From the category archives:

Dear Diary

Ramen as a space-filling curve

August 29, 2010

Although it has stared me in the face for years and should have been plainly obvi­ous, last night I had a rev­e­la­tion that the noo­dles in Top Ramen are “wrong.”  Actual ramen from a ramen house has straight noo­dles (and good broth that doesn’t come from a pow­der, but that’s beside this point).  Ramen noodles […]

0 comments Read the full article →

Silver-plated Letterpress

August 9, 2010

I have only linked to Etsy prod­ucts a few times on this blog, but each time I do I feel that I need a boil­er­plate caveat about my views on Etsy — or more specif­i­cally, the prod­ucts being sold there.  I mainly see Etsy through the lens of Regretsy, which goes to great lengths to […]

2 comments Read the full article →

Psychological or physiological?

August 6, 2010

As I men­tioned the other day, I have restarted the 100 Pushups and 200 Situps pro­grams.  Some­thing I noticed, both this time around and last time, is that my pos­ture has improved a bit.  I sit a lit­tle straighter.  I stand a lit­tle taller.  This feels like it is a result of the exer­cise, but […]

0 comments Read the full article →

The Home Depot Absinthe Fountain

August 3, 2010

In the past few weeks I have men­tioned my “ghetto, Home Depot absinthe foun­tain” to a num­ber of friends.  Given the inter­net mantra of “pics or it didn’t hap­pen” and my dif­fi­culty of describ­ing all of the lit­tle details in words, let me start out with a pho­to­graph: The project arose from my desire to […]

0 comments Read the full article →

Hundreds of situps and pushups

July 30, 2010

About six months ago I started doing the One Hun­dred Pushups and Two Hun­dred Situps train­ing plans.  (The situp name is a bit of a mis­nomer, in that they’re really curl-ups or crunches since actual “situps” — the type most of us learned as kids — are not all that great for your body.)  Although […]

1 comment Read the full article →

Money vs. Culture

July 28, 2010

There is a great guy named Mer­lin Mann whose work I have been appre­ci­at­ing for years.  He is pretty much a time and pro­duc­tiv­ity guru, although I am not sure you’d be able to catch him using the word “guru” to describe him­self in any way.  He invented the Hip­ster PDA and Inbox Zero.  Earlier […]

0 comments Read the full article →

Radio Shack: “Is this stuff any good?”

July 20, 2010

My last two posts (skip­ping over the one regard­ing comics) men­tioned Radio Shack in one form or another, so I thought I would com­plete the tril­ogy with this one.  As you may recall read­ing, I worked at Radio Shack in the early 90s.  It was min­i­mum wage plus poor com­mis­sion, so basi­cally ended up being […]

0 comments Read the full article →

The Twitterverse answers my comic book question

July 19, 2010

As a kid, I never got into comic books all that much.  I sus­pect that the only comics I ever read were the free Whiz Kids comics from Radio Shack.  Seri­ously.  When the League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men movie was on the hori­zon, I picked up the graphic novel upon which it was based.  I love […]

9 comments Read the full article →

The six degrees of Amber Alerts

July 13, 2010

This is Dave.  Back in the early 90s I ran into Dave when I was work­ing at Radio Shack.  He came in to buy a tone dialer and a crys­tal of a spe­cific fre­quency and I imme­di­ately knew what sort of shenani­gans he was up to because I had down­loaded and read the same text files with […]

2 comments Read the full article →

A conversation over weed pulling

July 4, 2010

Today I got to con­tinue a 4th of July tra­di­tion: pulling up the past 6 months of neglected weeds from the back yard.  This year, though, it was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent.  Sure, there were still plenty of weeds, but more inter­est­ingly, there were worms — lots of them.  In pre­vi­ous years, the lawn itself has […]

0 comments Read the full article →

On the usability of virtual pre-paid gift credit cards

June 30, 2010

Recently, I found myself in pos­ses­sion of a $20 “vir­tual” Visa gift card.  To make a long story short, I found the Wol­fram Alpha iPhone app use­ful enough to spend $20 on it when the price dropped from $50, but then it later dropped to $2 and Mr. Wol­fram decided to issue refunds to those […]

0 comments Read the full article →

The horrors of internet calendar formats

June 1, 2010

I have been work­ing on a lit­tle side-project for a few weeks now.  One of the things I thought I could add easy-peasy, slam-dunk, was a read-only view of a shared cal­en­dar.  I have seen the iCal data for­mat before, and it didn’t strike me as par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult, just A BUNCH OF CAPITAL LETTERS and […]

0 comments Read the full article →

← Older Entries