I was recently on a quest to find the perfect blue ink for my fountain pen. I wanted a bright royal blue. A few that I tried had the right hue but were too transparent. There seems to be a balancing act between pigments and color depth for inks, and also not clogging the pen. I do have a purple ink that I like very much, but it just won’t do for legal and more official paperwork. Also a lot of inks look fine when you first write, but dry and fade over time into something less appealing. It’s like when I pick up pebbles at the beach. Most of them look gorgeous when they are wet, but once they are home and dry, I am disappointed. Anyway, I’ve settled for now on Omas Blue, which is on the higher end of the price scale for inks, but definitely affordable (their Vespucci Red is supposed to be amazing). I discovered that someone actually has actually created a book of 200 hand painted ink samples. You can buy it for $27.50.

At Albertson’s, which I still refer to as Lucky’s, there was a free sample kiosk with a strange device which had a rotating pizza on it. There wasn’t anyone at the kiosk and the pizza appeared to be baking while it spun. It was a demonstration of the Presto Pizzazz pizza oven with “exclusive RotaBake(tm) technology”. It appears to bake pizzas right out there in the open, spinning them slowly around. I wonder how safe it is with pets and small kids around. Apparently, Presto hasn’t been doing so well since Wal-Mart reduced their orders (you may know them for their SaladShooter) and this pizza oven is supposed to save the business. Perhaps they’ll take the infomercial route.

Nick At Nite will start showing The Facts of Life in September according to a Merc article (which is mostly about Barney Miller coming to TV Land). Lisa Welchel, who played Blair, has her own official site. If you don’t want to remember how we dressed in “the eighties“, the show will give you that scary retro feeling. I think I stopped watching around when George Clooney was added to the cast. Yes, George Clooney — with lots of hair.

Diablo II came down to $40 at Fry’s so I finally joined the legions of happy questing zombies. But first I did my laundry and fed the cat. I think “time sink” is probably an understatement. For those of you who don’t know how Diablo works, I apologize for the following digression. After many hours of slogging through fields and dungeons I went to sleep and had a dream that I was on a quest with 4 other people. We had to find a stamp and put it on an envelope in someone’s office and then get out of town before the police caught up with us. The stamp and the envelope part worked great, except for the yapping dogs, but leaving town was tricky. I had to bribe a police officer with 147 pieces of gold in order to steal a Corvette. But when I got to the car, it wouldn’t fit in my inventory. So I opened my pack and apparently I had managed to store several pieces of furniture in there, a lovely antique dresser, a plant stand, an old telephone, etc. I had to do lots of shuffling to get the car to fit in there and lost precious time. Then I wasn’t able to drive the car very well because my driving skill level was so low I kept running into things. Eventually I made it onto the road out of town — and remembered that I should probably go back and get my companions. I think I was so exasperated that I left them to fend for themselves.

Oh no! No more purple iMac! (However, the sage one almost matches my car.) Have they given up making a matching keyboard and mouse? It seems those are only black and clear. Certainly that’s more cost effective. Apple did not tell vendors of Mac accessories about the colors in advance, so they are left to scramble them into manufacturing. “Apple won’t provide hardware vendors with colored plastic samples even after the launch of new products. ‘We have to do it ourselves: physically test colors by eye or with a densitometer.'” Agh!

I know people who claim that clothes dryers are very harmful to fabrics and you’ll get many more years out of clothes if you hang them up to dry. I am inclined to believe that, and I keep my favorite clothes out of the dryer. But the dryer is just so darn convenient! Whirlpool has introduced a new drying system called “Senseon” which they claim reduces drying time by 20 minutes and is gentler on clothes because it uses lower temperatures. That also saves energy: “Air is heated to its maximum temperature (depending upon the cycle selected) using a 5400-watt element. When that level is reached, a 2700-watt element takes over to maintain that temperature. This saves over 30% in energy usage and is the most efficient in the industry.”

Thank you Randy for fixing that little itch in the back of my head that kept saying “You’ve seen Jean Grey somewhere else, and it wasn’t GoldenEye”. Famke Janssen was the Metamorph in that very intriguing episode of Star Trek:TNG. So she and Patrick Stewart had already spent some quality time together prior to X-Men.

Miracle of miracles, AT&T; @Home finally has decided that they can give me cable modem service. After my DSL no-go and literally years of phoning the @Home folks every month, I can barely believe that I may be able to actually get a high bandwidth connection. But I know better than to rejoice until I have the actual hookup working, so I won’t go bouncing gleefully around the place just yet (plus, the cat looks at me funny when I do that). My first setback has already occured: I called to sign up (operators are standing by, 24 hours a day) and the nice man couldn’t get something overriden about a prior hookup in a different unit of my complex. So I have to call back in the morning (apparently the people with override privileges get to work in the daytime). If I didn’t have to type, I’d be crossing my fingers.

I’ve been using GuruNet for over eight months. It’s a handy Windows utility that lets me alt-click on a word on my screen to get a dictionary lookup, web search, translations, and book search. I found a competing product today called Zapper. It takes context into account (as does GuruNet) and activates with a control + right click. I suppose I could install that too and do a head to head battle. Zapper has more specific lookup options, like shopping, sports, and finance, but I’m sure GuruNet can easily add more if they so desire.

I watched Nova’s The Diamond Deception episode last night. It described the discoveries and processes of synthetic diamond making. The Nova program opens with a GE scientist demonstrating how he can make a diamond out of a dollop of peanut butter. Not surprisingly, De Beers has been keeping up with synthetics themselves, acquiring their own equipment to make synthetics, not for market, but to develop methods of identifying man-made diamonds. They rather people bought the Real Thing from them. I was amused when one of their spokesmen said “It’s like a Picasso versus a copy of a Picasso. The copy is worthless, but the Picasso is priceless.” I thought…well, let’s see… Picasso was an artist who put time and creativity into making a work of art. The scientists behind the synthetics have been using remarkable creativity to learn how to produce in hours what nature took billions of years to produce blindly. You’re digging rocks out of the ground. I know consumers will still desire the naturals over synthetics, and De Beers will sway the vote with their own campaign. I’m not naive enough to think everyone will think this one through like the engineer geek I am. Scientists will eventually produce diamonds which can not be distinguished from natural ones, so De Beers has plans to start etching logos onto theirs.