señor taco’s travels

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde

I just got my carbon frame (Darkside) back from repairs by Joe’s Bicycle Painting. You may remember that a month before ALC 6 I cracked the frame.

I was very slackerly¹ in shipping it out.  Joe’s, it appears, did a fantastic job. I can’t wait to build it back up this weekend.

1. Meaning it took me a few months to finally get off my butt and ship it out last week, much to the exasperation of some.↩

Steve Albini Talks of Food and includes a simple recipe for mayonnaise at the end. He’s a bit of a grouch, but a talented grouch for sure.

(Via jwz.)

From Upcoming Pixar comes the news that Disney has released the WALL-E teaser Poster:

© Copyright 2007 Disney-Pixar

I can’t wait to see more stuff come out.

(Via Upcoming Pixar.)

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” — Albert Einstein

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” — Stephen Roberts

“Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.” — Satchel Paige

From Scott Adams at The Dilbert Blog:

I was happy to hear that NYC didn’t allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom of speech.

I like it.

I have a post brewing about a book I read on my trip to New Zealand and tomorrow coincides with the subject. The book is Eats, Shoots & Leaves and the day tomorrow, September 24, is National Punctuation Day. Possibly I’ll put a review of the book up soon.

(Via the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks.)

Images are a big part of my life. There’s work for sure. At home I don’t craft as much, but I take a fair number of photos. As a result there are two major things one does with photos, view them and modify them.

Let’s start with the latter first. Recently Gus Mueller of Flying Meat¹ released a new image editing app, Acorn. Acorn is fast, lightweight, and uncluttered. Sure, there will probably be times when the big grand-daddy of image editing will be needed, but as it stands I’m going to stick with Acorn whenever I can because it does most everything I want. I need to learn how to write plug-ins for Acorn and then I think it will be what I use almost exclusively.

As for the former, viewing images, OS X comes with a nice built-in tool in Preview. Possibly Quick Look in Leopard will be better, but I’m not there yet so I can’t say. For now I prefer all of my images to be previewed and opened with Xee. Xee is fast, lightweight, free, and supports more image formats than you can shake a stick at.²

While the icon for Xee is inspired a designer named Adam Betts has developed a replacement icon set for Xee that is quite beautiful. I’ve switched my home install of Xee over to it and I’ll hit my work install next week.

1. Yes, that is the company name, and he makes fantastic software↩
2. If you’re using The Unarchiver from the same person, Dag Ågren, then it can even look inside archives like Zip, Rar, and StuffIt. Trust me, even if you don’t use Xee you should use The Unarchiver. It’s simply brilliant↩