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My 3.33 GHz, 8 GB friend. No, I am not kidding. !!! It is, for the record, awesome.

So I just got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I thought, as I often do, that I need to do something about this. See, I have a routine when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night:

I’ll shuffle over to my bathroom, which coming from my bedroom is just before the corner I round to get into the kitchen. Then what I’ll do is, standing just outside the bathroom, I’ll lean forward, turn my head away, squinch my eyes shut, then grope for the kitchen light switch to turn it on. Then, still looking away, I’ll back up quickly and go into the bathroom, using the light shrapnel from the kitchen to see by so that I don’t fall into the bathtub and crack my head open, because my bathroom is pitch black.

After I’m done, I do the whole squinch-eyed groping-for-the-light-switch routine in reverse, and all because I don’t want to blind myself. Clearly, I am in need of a night light. Equally clearly, it has to be a blue canary night light. Lite.

But tragically, there is no such thing. And I can’t understand why. Google searches for “blue canary night light,” “blue canary nite lite,” and “blue canary night lite” all turn up song lyrics and forum posts from frustrated souls like me bemoaning the lack of a purchasable blue canary night lite. I mean, wtf? If I can get a leg lamp, why can’t I get a blue canary night lite? God.

Entertainingly, however, every one of the sponsored links on a search for “blue canary” is night-light-related. But this situation still sucks.

Lots of good stuff at SimpleBits in the last week; just keep scrolling. Some things of note:

• The WebKit development team recently redesigned the web inspector with a ton of useful improvements. Do not miss this!
• Ork Posters – Typographic city neigborhood posters. Both Chicago and San Francisco are available. Super terrific!
• Scroll is a new magazine on web design—available in both print and electronic format—brought to you by Web Directions. I haven’t had a chance to dig deep into this yet, but I am expecting great things.
• The folks at SimpleBits have put together a custom Amazon store wherein they recommend books, music, etc. that they use to design. What a great resource!

Finally, A List Apart turns 10 this year; read Jeffrey Zeldman’s retrospective.

because, seriously? I think I have a problem^*. So I was wandering around Target again yesterday (I used the flimsy excuse of driving my carless friend there so she could make a return), and stumbled across the clearance area of the home office/stationery section. I don’t know if they circulate crack smoke through the ventilation system there or what, but I almost—and it was a near thing—came away with these (really very cleverly designed) magnetic road-trip car games that had this great retro-kitsch thing going on, for the bargain price of 98₵ (98₵!) a pop.

I mean, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in my 30-odd years of living that I’ve taken a road trip, and if I were to take one now, I’d most likely be driving. So road-trip bingo? Not so much. Not if I want to stay on the road.

I did succumb a bit and got a (cause I needed it) Greenroom Eco list pad, for only 48₵. !!

^* I should get “poor impulse control” tattooed across my forehead like whatshisname in Snow Crash.

that I have a debilitating weakness for stationery. Paper products, notebooks, pens and pencils, you name it. I’ve got a whole—I am not kidding—crate full of unused notebooks and pencils, etc., etc. As a result, I usually try to restrain my stationery purchase impulses…with, as my track record shows, limited success. But I do try.

But when I was wandering around Target (another of my favorite activities) a few weeks back, I stumbled across something I just had to buy.

Everyone’s favorite color these days is green, and I’m no different; despite my paper habit, I do try to live in an ecologically friendly manner, and so when I saw these notebooks, paper products made from sustainable materials, I thought, whoa. Greenroom Eco makes notebooks, binders and filing supplies produced entirely from post-consumer recycled waste, and printed with non-toxic soy-based ink.

That alone is pretty cool, but what about the quality of the paper? Most recycled paper, in my experience, has the quality and durability of newsprint, which is to say, very close to none at all. Not so here; I wouldn’t have been able to tell that this paper was made from recycled material had I not been told. The paper quality rivals that of Moleskine or Rhodia (aficionados may disagree), which is a pretty big deal in my opinion. Check ‘em out!

I was going to write a fluff piece on getting some SIGG water bottles, but then, as I often do, I did some research so I would know what I was talking about, and this isn’t going to be fluffy anymore.

So a few years ago, it was discovered that 95% of Americans^* have levels of a chemical called bisphenol-A (BPA for short) in their urine. BPA is an estrogenic chemical (i.e. mimics the hormone estrogen), and its structure and presence can “duplicate, block or exaggerate hormonal responses.” According to its critics, which are legion.

BPA is present in polycarbonate (as opposed to polyethylene or polypropylene) plastic cans and bottles—like the Nalgene sports bottles most people have no doubt owned once or twice in their lives—and has been found to have leached into the water or food contained within.

Now, there is some debate (mostly between plastics-industry sponsored studies and government-funded studies) about the relative harmfulness of having BPA in your system, but the news is quite alarming nevertheless. Government agencies at this point are not concerned enough about potential deleterious effects of ingesting BPA to have banned its use, so policing, if it happens, has to happen at an individual level.

I had only heard (or to be fair, absorbed) the barest minimum of facts about this when a colleague of mine was telling me why he had shown up to work one day with this gorgeous aluminum water bottle, and I asked him where he got it from. He focused more on the fact that no water bottle he’d ever had didn’t alter the flavor of the water inside if it was left overnight, and that only bottles like the non-reactive aluminum ones that SIGG, a Swiss company, made had your water still tasting good after a day or two. And, as I said, these particular bottles are powder coated in a huge variety of beautiful designs, so I wanted one, just because it would be pretty.

So I got a couple, a large one and a small one, and when I was in the store, I noticed that popular water bottle manufacturers like CamelBak and Nalgene are now making BPA-free bottles, no doubt in an effort to reach out to disgruntled consumers.

As for me, I’m going to keep my pretty SIGGs and get rid of my old Nalgene bottles, if only because the water does still taste good after it’s been in the bottle a while.

^* This is according to my single source article, which is admittedly a couple of years old. Prachee, I’m sure you’ll know more or be able to find more relevant scientific data, and be able to tell me if what I read is wrong or disingenuous.

shopping spree this weekend. This is why I should never window shop. It’s all “shop” and no “window”.

Anyway, one of my more major purchases was a second pair of Onitsuka Tigers, this pair grey with orange accents:

My second, entirely impulsive (the Tigers were intentional) purchase was this pair of beautiful but exorbitantly expensive teacups, complete with ceramic infusers:

Nice, eh?

I just ordered myself a Nikon D40 dSLR camera, which I should be getting in the next few days. Woo! What prompted this big purchase? I have a digital prosumer camera right now, an Olympus C8080WZ, which I like quite a bit, but whose autofocus capabilities and glacially slow raw shooting I have become increasingly frustrated with. I wanted something that would give me fine manual focus capability and quick raw shooting, which amounts to getting a dSLR.

Along with the kit lens, I ordered a 50mm prime lens. I didn’t bother spending the extra money on getting an AF-S or AF-I lens (one that has a motor in the lens—because the D40 doesn’t have a focus motor in the body). I figure the extra pain of having to focus manually will be worth the ability to more affordably upgrade to a different camera later. Look out for my first set of D40 pictures soon, along with my latest set of Olympus shots, taken this weekend at Point Reyes.

What can I say? I guess I’m a follower. Another thing everybody and their brother has in San Francisco is at least one pair of Onitsuka Tigers. And these are another thing that became popular because they are actually cool (unlike some other things I could name). For those who don’t know, Tigers are a popular brand/style of sneakers, and today, I finally got myself a pair, while exploring some of the many cool little boutiques in my neighborhood. Here’s my pair:

Neat-o mosquito.

If you live in San Francisco, you know that everyone and his brother there has a Timbuk2 bag; in fact, you’re probably one of them.

If you don’t live in San Francisco, the odds are good you’ve never heard of Timbuk2. For those who don’t know, it’s a company that made a name creating high-tech, high-style, highly-customizable messenger bags for bike messengers in a city famous for them. And like I said before, everyone and his brother has one; you’d be hard pressed to spend a day in the city and not see at least a few people sporting one.

As for me, I’d always kind of liked how they looked—I’m a sucker for bags, especially messenger-style ones—but hadn’t been impressed by many that I saw to the extent that I felt I had to get one. Now, I’m not one of those people who has to have things that are unique or unusual, and rejects things that are popular just because they’re popular—after all, some things become popular for a reason. I wasn’t opposed to the Timbuk2 bag as a concept; I just hadn’t seen that many I liked.

But this was all before I actually visited Timbuk2′s retail location in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. I happened to be meeting some friends at a newly-opened sushi restaurant in the neighborhood, and had arrived early. Having some time to kill, I decided to walk into the Timbuk2 store, which was across the street, to see what the fuss was all about. To my surprise, a lot of the bags on display were more immediately aesthetically appealing than the ones I’d seen around town or were available on the website. It turned out that there were a number of patterns and colors you could only pick if you decided to customize a bag at the retail location, and they were all pretty cool looking. I had to leave in short order to make dinner on time, but my interest was piqued.

After a few days of thinking about it, I decided to go back and order one. I was told it’d take two weeks to complete, and I just picked it up from the store yesterday. I am very, very happy with how it turned out. Here’s a picture:

And here’s one of the lining:

Nice, eh?