When I reached the ripe old age of 25, the barrier to renting cars was no more, much to the chagrin of the rental agencies. You see, when I drive a rental car, I have fun. I do things that I would never do to my own car. Knowing that I drive the way I […]

I’ve gathered another list of search phrases with which people have found my site. Some are weird, others wacky and a few are just plain strange. britney spears riding on a motorcycle – Fine, you’re a fan of Britney. Why do you want to see her riding on a motorcycle? Why not driving a car, […]

A past roommate of mine and guest author on my blog has a blog of his own.

Rob Read has written a paper explaining how to be a programmer (presumably a good one). I haven’t had a chance to read all of it, but from what I saw it had useful advice for all levels of programmers. (via /.)

If you have a web site, don’t restrict browsers without reason. I use Opera and Galeon mainly but reporting.net displayed an error saying that I had to use IE, Netscape or Mozilla. Galeon uses Mozilla’s libraries, so the rendering is identical, but they wouldn’t let me use it. Thankfully, the designers of Opera had the […]

I’ve noticed the phrase “buying a condo” in the list of search engine queries leading to my site. I only mentioned it in passing, so the people that find my page probably leave without learning anything. I will now rectify the situation (mainly because I like to use the word rectify). I didn’t follow all […]

I spent a few hours one Saturday creating a list of 100 things about me and added myself to the web ring. It was an interesting experience. I got to know myself better and was reminded of events that I had nearly forgotten. I recommend it to anyone who would like a chance for introspection.

For some reason I was curious about the saying, “curiosity killed the cat.” Is it true? Is there really a cat on record that died because it was curious? Did it lick a light socket or crawl into a microwave? Why did curiosity kill the cat but not the dog, rabbit, mouse or orangutan? I […]

Have you ever had an idea you thought was so absurd that you had to be the first one to think of it? While eating at Rodizios some of my coworkers and I had a discussion about beef gum, which became a running joke during lunch. We weren’t the first.

Van Gogh’s Letters, unabridged and annotated. (via mefi) I’ve been curious about van Gogh, especially after hearing Don McLean’s song, Vincent. Van Gogh’s letters provide an intimate view into his personality and who he really is. I prefer reading what he wrote instead of a biography. I had never heard of Web Exhibits until I […]

The third annual weblog awards are at it again, having risen to the top of blogdex and daypop. My recommendation is not to take them too seriously. It’s all in good fun; a way to give recognition where it is due, but there’s no need to get all worked up over it.

I started reading Dave Barry’s column a few months ago and each week he manages to make me laugh. He is at the top of a very short list of good humor columnists. (I wrote that before I saw that page. How convenient.) I’ve found that it’s not hard to find humor columnists; the hard […]

From a MetaTalk post I learned that a user was artificially inflating his MeFi contribution index. I was going to remove him from the list, but Matt took care of the problem by banning him from MeFi. Since I was already looking at the code, I made three minor improvements. The first is that the […]

I want to read the 1,000 words that this picture is worth.

I’ve rewritten some of the navigation code for the site in order to make it more usable. If you notice something that doesn’t seem to be right, please let me know in a comment. There’s still some more work to do, but I believe it’s headed in the right direction.

An analysis of more than 8,000 full-term births has shown that mothers have more complications when giving birth to a baby boy. Male infants were just as likely to be healthy after delivery as female babies. Sorry mom.

The Salt Lake blog meetup was fun, except that I work with all the people who attended. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy spending time with them, but I could have just as easily had the meeting at my place. The purpose of a meetup, in my mind, is to meet new bloggers in the […]

I prefer a short delay and a high repeat rate for my keyboard. On Red Hat, I used kbset, but when I ran an application that changed the keyboard settings, it couldn’t restore the settings. I looked for an alternative and found xkbset, written by Stephen Montgomery-Smith. In addition to being able to set the […]

I have owned a Sony Clié for nigh on a year and have enjoyed it, except for one problem: It refused to sync with my desktop. No matter how much I tried to convince them of the value of communication, they refused to talk. Eventually, I gave up. A few evenings ago, fueled by renewed […]

I had the pleasure of watching Three Fugitives on TV last night. I usually don’t laugh out loud during a movie, especially when I’m the only one in the room. So, either the movie was exceptionally funny or there was a gas leak, because I laughed a lot. I enjoyed the antics of Martin Short […]

When you look at an image on a web page, the viewable size and the actual size can be a confusing distinction. The actual size is the number of bytes in the image, or how much space the file would use on a hard drive. The viewable size is determined by HTML tags which allow […]

I was in the Northeast for Christmas where we were given a generous helping of snow on Christmas day. Mother Nature had not given such a cold and bounteous Christmas gift since weather records were first kept in the late 1800’s. The roads cleared up the next day and by Saturday the runway in Manchester […]

I have been making infrequent entries this week because of vacation and the absence of internet access at home. I’ll be back to work on Monday though, and my roommate has resolved one of the two problems with the connection at home. The other problem is with the wireless access point that refuses to work. […]