From our neighborhood dry-cleaner...

for seriously.

The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners on 655 East Lake Dr. in picturesque Oakhurst recently "lost" various pieces of 2 of my Wife's business suits. Not expensive suits, but they're nice, and she only has 2. Conveniently a piece of each was missing.

Now picture this situation in your "mind's eye." You are preparing to make a good impression at your new job so you have your only 2 suits cleaned. Smart of you, snappy even.... Make sure the Dry Cleaner says they have them ready for you in a timely fashion, so you can go get em' tiger!
FADE TO WHITE
CUE MUSIC

After an exhaustive search on the part of The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners (prompted by numerous phone calls from us) the offending clothing was located. They seriously didn't know where the clothes were. The jackets had been outsourced to another Dry Cleaner. If we hadn't come in to ask about the clothing, who knows when it would have been returned. I went to The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners @ 6:45pm and was summarily banned from "getting stuff cleaned here anymore." I wondered if this banning covered the outsourced Dry Cleaner as well...

We were ultimately informed that The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners was not responsible or in anyway at fault for the clothing being "missing." And what's the big deal anyway because we actually just found one of the jackets here at The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners. Because it was supposed to go out with the missing clothing but we just didn't send it. It's got a rip or something.

?!?

We checked the Atlanta Better Business Bureau. The BBB website has a file previously reported for The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners under the heading "Customer Complaint." Also of note is that The Oakhurst Laundry and Cleaners is NOT a member of the Better Business Bureau, so that report won't do anything.

This post got picked up by our free local newpaper's blog Fresh Loaf so hopefuly others will avoid this neighborhood sink hole.

Steve "one more thing" Jobs and Bill "John Hodgeman" Gates sit down together on stage for the first time in years at the D5 Executive Conference.

The two seem to have a lot of respect for each other, and Bill gates comes off as pretty charming. They dish about the early days (The Altair gets a shout out!) and speculate on the future. These are THE two biggest influences on personal computers in the last 30 years ever! (They invented personal computers) These guys and their products have shaped us and people like us, and if done correctly will continue to do so. Seeing them together is a treat.

Engadget has detailed coverage

We had an awesome vacation in Grayton Beach Florida with some friends. It was beautiful and fun-filled. We ate home-made ribs, crabs and plates of shrimp. Not to mention swimming in the ocean, swimming with oversized dogs, playing Wii Sports and generally maxing and relaxing. Oh, let's not forget all that cold lamping we did either.

Here are more photos of our Beach Adventure, with more coming soon.

Then we got home on thursday and immediately got sick on friday. That totally sucked. So we spent much of our Memorial Day weekend with a sinus infection and a fever. Yay!

As a way to clean our swollen pallet, here is Miller, telling you how it is, you should listen.

We've been on vacation. It's been great. See you after Memorial Day.

The prolific and respected Chicago based design firm Coudal Partners is organizing an awesome web-based Swap Meat.

Coudal Swap Meat

They are encouraging people to send them stuff they've made, or if it's rare, something you've found. The Coudal Swap Meaters determine a value for what you've sent, and send you back something of equal value that somebody else sent them... Swap'ems.

If they really like what you've sent them they may do a small write-up on the website. There's lots of great stuff featured already. I heard about this just as I was completing the exo-clunky painting. So I thought I'd hop on board and swap it. I hand-cut the box that my painting was sent in, and included a few clunkyrobot.com stickers so the "unpacking" of the art would achieve maximum enjoyment. I hope I get back something cool!

by Carl Sagan

We actually had a weekend free from pending projects. So in an effort to do something more than play Super Paper Mario all weekend... We planned and started a new painting. I've been wanting to paint this one for a while. It's still unfinished, but complete enough to be shown in progress.

*work in progress*

This is the fifth in a series of acrylic paintings done of scraps of found wood. The wood was recovered from the bottom of an old wine box. If the photo had been better, you might have been impressed by the painstakingly multi-layered star-field that took forever to paint.

See all Scrap Art

To plant explosives.

Keep it up NASA.

Sat. night we went to the Lucky Yates Talk Show @ The Vortex Bar and Grill in Midtown Atlanta. It's a talk show done in the grand tradition of talk shows... only it's not televised. It was a blast.

The show is hosted by none other than Lucky Yates. (who officiated at our wedding.. he's a licensed minister!) Lucky asked us to write his monologue jokes for the show, which we were happy to do. You can see Lucky delivering one of our finely crafted punch-lines here... Yikes. The jokes were mostly received with groans... Mission Accomplished!

Lucky's first guest of the night was native Italian and local gelato mogul Paolo. We got free gelato! Paolo runs a famous local gelato stand in The Virginia Highlands. He also makes pet gelato, and has a YouTube show where he cooks for pets! Apparently, back in Italy he was also a magician, and used to ride his Vespa Primavera to his magic gigs with trunks full of equipment strapped to the back. He made this sound like it was embarrassing, I can't think of anything cooler.

Also making an appearance that night was author, NPR contributor, and best friend of Jay Leno... Hollis Gillespie. She told mildly creepy stories about Laura Dern playing her in an upcoming TV show based on her books.

Roving comedian Slim Chaps made an unadvertised appearance. He did a tight 11 minute routine about pooping. Classic stuff. Slim Chaps is, in actuality, a bad comedian character that our friend Matt does. I would have to say that Saturday's performance was probably his best/worst yet.

The next Lucky Yates Talk Show opens Sat. June 2nd @ The Vortex.

We went to the midnight showing of Spiderman 3 last night...
it's laugh out loud terrible.

While I wasn't a huge fan of the first two films, they certainly entertained me, and not in a snarky sit-back-and-laugh sort of way. And for the most part the villains have always been the best actors in the films. Willem Defoe's over the top performance in the first film was undeniably engaging. The beloved Alfred Molina delivers a quietly sinister Doc Oc in the second....

This time we get the guy from wings.

We saw the movie with an audience that went out of their way to see the film early, at midnight the night before it's release... Despite this, even our fellow Spidey fans turned on this film before the finish of the first act. They were laughing AT the film.

You are advised to avoid this summer shitburger.

I recently read an article on Life-hacker detailing how to use Google's free Notebook App for organizing your life and "getting things done." It uses an organizational system developed by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done: Stress Free Productivity. There is an in-depth overview of his system on wikipedia.

So I've started implementing the system So far it's been great, and the Google Notebook has a lot of flexibility so the tool and the concepts dovetail nicely. It got me thinking about all the buzz surrounding web based applications. All those new applications that used to live on your hard drive. But not anymore.

I'm talking about services like Flickr, Gmail, and Google Calendar to name a few. Matt Haughey, founder of the beloved community weblog Metafilter, has an interesting post on his new web-business weblog about switching his whole operation to web-based applications. It requires you to decentralize your content and information, often spreading it over many applications across the web. While this headless approach is obviously not for everyone, I find this exciting... and I'll tell you why.

The iPhone.
Remember the iPhone? Well we sure do, it's slated to be released "late" next month.

If you have, like I have, switched all of your email applications, image storage services, and organization tools over to web-based applications all you will need to access this information is a simple yet powerful "internet communicator." You would then have the power to access your data from literally anywhere.

With access to our email, any photos we've taken, our calendar, and all the tools we need to keep it organized in the palm of our hands.. well we would become virtually unstoppable.

This is weird.