I know; only children excitedly brag about their Christmas gifts. Maybe I’ll do a proper review, instead?
If you’ve been following Swiss Miss, you’ll have seen a bunch of beard-related stuff. I just received a Beard Head, and it’s about as wonderful as I could have imagined. It’s a perfect fit for my head, and the moustache-customization feature is simple ingenuity. Wearing a coat, I can see that the whole of the engineering is planned out: The back of the Beard Head comes down to my jacket’s collar, but isn’t so long that it gets pushed up by it. There’s room at the front-sides so that I can turn my head easily. The moustache can be taken off and buttoned elsewhere into the natural weave of the wool.
I can’t wait to wear it out and about!
I got a Lexar 8GB class-6 microSDHC. I had half-expected it to be a bit slow, from what I’d heard on forums, but it turns out to be faster than the 2GB card I’ve been using this year. I had gotten a 4GB class-4 card last christmas, but the slowness of it ruined my expectations of these cards’s speed and was useless for my every-day use.
In short: The 8GB microSDHC is great. It also seemed to get slightly faster when I filled it up with stuff.
MAX(µs) AVG(µs)
512 B - 430 / 235 (Sequential)
4KB - 1830 / 1820
16KB - 7280 / 7265
512 B - 500 / 480 (Random)
4KB - 1895 / 1875
16KB - 7335 / 7320
I also got a cheap black-and-red Chinese console with two slots which lets me play NES and SNES games. The S-video is low quality (and plays NES games in greyscale), my mom apparently had to glue together a broken part, and one controller has a faulty R button, but it’s otherwise good enough quality. I spent a couple hours last night (this morning?) playing Super Metroid (which I also just got), and it’s as fun as I remember.
I only have about three or four games, but still.
I saved the best for last: Handcrafted CSS, by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte; Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson; and Painting the Web, by Shelley Powers. I’ll save those reviews for after I read the books. I think I’m starting with Handcrafted CSS, because the cover is just so tactile. It’s also pretty short, and reads like a blog entry (complete with links to other peoples’ blogs).
It raises a question, which I might later remember and go into in more detail: Are books like really old blogs? I’m reading this book in 2009, but it’ll be as irrelevant as today’s blog entries after a few years.
(That is to say, not entirely irrelevant; but still kind of “What?”)
I’ve still got to get Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition. Maybe for my birthday? Is John Resig’s book out, yet? (Never mind, I’ll google it myself. It seems that it’s not quite out, yet.)
Oh, I also want Transcending CSS.
I’m going to have to introduce some of the students at the college to these books. I’ve read so many blogs everything in them will likely seem old-hat to me, but the new students will find them invaluable. Or supervaluable.