If any of you doubted my previous observation that fishing line and condoms are marketed identically please note the product I encountered in Canada.

Sensation, Extra Smooth, Extra Tough, Big Game. Someone has a great sense of humor at Trilene.

Oh and when they break! Not sure which is worse.

My father and brother and I are headed to Canada with friends for our first fishing trip in over 15 years. Naturally, we had to restock our gear supply. So we visited the frighteningly expansive Bass Pro Shops in search of a craggy old fisherman who could help us find what we needed. We certainly found him: a leathery, nearly-toothless Vietnam vet who could speak in English for sentences on end without seemingly ever using a word I understood. (“Psst, Dad. Did he just say that the crawler harness behind the bottom bouncer might catch on the planer board? Right, OK, thought so. Good to know.”)

Who would have guessed that fishing line and condoms would be marketed so similarly? You have XL for extra long, smooth action and XT when extra toughness is required and of course there’s new-kid-on-the-block Sensation monofilament for “Greater Sensitivity, Strength, and Control.” Having Mr. Fishervet unironically explain the differences between the types of prophyl- er, fishing line made me feel slightly unclean, quite honestly. He didn’t particularly care for the condom analogy, either.

And because I know you’re wondering, we bought Sensation … for pleasure.

Laura Gilligan meticulously creates customized wine charms and other baubles by hand at Cloud Village. Check out the wedding gift detail.

Melissa Pins turns her keen eye for fashion to custom-made dyeable footwear for women at Blue Tux Shoes. Oooh la la!

Matt Wenc creates paintings that warp spacetime ever-so-subtly at mattwenc.com.

The following message was not underwritten by any of the aforementioned merchants. (But I bet they’d like me more if you bought something.)

Today when calling to cancel a phone account I arrived at a fork in the voice menu path where I had to declare my reason for calling. Once it was confirmed that I wanted to cancel the line would transfer and then after a short wait I would be informed that the system was experiencing difficulties and that I should call back later. Yet, if I called in and declared some other reason — billing question, for instance — I got right through to an agent. I tried this three times and each time when I wanted to cancel (and I used slightly different terms each time) the system was experiencing difficulty. That just seems too baldly nefarious to be believable, but there it is. And no you can’t cancel an account online. That’s be way too easy.

Oh, and when did voice menu systems go from passionless monotone to Katie Couric chirpy? I’ll take robo-operator any day.

Aerolatte – This little gizmo is neither a sexual aid nor a hair removal device, though it looks like both. Warm some milk in the microwave then whip it with the Aerolatte and pour into coffee. Instant latte, no Starbucks or foaming machine. I don’t drink latte, but I find myself grabbing it just to stir in sugar. Automate everything!

Stair Basket – With house lots only 25 feet wide a lot of Chicago living happens on multiple levels. Add to that the amount of crap that accumulates and is dispersed around the place with two kids and you quickly find yourself piling stuff up on the stairs to remind you to take it up or down. Add in general clutziness and perhaps drunkenness and you have a real hazard. That’s where the stair basket comes in. Now you only have one large thing to break your ankle on as opposed to lots of little things.

Greasemonkey – I join many people in thinking this is the greatest Firefox extension ever. Basically it allows people to write small Javascripts that do some amazing things. My favorites include always providing a download link for embedded movies, stripping the margin crud from Boing Boing, and adding Netflix links to IMDB. But far and away my favorite Greasemonkey script is the Chicago Transit Authority hack of Google Maps. Now in addition to the street and satellite view you can switch to a CTA view that shows you where your address is on the subway grid. Wonderful.

Smarterchild – At work our internal chat client has about a half-dozen bots that can do your bidding for you (fetching addresses, monitoring feeds, etc.) so I was pleased to see this ability on the open interweb. I find myself using Smarterchild most often simply to pop up a reminder at a given time. Smarterchild is my friend.

Plaxo – I was initially very skeptical of this service. Storing all your contacts externally is just asking for trouble, in my opinion. But I am a convert now. Plaxo has a great interface, an online version (so you’re not stuck using Outlook), a phone synch option, and — this is important — it does not require your contacts to register with Plaxo to use it. I have reconnected with three or four people that I had lost touch with simply because of the one-to-many update requests you can manage with Plaxo. That alone is worth the cost. Which is $0.

See also: Faves I and Faves II

Somebody’s an Illini fan on the Trump Tower construction site.

Thanks Laura and Jen!

My doctor’s office has signs everywhere informing patients that charts and presciptions will NOT be faxed or mailed to them for confidentiality reasons. OK, fine. But the walls in the office are so thin that you’d think you were in a confessional. As I was waiting to see my doc I overheard a fellow patient next door nervously-laughing his way through a conversation with his doctor about how he needed to lose ten pounds and change some of his eating habits if he wanted to avoid the heart disease embedded in his genes. Shhh, secret!

Recently I switched from the trusty Sage plugin for Mozilla to the standalone FeedDemon RSS/Atom reader for PC. Sage did the job, but the number of feeds I was tracking was getting too large and I was never completely comfortable (nor have I ever been) with that sidebar window on Moz. So I am here to state my incredulity that I ever lived without FeedDemon. Goodness gracious, that’s a well-done app! Very clean with lots of advanced features like podcast organization and keyboard shortcuts. Highly recommended.

Seems like there isn’t any information source that I care about that doesn’t have an RSS feed these days. Would be interesting to clock time spent in the reader versus in the browser, no?

Baseball season’s almost here and that means fantasy leagues are gearing up. Steroid usage is all the talk too with fans on the slippery slope of a debate over what constitutes “real” athleticism. (Steven Johnson predicts that elective surgery is the next category of performance enhancement.) Meanwhile, more entertainment dollars are spent on computer games than attending actual sporting events. (And who knows how much more is spent gambling on sports — a meta-sporting activity, so to speak — than on the sport directly.) Hard to know the boundaries of the real sport.

What I’d like to see is an application that merges an online fantasy basball league, a sports-action baseball game, and a Sim Baseball-type universe (such as this). This way you could field your actual fantasy team (using current or past players) and, using the rich data of past performance, play out actual games at any level from just watching stats crunch against each other spreadsheet-macro-like to actually trying to make Aramis Ramirez hit a pitch from, say, Pedro Martinez. Then, layer in the Sim component (based on as much data as can be mined) to allow you to operate the virtual club and individual players as fully as possible. Salary caps, personality/compatibility issues, performance-enhancing drugs — you’d decide all of this. Or, at least let the data-rich simulation run its course based on a few parameters you set. For example, what would happen if everyone in the league was on androstenedione?

Maybe this kind of app already exists. Seems like it would be hellishly complex, though.

The real question is: how soon until the virtual derivatives of sport feed back into the sport itself? (Not counting gambling scandals, that is.) It happens in other forms of entertainment all the time. How long before there is a game that pits the actual human players of the two best fantasy teams — or some computer-modelled aggregate of the best fantasy teams at any given moment — in the world against each other?

Here’s round two of Stuff I Like. (Part one is here.) Who cares? Hmm, I don’t know, but it is nice to make lists of this. Like a reverse wishlist. Not so much something I want as something I want others to know they should want.

Harmony Remote – Gobbled up by Logitech (but apparently none the worse for wear) the Harmony Remote is by far the most usable, most intuitive universal remote out there today. The most important features of this remote are what it does not do.

It does not consider its screen the primary way of dynamically reconfiguring a new interface for each remote it emulates. Instead it uses hard buttons for as many buttons as possible that overlap the most number of devices. You’d be suprised how few functions are device-specific.

It does not require you to “teach” it the IR codes of your other remotes. Instead, you connect the remote via USB and log in to your account at Logitech. You choose your devices there. I’ve got a bunch of obscure and ancient components in my setup and it had every one of them and far obscurer too.

It is not device-centric, but rather activity-centric, asking what do you want to do rather than which device do you want to access to attempt to do what you want to do? When you login to your account you define activities — watch TiVo, play music, whatever — and almost never need to refer to individual devices again. Activities of course are a nicer name for macros which are just sets of remote commands. But thinking in activities rather than which device must be set to which input blah blah is so much more intuitive. I am about the zillionth person to laud this feature, but hey here I am. (Don Norman loves it, for example.)

Win2VNC – The very definition of a useful hack, this program rides on top of VNC to allow you to use a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers on a desk. (It’d work longer range, but why?) I use this app every day when I plop down in front of my laptop and need to do things on the three other machines on my desk. Getting rid of all those keyboards and mice really frees up a lot of space.

Mozilla Firefox – So I like Firefox, big deal. Using Firefox on PC is a no-brainer. IE is such a steaming turd there’s really no choice. But when I finally switched to Moz on Mac I knew something really important had happened. I mean, Safari is an exemplary browser, truly awesome. For a while there were things I could do in Safari via AppleScript that I could not do in Mozilla, like aggregate all open windows into a single window with multiple tabs. But with Mozilla’s flexible extension architecture it wasn’t long until even that feature was made cross-platform. There’s no Safari for Windows or Linux and I like my browsing experiences to be consistent. Bless you, Firefox.

7UP Plus Mixed Berry – As the only person in the world who actually likes this new drink I feel that I must declare my allegiance here, in public. There, I said it. No need for counterpoint links. Just Google it. No one else likes this beverage.

Anapod Explorer – Probably the most useful piece of iPod software for the PC. The best features include being able to stream music over the web directly from the iPod and being able to manage/access your music via an SQL database of your music library. Oh, also, you can download music from your iPod, something iTunes don’t do.

Sunrise Earth on Discovery HD – You had to know that ambient imagery would be the next logical step after high-def television became somewhat mainstream. Sure, there are media players that’ll load art packs, but Sunrise Earth is one of the first completely non-narrative programs that is just beautiful to look at — and that’s it. The subject of the show is a single sunrise, taken from multiple angles in full surround sound. I love it.

The window side seat on the upper deck of a 747 – No photos for this, so visualize if you will. The curvature of the hull of the 747 is somewhat extreme on the upper deck of the 747 so seats can’t fit right against the window. This is a good thing. Whether the bubble is configured for coach of business class, the gap created by the curve means you get a little footlocker next to your seat that is good for storage, putting your feet up and reclining almost completely, and resting your laptop while you dine. Try it. It feels like a credenza or something.

That’s all for now. Tell me, what I am missing here?