Betterness by Kawika Holbrook

Criticism

Mark Fauenfelder hates Time Warner's TiVo knockoff. A lot. "If TiVo were a beverage, it'd be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old."

Personalized Stamps

I've just created my own personalized stamp online. PhotoStamps accepts any picture smaller than five megabytes free of copyright restrictions and "suitably decent. A sheet of 20 37-cent stamps costs $20 after shipping. The service is in the middle of a two-month evaluation period, and the Postal Service may choose to retire the program at the end of September. I hope this lasts long enough to order a few pages with my parents' business logo on them.

Raider Fans

This exhbit of Raider Fans doesn't even begin to tell the story. Dana Stubblefield, a frequent guest of my store, now plays with the New England Patriots, but I'll still root for the home team.

The Widows & Orphans Iron Lung Fund

DropCash, which helps people better track their fundraising, is a smooth use of the TypeKey authentication system and PayPal. In 30 seconds I create the The Widows & Orphans Iron Lung Fund to raise money to buy an iPod mini. I don't need an iPod mini, but I thought the words "widows," "orphans," and "iron lung" in a fundraiser might raise its profile.

Failure to Communicate

A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

KTV: Back From the Dead

Thanks to the Internet Archive, the first iteration of my weblog was saved. kawika.TV (motto: "Like to watch?") was my attempt in mid-2001 to create a TV-themed weblog with categories as shows. I worked my ass off to make the content management system do things it was never designed to do. Then, as usual, I got bored with the concept and changed everything. Only I forgot to save samples of all my work. Well, the writing -- such as it is -- is still available. But the images are gone. And man, did I work on those images. I wish I still had them, because now I'd like to try the TV theme again, this time with a family website called Holbrook.TV.

Here, from the archive, are some of the show titles and descriptions:

Station Identification -- This is KTV, my home away from television. KTV broadcasts in CSS2, so if you don't have the latest browser, you'll miss the experience of my lifetime. (PROGRAMMING NOTE: This site contains graphic images and disturbing content -- at least to anyone unprepared for the amount of design and programming left to complete.)

Traumarama -- Go behind closed doors to open wounds that just won't heal.

WorkOver -- How coworkers were worked over when work was over..

Hindsight News -- What once passed for news shall come to pass again.

It's All Relative -- The family ties that bind (and, occasionally, chafe).

One Life Left to Live -- Paying an arm and a leg to risk live and/or limb.

Roommating -- Sex in the city and surrounding metropolitan area.

Wanderlust -- A travel log from here to there and a few points in between.

Like to Watch?

I just bought the domain name www.holbrook.tv for no particular reason. Perhaps I can turn it into a family website once I'm married. Whoa, that just hit me. Married. Cool.

Style Guide

One day, I would like to make use of The Economist's has an online style guide by writing more than blurbs.

The Right Invite

Nothing so far has troubled my bride-to-be than the thought of our wedding invitations going unprinted. The printer she chose has bailed at the last minute, leaving us with a few hundred blank invites, response cards and envelopes. My best man is working with his father, a printer himself, to rescue us. "He's from the old school," Kulika says of his father. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but letterpress certainly comes to mind. If I were a rich man, I'd pay someone like Julie Holcomb to print everything on handmade paper using Jenson Pro. As it stands, we'll have fine invitations from good people at no charge. And couldn't be luckier.