Curiosity Killed the Cat

Now I can get Leva's Polka stuck in my head every time I enter/leave the apartment! Brilliant!
It's actually a Chrome phone charm that Good Smile Company made for us to celebrate the Hatsune Miku and GSC themes they made for Google Chrome. Except my phone doesn't have a place to hang a charm, so I stuck it on my keys.

Also in the Japanese-Think-of-Everything department, my microwave has a sake button on it. I especially like how it's combined with the milk button.

But it sure looks pretty.
From the Google Chrome 1st Birthday Party I went to last night. It celebrated both the first birthday of Chrome and the launch of Artist Themes. A number of artists who did themes for Japan turned out, which was nice. I was rather tired after running around most of the day taking care of paperwork, so I left early, and did not have a chance to sample the cake.

Spent most of the past few weeks working on Chrome Artist Themes Gallery. It's nice to finally see it live. Obviously I didn't make any of the themes this time 'round, but a gallery with 100+ pages in 40+ languages == massive changelists and submits. But the upside is I got to see a lot of these themes as they were being built. I've also, at some point, probably installed all of these themes on my various machines (let me say now that the Mac themes implementation is not quite up to par with the Windows one, but that's what you get for being on pre-alpha release...) Some of my favorites:

• Cath Kidston - it's flowerly and pink and oh-so-girly. It's the one I've settled on using long term.


• Yulia Brodskaya - her paper designs are simply amazing! Lovely vibrant colors.


• Boa Mistura - soft textures, calm pinkish-purple colors. Light and airy.


• Hatsune Miku - NEEDS MORE LEEKSPIN (consequently, when the Japanese marketing guy asked me what I knew about Hatsune Miku, I answered, "Gong Show". He was amused.)


• PukPuk - a golden theme with some nice artistic swirly designs


• Akira Isogawa - I love Japanese patterns.


• Jon Klassen - another with nice paper textures; a calm watercolor painting with cool color tones


• Baron Ueda - pink and brown, an awesome color combination. And grunge!


• Stefanie Posavec - words, words words. Good for a bibliophile, and a nice soft reddish pink palette.

And awfully tired to boot. I think I'm going to take a shower and pass out. More tomorrow, after my first day at work and a good night's sleep!

Went up to the Japanese consulate in SF today to put in my Visa application. Looks like it means I'll be flying out to Tokyo come the weekend (depending on what flight I end up booking)...
Stuff is mostly packed, just wrapping up a few things...
I will set up a separate travel blog to log all my thoughts, (mis)adventures and photos of my stay in Japan.
Should be fun!

...and still putting snowflakes everywhere I can.

The reason why I'm in NY.
Can you guess which ones I made? I think there are like 12 of them. They're pretty obvious...

I'm off to New York City this weekend for a few days (heading out Sunday morning, returning Friday afternoon). Going to be hanging out with the Spreadsheets team in prep for a launch. While I don't anticipate another sugar-induced tour of the city it should be fun nonetheless.
And I think only one person on my FL is in NY right now, but hey, if you're there, give me a shout!

3D CAT IS THREEDEE!

I even have a pair of Hannah Montana 3D glasses to prove it.

Webmaster: Oh no! I forgot to wear green today! And I even posted the doodle!

PM: [coworker] just IM'd me, she's going to be half-late.
Engineer 1: I thought being late was a binary thing.
Engineer 2: Maybe if her foot is in the doorway...?

Coworker: If you didn't Twitter it, did it really happen?

I am posting this from my new Android phone!
However, I don't want to change my current phone plan so it's basically like an iPod Touch -- useful only if there's a WiFi connection available. But... it has a camera! And a trackball...keyboard... mmmm shineys

I friggin' hate keen.com right now. So far TWO of their idiot users have used my email address to sign up for their services.
I have had fun screwing with their accounts, and am likely to continue doing so to vent off all my frustration.

In other news, Happy Christmas! Some folks will remember how I was going off on how glad I was not to have an Android phone. Well, that's about to change, or at least it will when I get back to work...

...until I bury Google in snowflakes.

EDIT: Also, if you missed, it, shinkansen doodle!

Since people have been pinging me all day about this, no, I had nothing to do with the Gmail themes announced yesterday. I did make a few themes to use internally, but not any of the ones on the public build.
If they make a Gmail themes API similar to the iGoogle one, you can be sure I will make these available. I have a
green floral (papercuts) theme, a glossy theme similar to the DA! v10 layout, and a port of the iGoogle Tetris theme.
Already, Hank has planted the idea of a LOLcat theme in my mind...
Also, I need to post my snowflake iGoogle theme...

...about LOLcats...

This is what happens when I have to take the screenshots.
Three years and I'm still subscribed to those Pharma emails...
Also, Scotch tape X-rays are like, the most awesome thing ever.

Someone got a photo of me as a LOLcat!
Quite a few people liked my "costume". All I had to say was "I'm a LOLcat!" and people would think it was awesomeness.

So, I went to the LOLcats talk on Friday. The two cofounders of icanhascheezburger basically chatted about how their Wordpress blog for sharing funny images with each other ballooned into an entire social network with its own set of grammar rules. Each step was illustrated with appropriate LOLcat photos. It was much fun.
Also, I learned the new admin for ICHC has created a whole network of sites based on the captioned fun as ICHC, including one for politics (Pundit Kitchen) and, more closely relevant to my interests, GraphJam, although sadly GraphJam is focused more on expressing musical lyrics as graphs and not Internet Memes.
I now want to make a site called LOLgraphs.