testMonkey realm

For all you burgeoning business people out there, I have for you the greatest money maker of all time today. Stay tuned.

We all know the iPod, in all its ubiquitous glory, comes with those tiny earbuds instead of full fledged headphones. And we all know that everyone except my mom has an iPod -or a cheap knockoff -that also packages their “portable music player” (read: iPod wannabe) with earbuds.

While the tiny speaker and/or the cords may be white, blue, purple, tweed, whatever, they always have a little black foam cover that is lodged into your ear canal in traditional Kamikaze style.

Now, I consider myself on the upper echelon of the hygienic crowd; I shower each day, brush my teeth, put on deodorant. And, despite the fact that doctors will tell you not to, I even clean my ears everyday. Yup, everyday.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I pulled from my ears the spankin’ new iPod nano’s earbuds the other day and found them covered with earwax. I mean, I clean my ears everyday and I’m still socially unacceptable.

I can’t be the only one with this issue.

Therefore, it’s a simple, guaranteed money maker of an idea that I present freely to you. I’d do it myself, but I lack resources, money, and well, the motivation.

Remember that little black foamy cover that comes with the earbud? Make and sell an earwax colored one. Seriously. You’ll be freakin’ rich. And the hyper-cerumen producers of the world will thank you.

Let me preface this post by stating that my intentions were of the most pure kind. It is only in hindsight that I see the potentially nefarious implications of my decisions.

I, like many men, turned to Gift Cards as my principle gifts to my wife this year. Let’s face it - the awful stigma that once accompanied gift certificates or cards is all but gone these days. Many prefer them to getting those horrid gifts of days gone by (”you bought me a penguin statuette for Christmas?!?”). Case in point: for two years running, women at or near the register have said to me as my order was processing: “I wish my husband would just get me a gift card.”

(Factor in also the Catch-22 that is buying stuff, especially clothes, for women: buy them too big and she gets mad because you are calling her, well, fat. Buy them too small and she is upset that you are calling her, um, fat.)

When buying gift cards for anyone but my wife, it’s the same a buying a real gift. Giving them a $20 card is the same, financially speaking, as giving them the $20 sweater. But it has occurred to me in these days after Christmas that the rules bend a bit if you are in this scenario with your wife.

Allow me to be specific: my darling wife is about seven months pregnant. As such, for Christmas I got her a gift card for a local maternity clothing store; she can get some things she needs for her current voluptuous state. I also gave her a gift card to her favorite clothes store so she can get something nice after she has had the baby (since nothing in this store comes close to accommodating a pregnant woman). Kind of a “now and later” themed Christmas. Aren’t I sweet.

So where is the swindle, as the title suggests? Think about it for a minute…yes…ah, there it is: I’m getting credit for stuff she would have bought anyway. That money would have been spent the same way, in the same amounts, for the same things, whether I’d bought gift cards or not.

I feel like I’ve gotten away with something naughty. I won’t tell if you don’t.

For the one or two of you OS X users that check this blog from time to time and usually do so with Safari, please allow me to introduce you to Shiira. What is Shiira, you ask? A better web browser, I say.

Shiira is built on top of WebCore, the engine that runs Safari. This means that if the pages you usually browse load fine in Safari, they will look, act, and render fine in Shiira, too. So why use it? The subtleties, that’s why.

Tabs are pretty standard in modern browsers these days, but why won’t Safari let me re-arrange them the way I want? No idea. Shiira to the rescue; I can drag my tabs around in any ol’ order I want. Yippy. That alone is worth the price of change (which is free, by the way). But there are other subtle touches in Shiira that make this a worthwhile browser. Instead of opening links in new windows, I can have all links open in new tabs (that’s why we have tabs, right?). When I close a tab, instead of showing me the next tab over from where I was, Shiira takes me back to the tab that I was on previously. How freakin’ cool is that. Shiira gets me. Dig it.

Other subtleties are nice, too. The interface is not metallic. The interface is much smaller and less cluttered. There is a little button on the tab bar to allow me to add a new tab for those like my father who have no idea how I work such magic (Apple - T still does the job). It allows me to use my bookmarks from Safari. The download manager is handled in the sidebar instead of that stupid little window that opens and stays open in Safari.

Shiira does present a few limitation that sort of drive me nutty. My in-browser spell checker is gone. Safari’s bookmark manager is the best I’ve seen and Shiira’s sidebar is a poor excuse. The sidebar does not automatically close when I’m done with it.

Overall, Shiira is a great alternative to Safari and offers plenty of reasons to set it as the default browser in OS X (which, interestingly enough, you must do in Safari preferences - go figure). All two of you should check it out.

Seems there is big news from the Superman Returns front (snicker snort giggle):

“Superman Returns” star Brandon Routh is supposedly giving the suits at Warner Brothers fits because of his prodigious package of masculinity. The 26-year-old beefcake’s extra-large endowment is said to be so distracting through his skin-tight costume that producers may have to shrink him during post-production.

“It’s a major issue for the studio,” a “Superman Returns” production source fretted to the London Sun. “Brandon is extremely well-endowed and they don’t want it up on the big screen. We may be forced to erase his package with digital effects.”
(https://www.nypost.com/gossip/pagesix.htm)

Clearly Brandon Routh is in no way related to the testMonkey clan. In any way.