hold on, I have to turn up the volume on my pillow...

Sometimes I get something new and I have a huge urge to blog about it, but then I think "nobody wants to hear about *insert weird gadget*" and resist said urge. But this, I had to blog about.

First, a little back-story: My brother and I share a thin wall between our bedrooms. His bed is right up against the wall where my television is, so if I have the volume on loud at night, he can't sleep. This has been an issue for years and years. For a while I had headphones with a super long cord so I could listen in bed, but they aren't comfortable, and when it would come time to go to sleep I'd have to take them off so I didn't strangle myself while I slept. Having a long cord laying in the middle of my room all the time wasn't too awesome either.

Enter: the pillow speaker. I traced a super long headphone extension cord around the perimeter of my room, and plugged it into my new pillow speaker. It is literally a pillow with a speaker tucked deep inside of it. You can sleep on it at night, put a pillowcase on it and everything. You'd never know it was a speaker if you didn't hear sound coming out of it. It's a miracle! I don't have to wear bulky headphones, and I can still listen to the television even when I'm drifting off into dreamland.

The only problem I ran into was that the sound was very, very soft if my head wasn't nestled directly on the center of the pillow. It could be that my cheap-o television's volume doesn't go very loud, but for whatever reason, it posed a problem.

Enter: the headphone amplifier. I didn't think this would work as well as it did, but by golly does it work well! You just plug the amp into the headphone cord, and it increases the volume tenfold! Now I can sit in bed with my pillow on, listen to some tv shows, then turn the volume down a bit when it's time to hit the hay. This little amp would probably also work wonders on those iphone/ipod speakers that don't seem to get very loud at all!

In conclusion, I know this was a super weird thing to blog about, but on the off chance that anyone else has a need for re-routing the sound that comes out of their television at night, I thought it might be useful! :)

star stuff

On last week's star stuff post I got two comments that mentioned The Big Bang Theory. I've heard of it before, but I never knew what it was until the comments piqued my interest and I finally looked it up. And um, I'm halfway through season 3 now.

The show is about four socially awkward scientists and I think my #1 wish right now is that they were real so I could be friends with them. There's this one episode where the guys get together to buy what they think is a miniature version of the time machine from the 1960 sci-fi movie The Time Machine starring Rod Taylor. When it arrives, it's actually the full-scale model that was used in the film. They joke about what a chick-magnet it'd be but OH MY GOSH. For real, if a guy told me that he had THE time machine from THAT movie, I'd go weak in the knees so fast I'd probably tip over. These characters are my spirit animals.

My whole life I've felt like such a loser. Rather than try to get along with people who possess social skills I never will, I'd love to be able to hang out with nerds like me who have just as much trouble with human interaction as I do, who share an interest in the same uncool things. We can talk about star stuff and sci fi movies, tell really corny jokes and give each other clumsy hugs and high-fives. Sometimes I think there should be a country (or planet, the left-brained among us could pull that off.) just for geeks where all of us could live and be awkward together. I think that's my dream.

darn you, youtube.

If anyone else has a white/light colored blog and is scarily obsessive picky about how all of their colors match, you'll be equally irritated by youtube's new black embed player. I went back to look at an old post yesterday, and as I was scrolling down the page I noticed these ugly black bars standing out like sore thumbs against my pretty white background. "Umm, where did YOU come from?" I asked them. They replied that youtube had changed the style of their players, and that this affected all previously embedded videos as well. When I asked how I could get them back to light grey, they snarkily told me to search on google myself :p

So I found this tutorial which gives you a line of code that you can insert into your embed code to get the old color back. The only problem is that you need to manually insert this code into old *and* new codes. There is no option to select gray when you're embedding a video now (remember how you used to be able to pick purple or pink? I miss those days.) so I'm keeping that little line of code someplace handy from now on. Personally I think this is pretty stupid, though, since most people have light colored websites, right? ergh.

Anyway, I just thought I'd post this in case anyone else had a similar panic attack but didn't have talkative youtube players to help them find a solution...

arrows c/o hello vanny!

star stuff

I'm obsessed with outer space, science and everything that goes with it. Although my brain isn't wired correctly for a career in science, I still love learning everything about it that I possibly can.. and spend way too much time each week reading science articles, gazing at Hubble photos or looking up old Carl Sagan interviews on youtube (I've concluded that he is officially my favorite person to ever live.) The universe is just so awe-inspiring. I dare you to look at THIS and not get goosebumps..

I want to incorporate my love of science into my blog a bit more, so each week I'm just going to do a little post on Thursday night with a round-up of some of my favorite science photos, artwork, videos and links. I really hope that you enjoy it as much as I do! (All images link back to their source)

sunday funnies

In the last week, I have become utterly, hopelessly, wonderfully in love with the SyFy show Eureka. It's about a town of geniuses who work for the government to create the newest cutting edge technology, whether it's medicine and cellular technology or nuclear weapons. The town sheriff, Jack Carter (played by Colin Ferguson, who is so brilliant --and so cute-- I feel like squealing each time he's on screen) is not a genius, but he more than makes up for his intellectual shortcomings with his wit, common sense and spot-on hunches. The show is part drama, part comedy ... the overall storyline is serious, but each episode has more than enough humor to keep it light. Even when a computer malfunction triggers a 24 hour countdown to planetary destruction, there are still jokes all around. It's geeky, but grounded. I mean seriously.. if I could marry a tv show, I would be Mrs. Eureka by now. I'm just so head over heels.

So, you're probably wondering by now.. "why are you posting this on sunday funnies day, Kate?" Glad you asked. It's partially because I couldn't contain my excitement any longer, and my family locked me in my room until I promised I'd stop talking about Eureka (I'm exaggerating, but they'll probably resort to that soon.) But it's also because this one clip from an episode I watched tonight struck me as so hilarious that I had to share it. I don't know if it is as amusing without the backstory of the episode (short story: contaminated meat makes all of the geniuses temporarily super stupid) but to me it was spit-out-your-grapefruit-juice, hyperventilating kind of funny. But then I'm sort of high on Eureka love, so I might be a bit biased ;-D

overloaded

My little usb hub has reached its limit, so I'm on the hunt for a new one again. I'll be needing an extra port for my fourth (yup, fourth) external hard drive. I swear, I don't know how I use these up so quickly.

I'm smitten with all the cute usb hubs out there, but I think the sixth one -- ugly but useful -- will probably be the one I end up with.

Aphrodite hub (Fred Flare) / Tulip hub (Fred Flare)

Cassette hub (Perpetual Kid) / Flexible hub (Perpetual Kid)

Tardis hub (ThinkGeek) / 24 port hub (ThinkGeek)
Not actually a Dr. Who fan, but I threw that in for anyone who is ;-)

While I was searching "USB" everywhere, I came across these two gadgets that aren't ports, but deserved a mention nonetheless... that microphone is a usb radio (!!!!) and the wooden block is a 500GB external hard drive -- so much more appealing than the black or silver plastic ones hiding behind my monitor! They're from funUSB and etsy, respectively :)

web design!

Since my number one favorite way to spend my time (besides watching movies, playing with my cats and drinking grapefruit juice) is fiddling around with my blog designs, I decided to use that enthusiasm in a more constructive way, and open up an etsy shop for web design! I might add more things in the future, but for now I'm offering my services (that sounds so cool, by the way!) for blog design, blog headers, etsy banners, tumblr design and blogger overhaul! It's all at slightlyterrific.etsy.com (Scathingly Brilliant is taken. BUMMER!) So exciting! :-D

Help for the night owl who likes tv

I live with my parents and my brother, all of whom turn in around 11pm. But I have an entirely different schedule, and prefer to go to bed around 6am. (My favorite perk of being my own boss!)

While I enjoy this schedule a lot, having my television on while everyone else in the house is asleep definitely causes its share of problems. If I have the volume too low, I can't hear it (no, I'm not deaf.. my tv is just on the other side of the room from where I sit, OK?!) but if it's too high I'm always waking somebody up.

My first thought was to get Listen Up, the amplification device they sell on late night infomercials, but I'm not an old man with a nagging sleepy wife, so I didn't think it suited me that well.

THEN I found a headphone extension cord on Amazon for $3 and it literally changed my life. It's 50 feet long, so I traced it along the perimeter of my room to behind my bed where I can plug it into my headphones whenever I want to watch tv.

The perks are many. The cord is so long that I was able to conceal it (a shorter one would have been suspended in the middle of my room, probably becoming a jumping hazard for my cat when she attempted to get on the bed), I won't feel like a 78 year old man when I need to listen to the tv at night and I get to wear my favorite headphones instead of a hearing aid incognito.

I don't know why that guy in the blue pajamas didn't think of this; he'd look so much cooler wearing my bright green headphones.

my new imac desktop!

SUPER excited today!! My new imac desktop came in the mail!! Although my show this weekend was a complete bust, it did give me enough money to top off the amount I had been saving for a new computer.

My dad owns a small mail order business, so UPS is at our house delivering something almost every single day. They usually come around 5-6pm, maybe 7pm on days when we're really eager for something to arrive. Well, today they came at 1pm! I was ecstatic! :D Of course, this meant that I spent all day goofing off playing with my new toy instead of getting caught up on the weekend's orders. But it was just this once :)

The monitor is massive! I'm used to working on a 12" screen, and this is 21"!!! It's bigger than my television screen. It'll take a little getting used to, but I'm in love already. Here's some backwards-chronological pictures of my imac being set up.