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February 28, 2006

Morning in the French Quarter; pay Providence parking tickets, taxes online; flower font

Bourbocam, from Nola.com, is at the corner of Bourbon and St. Peter Streets in the French Quarter. People were milling and dancing there at 1 a.m. It's oddly compelling this morning to watch people go to work -- mostly on foot, with the occasional car, roller blades and bicycle. (If it's not morning wheen you read this, you can rewind if you don'tt like what you see now.)

Live video | Webcam

Carnival of Lost Souls: Talking Mardi Gras with Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans novelist. Interviewed in the Village Voice, Brite notes, "So far, this has been a very local Carnival."

Virtual city hall: Paying parking tickets and property taxes always hurts, but for a fee you can dispose of them without standing in line at city hall or writing a check and forgetting to mail it. Providence's list of online services is impressive. In the wee hours you can pay those orange parking tickets while still small for $3 (any number for that fee). Paying taxes that way can be expensive, though. A motor vehicle tax bill might cost under $5, but I wouldn't pay real estate taxes that way -- the fee for online tax payments is 2.95 percent of the dollar amount.

Flower fonts: We think of fonts as alphabets, but some pictographic fonts are drawings delivered via keystrokes. Kapitza.com offers silhouettes of flowers assembled into a font called Blossomy. There's also a companion font of silhouetted people, often in compelling motion. They're for sale, but the odd little pictures are all displayed on one page for you to admire.

Rocket ships: 1950s Car Art.

Jeeves retired: Fired, actually. The need to personify search results, as though a human servant were fetching for you, was always an eye-roller. Anybody remember an operating system called Microsoft Bob?

Askjeeves.com now redirects simply to ask.com.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:08 AM | Permalink