Blog

The story of how I came to buy a UPS without budgeting for it 15 years ago
One interesting thing that Sunnyvale did that none of the other cities I've lived in recently has done is provide a registry of neighborhoods. You can go online and each named neighborhood has the option of setting up a community association and webpage. So there's a yahoogroup for my neighborhood…

Everybody makes fun of my diet at work 15 years ago
Everybody makes fun of my diet at work, mostly because they think I'm always eating. See, if you go by the scale, I'm eating a lot less. I've managed to bend my metabolism to my will. I don't get really hungry or fuzzy from having low blood sugar now, but I'm losing weight and eating less food. But…

John McCain and the Internet: A bad idea 15 years ago
Back in the primaries, McCain enlisted the services of spammers. I got some badly targeted emails that were clearly oriented towards military veterans... and the email address for the person I think he thought he had wasn't a veteran, nor am I. I filled out the form on his website and said that I…

The election 15 years ago
There are many places to start a story. Maybe Martin Luther King. Or the first Kenyans in America. Let's start it with a game of blackjack. Jack Ryan (a disgraced politician) met Jeri Lynn Zimmermann, who later became Jeri Ryan, famous for playing a borg on Star Trek: Voyager, at a charity event…

In LC order... 15 years ago
I'm organizing my books in LC order (This is the way books are filed in the Library of Congress... and it's LC not LoC) There's good reasons for this. Largely because it's a more modern design than Dewey decimal but also because the people who run the modern Dewey Decimal system are generally douchebags and really want you to have to pay to get access to enough information to actually properly shelve books in order without using an external reference...

Rent on Video and Spring Awakening 15 years ago
The other day, I saw a recording of Rent. Rent was not my first musical, nor my first good musical. But it's very high on my list of favorite musicals. See, Johnathan Larson wrote a musical that was both stepped in the long tradition of the modern Broadway musical and also in rock. It's got an…

Why politicians should not spam (or even come close) 15 years ago
So I've gotten into some flamewars with folks about spammer politicians with people who don't seem to grasp points until they've gotten hit on the head. So I figure I'll write a nice post on the subject and make it sound reasonable and not have to bother finding new and clever ways to call them an…

A very topical book for right now: The Stainless Steel Rat for President 15 years ago
Right now, you should go to your library or go to amazon.com and get this book. It's very topical and you'll probably spend a bunch of time in the next two months laughing over how you are reminded of the scenes instead of crying because you hate both candidates. My thoughts on The Stainless Steel…

A move to dense CD packing 15 years ago
Ever see "High Fidelity"? You know, the John Cusack movie where the main character deals with his top five worst relationships and spends most of the movie organizing his record collection in autobiographical order? I've never actually managed to sit through it. Just watched bits and pieces of it…

Too obsessive to hit the reset button 15 years ago
I'm too obsessive to hit the reset button on things. This is a problem with forums and RSS feeds. I keep feeling like I need to really keep up. Like there's some sort of life-affirming answer to a question of metaphysics or the secret to building a warp drive or something in there. But it's not. I…