Welcome to stimulus season. If you’re stumped for ideas, check out what your fellow Americans did with it on How I Spent My Stimulus. You can even add your own stimulus story…

See excerpt below. (Thanks for the tip, Pam.)

I helped a friend move some furniture this weekend. Up at 7:00 am! Earliest I’ve been up on a Saturday in several months.

Reed DeLapp spotted quite the photo opportunity near the IKEA furniture pick-up, and his iPhone came to the rescue. The quality of iPhone and Treo photos is quite impressive. I don’t think I would even attempt a photo like this with my Motorola Razr, and when these photo opps com along, it’s nice to be prepared (ask Nick Longtin if you’re not convinced).

Check out this tool!

What it do, world.

Oh man, oh man. My Kanye shades arrived!!

Driving with these on is not a crime because looking fly and committing a crime can never occur in conjunction with one another.*

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*ArcStone Technologies, Inc. and the author are not responsible for the accuracy or reliability of any information, data, opinions, advice or statements made in this post. Word.

If you like art, and you like people, you’ll love Craftstravaganza - a rogue art and craft fair for handmade art. My wife and I attended last year and were really impressed with the talent and variety of artists – some really great stuff. Great gift buying opportunities at affordable prices.

At that time our baby clothing project was still in the design phase, so one of our goals for this year was to apply to become a vendor - and am pleased to announce we were accepted. Vendors are judged and a limited number are accepted so we were very excited. Come and say hi, and support our local artists. In fact, I will even offer $5 off any onesie or t-shirt if you mention this post! Preview our wares, http://orangerhinokids.etsy.com

Craftstravaganza takes place this weekend, complete information on the website: http://www.craftstravaganza.com/2008/home.html

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Saturday April 26th, 9am - 6pm
Minnesota State Fairgrounds - Fine Arts Building
Complete directions here

Our booth will be directly across from the band (yes there is music too!), our business name is Orange Rhino
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I had every intention of using my recently released SoundData class in an experiment with Papervision3D. I got pretty far: Picked out a good Armin Van Buuren track, had an interesting animation started; just hadn’t added the code to respond to the sound spectrum.

Unfortunately, once I loose a little momentum on one of these side projects, the likelihood of a bigger, better experiment stealing it’s lunch money gets pretty high. I grew rather attached to this latest experiment and, despite it’s somewhat ‘incompleteness’, I wanted to share it anyways.

Special thanks to Seb Lee-Delisle for the inspiration and all his particle work on Papervision3D!

Here’s the experiment. Enjoy! (there are several colors and speeds… so if you don’t like what you get on the first pass… refresh the page

HELLO WORLD!!!

Welcome to my very first blog. It’s an honor to write for TechnologyTranslated.com and I plan on making the most of it before I actually get real work to do here at ArcStone. For those you who are wondering who the never-before-heard-of-but-severely-articulate author of this article is, well world… I’m the new guy. “Office Cohesion Specialist” is my title, or OCS for short. An OCS is exactly like the company CEO or COO, minus the experience and responsibilities (and pay). I’m an important piece of the puzzle here at ArcStone… but not really.

For the past couple weeks I have been testing Wonderfile, running through every inch of the site to check for bugs. I used our project manager Bart’s company American Express card to register new accounts for the testing process. Wonderfile accounts cost between free-99 and almost $500, but I was using the company’s card and since the company owns Wonderfile, we were basically paying ourselves. No money was actually be lost in the process.

Short story long, using the company’s credit card got me thinking. If I could buy anything, and I mean anything, what expensive things would I buy? Here’s three items on my wish list (with more to come in the future editions of my blog).

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1. A monkey

Intelligent, agile, funny, and hopefully not of the poop-throwing variety. He would gather donuts and other goods for me (a la Mojo, Homer’s helper monkey from the Simspons) and would attract babes like a magnet (a la a babe magnet). A monkey would be my first purchase. It’s the most obvious choice. Practical and very entertaining.

The site Primatestore.com also sells giraffes and siberian tigers. Doesn’t seem like a legal operation, but they do good work. Mike Tyson rated its customer service a 10 out of 10 in 1994.

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2. The Best Dinner. Ever.

I would have dinner with family and friends 100 feet in the air. With Taco Bell, a personal favorite cuisine. For 8,000 Euros these “Dinner In The Sky” folks will lift a table, along with you and your guests, up into the air for a unique dine. Check out the website for more details. I’m currently taking requests to join me. Request should should be no longer than 250 words; send them to dsundquist@arcstone.com.

I’m curious what happens when you have to go to the bathroom.

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3. The most expensive, ridiculously over-the-top fish aquarium money could buy

I have an aquarium at home right now. I have a catfish, two angelfish, and a beta among a few others.

What I don’t have at home is a 2,500 gallon beast of a tank, filled with with exotic corals and tropical fish/sharks/octopi. I want multiple main chambers spread around the rooms of my house with glass tubing running through the walls, connecting the chambers. It’d be pretty much the most baller thing ever.

I’d definitely throw some lion fish in there too.

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Let me wrap this all up with a favorite quote: shoot for the moon, because if you fall short, you’ll land amongst the stars (credit goes to my 13-year-old cousin Katie’s bulletin board).

Until next time, world.

Sincerely yours,
Daniel Sundquist

Nick Longtin, our most productive blogger, has recently been complaining about not being to read his email on his 19 inch widescreen external monitor. Couple that with his 30th birthday just a few days ago and he felt the need to get a bigger monitor for his aging eyes. Bigger to Nick isn’t 22 or 24 inches - IT’S 38 INCHES!!!

With this new monitor we expect Nick to be 8 times more productive. See for you own eyes how Nick is using monitor size to be more productive!

Here at ArcStone, we only dream of the kind of corporate office angst that spawns entertainment like this:

• ^ ^ ^ Crazy and hilarious video compilation of corporate peons going postal to the tune of Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day.”
• Five Minutes to Kill Yourself. A flash game where you have only five minutes to kill yourself before a mandatory meeting.
• The USB Rocket Launcher. Nick has one of these and can testify to its usefulness in dispelling office tension. Now that he’s found the USB extension cable, he’s twice the threat.
• Scott Adam’s Blog. Who better to get you through the day than the evil genius behind Dilbert? (I should mention that ArcStone has not one cubicle and nary a Dilbert comic pinned up on the wall.)
• Corporate Gibberish Generator. In case you’re stumped for copy on your website. (Joking. You were tempted, weren’t you?)
• Online Anger Management Classes. Maybe it’s safer this way — no risk of beating up your classmates.

Edit: I forgot one. Get Yourself Fired. For those who *really* hate their jobs.

Any lover of words invariably goes through a phase of trying to learn all of the group names for various animals. You know the obvious ones:

a school of fish
a flock of birds
an army of caterpillars
a pride of lions

And the not so obvious ones:

a troubling of goldfish
a trip of goats
a wake of buzzards
a battery of barracudas
a parliament of owls

Perhaps it’s a bastardization of the English language to take this concept and apply it to something other than animals, but I was trying to come up with a name that describes a group of links. And then…of course… I couldn’t leave it at just that. Imagine the possibilities. (more…)

I tend to be a very thorough and detail-oriented person… at least I hope so (there are other words for it, but we’ll leave it at that). So naturally, when I’m writing code - whether it’s xhtml, CSS, ActionScript etc - I try and keep things neat, clean and easy to read. I indent like it’s going out of style, I strive for consistent naming conventions, and I use descriptive variable and function names.

(more…)