BoomFlag

I’m shopping for a wireless keyboard for the office. The Amazon customer-submitted photos included this gem:

It’s good to know that the keyboard is “roughly one cat length” long.

On Wednesdays we have “Tech Talks” at Zing, which are basically opportunities for anyone on the team to give a brief presentation about a technology or something they’ve found interesting or applicable to our projects. It might include anything from how to use the Symfony PHP framework, to what Node.js is, to tips and tricks for being awesome at Vim.

For the past few weeks, every Tech Talk has been given by Josh. He tends to work on things that are a little more bleeding-edge, so he has interesting things to share with the team. Before his presentation yesterday, he showed us a little graphic he’d prepared, in the spirit of TED talks.

One of our clients is a beauty product company in Beverly Hills. We’ve been working with them for several years, helping them with everything from e-commerce to design to marketing email blasts.

Today we received a surprise package with this label:

Inside were about two dozen of their products, ranging from shampoo to moisturizers and face masks. Sweet. I arranged everything on my desk and offered it to the team.

Everyone grabbed a few items for their wives; Ben was even thinking of Mother’s Day. Nice!

I love when our clients do little things like this. It makes it feel like all of the work we do is appreciated.

Ahh, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs… how I love them. A shell of thick chocolate surrounding some mysterious concoction of yellow and white that’s basically liquid sugar:

Now that Easter has passed, the grocery store has them on sale at 70% off. A quarter per egg! I bought a dozen of them. Now they’re almost gone, which is probably a good thing. It’ll keep me from going into insulin shock.

Until next Easter…

Sometimes I wish I had a sign like this.

I was working late (surprise!) a couple of nights ago, and heard some shuffling in the window well next to my desk– which is in the basement. I figured it was the wind or something. Today I saw a critter running around in there! I think this little guy must’ve fallen into the window well a few nights ago and had been going crazy because there’s no way back out. He was probably hungry and confused.

Anyway, Zack was excited to catch him to return him “to the wild”. He climbed down into the window well while the rest of us watched from inside the house. The rodent seemed pretty tame. We couldn’t quite tell what it was, but wondered if maybe it was a neighbor’s pet on the loose. (Our rats have occasionally run off through our backyard.)

Too big to be a mouse… maybe a gerbil? Not a hamster or guinea pig…

In the end, we determined he was a vole. Although you can’t buy voles at pet stores, apparently they’re generally tame enough that people catch them and have them as pets.

In any case, it was a fun little adventure and we released the critter over at the creek so he could make his way in the world again.

Original. And oh so awesome.

Our sweet new Zing t-shirts are here! Thanks to the efforts of Josh, the whole team has matching company garb.

Thom took a cool shot of me up in Snowqualmie Pass…

This evening, we went to Dairy Queen (tradition!) and enjoyed some hot fudge sundaes. Thom ordered a regular one, Julian followed suit, and then I ordered one with chocolate ice cream. Julian looked up in surprise. “You can get chocolate?” Of course! He quickly changed his order.

The woman at the counter turned to the other woman working there and asked, “Do we have enough chocolate ice cream?” The answer: “Yeah there’s, like, a bag and a half in the back.”

Whoa. If there’s one thing I won’t want to hear in the same sentence as any kind of food, it’s how many bags of it there are in the back. Julian and I decided we’re pretty much scarred from this incident, and not sure if we can eat at Dairy Queen again knowing there are bags of… something… that becomes the delicious concoction that oozes out of the machinery.

Still, you can’t argue with hot fudge…