OK, so Peggle might not be enough for you? Try Iconfactory’s Frenzic. A very fast-paced puzzle game with pieces reminiscent of Trivial Pursuit wedges.

Instapaper is a very handy site to have at hand, especially if you’ve got an iPhone (as you can see from above, it’s a very lightweight design). Basically, you create an account, install a droplet in your browsers and as you come across interesting sites you use the droplet to add a link to the site to your account. You then have instant access to a “newspaper” of articles you already want to read whenever you find yourself with time on your hands (such as on public transit with your iPhone). I’ve also found it extremely useful when you find an article or a site at work, you can effortlessly save it for when you get home. (Via Gruber)

Amazing time-waster warning: Peggle (iPod, Windows). Once you get past the cartoony fantasy part, this is a very addictive game - pinball on steroids. Great fun!

OK, when you’re done wasting time with Peggle and want to be productive, CSSEdit is a great tool for web design. The auto-complete prompts that come up as you type CSS are such a great timesaver.

Going and visiting my parents - and all the good Mom home-cooking that comes along with it! (Above is a pic of my parents’ kitchen table).

Apologies for the delay in the usual 8:30am posting of the awesome bit today. Yesterday was Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday (Super-Fat Tuesday?) - well, it also turned out to be Layoff Tuesday too, as I’m no longer working for Antec. They’re reorganizing the Marketing department and decided that they no longer wanted to do the reseller channel program I was developing.

So where does this leave me? Well, hopefully not as bad as feared. I’ve been starting to look anyways. Not much to report right now, but if you know of anybody who’s looking for Marketing folks, lemme know!

In the meantime, as you might imagine, priorities have shifted a little with all this. I’ll try to keep up on the project, but I might slip now and again. Hope you understand.

Sorry for the delay in today’s bit - Advanced Audi/VW is the garage we’ve been taking my Passat and now the R32 to. They’re a little on the pricey side as an independent, but they’re totally worth it - extremely knowledgeable, friendly and honest. If you drive German and are looking for a good mechanic in the Bay Area, you can’t go wrong.

Ah, the beauty of timestamping in WordPress. Fantastic feature - really helped me when I was playing catch-up on this project. I’ve been wanting to keep a week’s worth of posts queued up and ready to go on a rolling basis, but sometimes it’s been a bit of a challenge to do that (for instance, I’ve burned through the week-long queue I had going).

No picture this time around - continuing to take in how relatively painless the run up to the ‘rents this past weekend was. About 2.5 hours up, a little less coming home. I guessed that the drive home during the Super Bowl was going to be pretty painless, but I was surprised there wasn’t a mass migration from the Bay Area up to Tahoe to take advantage of all the fresh snow. Looks like I’ve got a plan for next year’s Super Bowl weekend!

In keeping with the “awesome software utilities” theme, I happened to be reminded of this next awesome bit - AppleJack, an opensource tool that helps you run the gamut of troubleshooting from Single User Mode in OS X (I was of course reminded since my PowerBook hiccuped on me today - nothing serious, knock on wood, but still).

Unfortunately, I also found out today that it hasn’t been updated to run on 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard) yet. Managed to use another tool, but things would have run a bit smoother with AppleJack. For those of you who haven’t updated OS X yet, take advantage!

I’ve been meaning to put xScope by ARTIS Software and Iconfactory on this list for a while. It’s a great little application that helps you measure items on your screen - absolutely ideal when doing web design. I used it for the first design of this blog way back when and all my web noodlings since.

The timing actually has worked out pretty great, as v2.0 was just released on Wednesday - if you do any kind of visual design on the Mac, I can’t recommend this tool highly enough! The new “Dimensions” feature (pictured above) is worth the price of admission alone.

Aziza (OpenTable) is this great Moroccan restaurant in the Richmond on Geary @ 22nd. If there’s anything that you need to have off its menu is the basteeya, this great chicken & almond pastry served as an appetizer. The lamb chops are pretty good too.

Another Christmas gift from Teresa (this past Christmas) - I love this Genesis box set! It’s kinda hard to argue the value of what you get with Genesis 1976-1982 - complete remasters of every album, both in CD and 5.1 DVD-Audio, video interviews with each band member regarding each album, other video goodies and an extra CD & DVD of songs from the era not found on albums. Not sure when I’m going to get around to 1983-1996, but I’m anxiously waiting for 1970-1976.

This one is way overdue, and as such I do want to reiterate that all the bits are decidedly not in any sort of order, other than “random”. Depending on how you look at it, you might say this is another two-fer, as both are my parents are great in their own right. Without having to acknowledge the obvious, it’s really hard to imagine what my life would be like without them. Exceptionally supportive and generous, I honestly don’t think I would be anywhere near where I am today without them. I’m very, very, very lucky.

It took me a while to get around to asking my friend Jim to use it. Despite the fact it was taken on Jim’s camera, this photo (which captures them really well, I think) was taken by our friend Andy’s wife, Joanne.

No picture to share here, but there’s no way I can’t share OpenTable.com. Online restaurant reservations with the ability to accumulate points for redemption for vouchers that can be used at (guess where?) restaurants that use Opentable? Pretty easy sell. Better yet, they’ve been really good about having a wide presence - we’ve even used them for reservations in Vancouver.