetry in motion watching one work. I just don't see horses doing anything of the sort. Very interesting reads, though. Thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 5:05 PM on October 4, 2008

I just now saw this. Wow, I had totally forgotten the "guest page" from my first website that is the third result for my (unique) name. And I must be doing something right anyway - vanity Google in 2001 = 15, in 2008 = 16,200.
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 5:35 PM on October 1, 2008

It's nice to see someone trying to explain the morass that is the USCIS. If only the politicians would pay attention would be good, as the current discussion on immigration is sorely lacking.

I went through the H1B system right out of college, which was a huge hassle with probably five or six visits to the INS and a ton of paperwork. But that was before the lottery, so once all the paperwork was done it wasn't so bad. The citizen process after that was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 6:16 PM on September 24, 2008

If you get a SkypeIn number (a local US number), you can then redirect that number to anywhere you are - be it to a landline or to your mobile phone.

For example, I have a local number in Sweden that my relatives use to call me. If I'm online with Skype (which isn't all that often), I can pick it up there. If I'm not, it will redirect to my mobile phone number, and it rings on my mobile. You can do the exact same thing, except that you would get a local US number instead... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:40 PM on September 22, 2008 marked best answer

if i do use skype, do i always need to be signed on for the forwarding to work

no, not at all. I'm hardly ever signed in, and the forwarding works fine all the time.

As for reliability, I've never ever had any problems, and I use it at least twice a week or so. There have been days with poor reception, but they are few and far between. It's not like you have to pay a lot for a year's subscription or anything. I think you can... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 5:51 PM on September 24, 2008

The George Washington Parkway is the prettiest drive in the local area, imo, and I see a lot of bikers on it too. Start where the parkway starts at 495 to the west, and ride east/southeast through Arlington, Alexandria, and down to Mount Vernon along the Potomac. I find it very restful, (except for the part through Old Town Alexandria, which can be crowded).
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:46 PM on September 22, 2008

Totally thirding (or whatever) Portal and Grim Fandango. Both are awesome. I also replayed Grim Fandango last year, and it held up really well.

If you loved adventure games, you could always try out some of the Telltale Games titles. They have demos (so you can try it out), and they are episodic, so it's small doses and small payments. If you like them, you can then buy a whole "season". I have been playing the Sam & Max games, which are fun, and thinking... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 5:20 PM on September 22, 2008

I have lived in big cities and small, on three continents and both in the U.S. south and north, and I've never noticed this. But then I look at the ground all the time (old habit), so perhaps I just don't notice. Fascinating! I'll be paying attention walking down the street in D.C. tomorrow, for sure.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:10 PM on September 21, 2008

Taco seasoning and flour tortillas. Mexican food was the only thing we never found anywhere when I lived in China, and the Mexican food themed care package we got was the best ever! Seconding magazines - I don't read them here, but things like Entertainment Weekly and People were awesome fun to read. Anything specific to your home town is great too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:00 PM on September 21, 2008

I know you said neither 301 nor "any other" redirects, but I don't see why they wouldn't let you do it the old fashioned way and include a meta tag redirect in the header of the old site? Change the text of the old page to include a note about the site moving to the new location and a link to that new site, so that people will update their bookmarks/links if they have them*, and then auto forward to the new site after an appropriate time period. (I wouldn't do this if I saw any other... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:52 PM on September 21, 2008

Some of the online commentary is really interesting:

- Whistleblower about why he identified Sanlu as the company responsible for the contamination
- About downplaying the incident by pointing the finger - other countries do it too!
- Chinese hackers taking on the cause?
- Anti-Sanlu photoshops at ChinaSmack.
- ChinaSmack also has some interesting translations of Chinese netizens reacting to the scandal.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 5:53 PM on September 21, 2008

CollegeNelson is absolutely correct about one of the major causes of powdered milk being in such common use in China. It has a lot to do with so many working mothers.

I think it's important to note that milk, along with other dairy products, has taken on an important part of the Chinese diet these days - much more so than even just a decade ago. That despite the fact that a lot of people in China are lactose intolerant, and milk has never really been part of the Chinese... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 8:23 PM on September 21, 2008

I get swelling like that if I sit motionless in front of the computer for longer than an hour or so. It happens at home but not at work, so I'm pretty sure it has to do with my chair at home (it's a bit too tall, so I tend to "dangle" my feet a bit there, or sit crosslegged). I've gotten used to moving my feet a lot in my chair at home, which has reduced the severity and frequency of swelling. My doctor didn't think it was anything to worry about, and just encouraged me to get up and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 6:09 PM on September 21, 2008

Under "Get Info", check the "Sorting" tab to make sure it doesn't have anything weird listed there, as changing things there can make the music show up differently in the sort order.

Also, check if the option to "only sync checked music" is enabled. Depending on if you keep your music is checked or not, it would affect the sync operation too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 6:03 PM on September 21, 2008

For our workgroup Samsung laser printer at work, we used to use the compatible toner cartridges. But the ink never stuck to the paper as well (particularly for letterhead paper), and it started having recurring paper jams. All the problems we had were instantly solved by getting the Samsung toner cartridge, so we have never gone back.

If I was printing things for home use rather than business correspondence, though, I think it would probably be worth the lower cost.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 5:02 PM on September 20, 2008

How about this. Surreptitiously determine his most played class in TF2.* Then buy him a toy or something that relates to that class. There are a ton of places online that do this, even though the Valve store is only OK (the shirts are kind of blah, imho, and the cool litograph is sold out).

Instead, try these searches for TF2 on zazzle or cafepress for some good stuff. (If he likes to play heavy, the "who touched sasha!" shirt is great.)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 4:49 PM on September 20, 2008 marked best answer

I have been working on some of the same things at my non-profit, with some success (we just started doing this in the last year).

Based on informal discussions with friendly bloggers (the ones writing about us anyway), we decided early on not to just add bloggers to the press contacts list for targeted press releases unless they specifically asked for that. We felt (and conversations with some prominent bloggers in the field confirmed) that it would likely be... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 3:39 PM on September 19, 2008

Desktop Tower Defense and Peggle. Seconding Fantastic Contraption, which is really fun. In a similar vein is Armadillo Run.

All of these are awesome timesucks.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 3:13 PM on September 19, 2008

You can still do it with mail merge, if you have one of the recent versions of Word (2002/XP and newer), although it won't do the formatting for you. The trick is filtering (Word calls it "mail merge recipients"), which you do in your Word document as an intermediary step between the spreadsheet and the merged document.

It's kind of hard to explain, but I'll try. If you have a prepared spreadsheet with all the possible variables you want inserted, you would... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:39 PM on September 15, 2008

nthing Sketchup. It took me about an hour to learn the interface (no reading manuals or following tutorials, just testing things out), and then I created a basic model of a my ideal room setup for a conference I'm running, and it took no time at all really. (See my Flickr in profile for outcome.)

A tip is to do a search for things like tables and chairs on the pre-rendered model site. You can download pre-made items that you can scale into your models - makes it much faster.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:10 PM on September 15, 2008

It's cool and very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's "fun". I had more fun with the creature creator itself, tbh.

There are quite a few creatures tagged with MeFi already, btw. Oh, and I'm Gemmy there too.
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 9:11 AM on September 8, 2008

Every time that resurfaces, I wish I'd been able to answer at the time.

This was the final exam question in my forensic anthro class in college (apply your knowledge of forensic identification techniques and write about how to overcome them), so I have a 10-page A+ paper written on the subject. I guess I should dig it out and blog it or something...
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 4:51 PM on September 5, 2008

I just spent a good chunk of this afternoon literally turning our apartment upside down, looking for that paper.

I finally found where it *should* have been (with essays called "Hackettsville Forensics Case", "Self Identification: A Forensic Biography", and "Humans on the Menu: Research Paper in Anthropological Theory"), but I can't find the actual exam paper on disposing of bodies. Guess I must have put it somewhere... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 4:40 PM on September 6, 2008

I agree that you need a forum. Vanilla seems to work fine from what I have seen, but I personally like the Invision based forums.

If you just want to set up a forum, without the website, I would recommend InvisionFree. It's a free (i.e. ad supported) forum that is pretty easy to set up and run.

I am the admin for a forum there where we (300+members) have been posting for about three years without any problems. The only bad thing are the ads, but... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 4:00 PM on September 5, 2008

Happy Birthday! Grattis på födelsedagen!
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 8:15 AM on September 5, 2008

Seconding The Riches. I thought it was brilliant, and I love all the stuff on your list.

Angel
If you can stomach weird aliens and more traditional sci-fi, there's always Farscape (which I'm actually re-watching right now and really enjoying).
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:58 PM on September 4, 2008

My stomach is all in icy-feeling knots just thinking about another big storm hitting the same area again. Good luck to all in the path of the storm. Stay safe, and know the entire country is sending good vibes your way.
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 10:44 PM on August 30, 2008

ColdChef, that's heart wrenching reading, I'm so sorry you have to go through this.

What can we out-of-towners do to help? Would donating to a national charity like the Red Cross be ideal, or are there any charities in your local area that could use the help? Or, can we send you some cash directly to help out your neighbors and your family? Just let us know.
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 8:44 PM on September 4, 2008

I don't see anything glaringly obvious in your logfile, but that doesn't mean much. You might want to try looking each entry up (all the .exe files) to see if any of them might be the culprit.

Is it only Google, or all search engines? Does it happen both for Firefox and for IE?
Definitely check the hosts file, make sure it's not set to redirect you. Does trying to access Google and tech sites via a proxy server work? (Try proxify.com)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 8:42 PM on September 3, 2008

National Geographic
Google News (Even better if you help him set up an iGoogle page that has mostly news about things he likes and/or his hometown)
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Scientific American

I found, when helping some elderly acquaintances get online, that it's easier to start small and with something that they really care about (say, the news from home) and then to branch out from there, rather than trying to offer a huge amount... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 7:45 PM on September 2, 2008 marked best answer

I ordered an unfortunate (alien) animal from Cat Grey at morbidtendencies.com as a gift, and my friend still talks about the cool wrapping. It came in a tie-died scap of cloth, wrapped in leaves and weird string. It was awesome.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:20 AM on September 1, 2008

Wow, that's fantastic!
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 10:54 PM on August 30, 2008

Seconding the double salt, that usually does it for me when my normal routine isn't quite cutting it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 2:52 PM on August 29, 2008

Swedish is correct.

I would also go with "komponist" for Danish, like whitewall said.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:30 PM on August 27, 2008

My husband and I used to go to a movie theater in backwoods Arkansas that only had a few of those pre-movie slides that played every time. One of them was a rebus (recreation), where the answer was supposed to be the name of a famous actor (guess which one?). They showed it over and over and over ad nauseum, and we used to joke around with some alternate answers - including Ducky Gemstone - and it became a standing joke.

He used to to play games... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gemmy at 10:32 PM on August 26, 2008

Drive to the beach, find a deserted area. Stand in the surf up to your knees and turn your face towards the wind. Close your eyes, then sing every song you know, breathing deeply of the salty air. As the wind carries your voice away, let it blow cares and worries away with it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:08 PM on August 24, 2008

yea, Dinner for One. I can probably recite it verbatim too. Growing up it was a total tradition to watch it on New Years Eve and then quote it for days afterward.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:03 AM on August 24, 2008

This is fantastic. That is all. I hope Devin gets to hear it.
posted to MeFi Music by gemmy at 8:46 AM on August 24, 2008

Way too slow to do anything serious.

Exactly. It's a neat idea, but too clumsy and slow.
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 1:04 PM on August 23, 2008

Awesome post, Spank!! I'll be checking this out this weekend, wheee!
posted to MetaFilter by gemmy at 10:16 AM on August 22, 2008

cwhitfcd is right, which is probably your main issue.

Try setting the podcasts up to only sync new items, and then right click and mark the old podcasts as not new, and it won't sync all of it.

The other option (which is how I do it) is setting iTunes to use the "only sync checked items" option. Put checkmarks on all your music and on the podcast episodes you want to sync, and uncheck the others.

I would... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 9:18 PM on August 21, 2008

Cell phone cameras are pretty awful still, but it seems like you should be able to find one that will do what you want.

If you want a good standalone point and shoot camera, though, anything in the Canon SD series would work. I love my Canon SD700IS and carry it everywhere, using it almost daily.
posted to Ask Metafilter by gemmy at 4:13 PM on August 21, 2008