what i learned today

randomness:

• Either the printer hired by Jason’s Deli was color blind or doesn’t know what carrots look like once they are pulled out of the ground. Or perhaps the answer is to not eat the carrots at Jason’s Deli?
  
  

  Tomatos, Pickles and Carrots

parenting:

• Top 8 gifts for playful children
  I do believe this is one of the best gift lists I’ve seen. Keeping it simple as long as possible is a good plan.

• Are More Kids Depressed Because They’re Too Clean?
  Not that I ever felt bad about not cleaning like mad and letting the kids be kids, but this reinforces my choices!

tech stuff:

• I’ve never been a fan of foursquare, but I was bummed the other day when, after paying my bill at Wolf Camera, I checked in on 4sq and learned I could have saved $1 on my photo order via foursquare! I could have bought a new app with that $1 saved!
• I applied to be part of the Chrome OS pilot program, though I’m sure I have no chance in being selected. Learn more: An update on Chrome, the Web Store and Chrome OS
• I got fed up with the slow load times and poor updates in Brizzly yesterday, so I finally installed TweetDeck. I’m only using it for Twitter; I like the little (AdobeAir?) pop-up notifications. But, I haven’t figured out how to easily see if I have any mentions of DMs without creating a new column; Brizzly has a nice notification system, but it seems to be broken at the moment. Brizzly also make Firefox run VERY slowly, so much that I have to quit and reopen Firefox every hour. My AirBook (still having a nice little vacation at the Genius Bar for the hinge defect) has RockMelt installed on it, but I haven’t figured out how to make that do what I want it to do either.

travel:

• I agree with so much of what Greg has written about the TSA in his post What’s wrong with airport security?. I have one more point I want to add; maybe I’ll finally get around to a post about it this week.
• This is one of the situations which makes me so nervous and crazed about the TSA: India to protest Meera Shankar’s ‘pat down’ search in US
• If you are still looking for unique gifts, how about a gift to charity along with a chance to win a prize? Here are the Best Odds in Town!

work:

• This was the thought I had when I first learned about constraint programming back in 1997: CP is fun
• I enjoyed learning about Rogo in this post Operations Research, Sudoko, Rogo, and Puzzles; while I don’t think I’d enjoy solving the problems themselves, trying to come up with formulations and algorithms for solving them kept me awake last night!