One aspect I loved the most of my last Dutch textbook was the way it presumed its readers were thoughtful, intelligent, and reflective people with deeper interests than their own visceral self-gratification ( Read more... )

I've been on a self-made diet now for 5 weeks, and I've taken off five pounds in that time. Wanted to put down the "rules" that evolved, both for my own use, and for friends since diets seem to have a bad name ( Read more... )

Several months ago, our division president at Microsoft wrote a few blog entries from which one could reasonably infer he held significant interest in the 1960s space race.

I delayed for two months (personal anxiety over authority figures, sigh), but finally dropped a copy of the To Touch the Stars CD that we did years ago on his chair. I also ( Read more... )

I won’t spoil this by telling you precisely what instruments Michael Moricz recorded last weekend on Julia’s album, but, uh, check out a 3 minute excerpt of “Going Back/The Dark is Rising”. You'll know why I was glad that I was, uh, already sitting down about 60 seconds through (don't cheat!).

You want to hear this MP3. Trust me ( Read more... )

Last Friday at work, I'd mentioned to a coworker how difficult it seemed to me to learn even elementary spoken Mandarin, and that I'd recently written it off as impossible after 15 tongue-twisted minutes of Pimsleur ( Read more... )

Derek Sivers doesn't even know anyone at CD Baby anymore.

Amazing that nobody in the indie music press has picked up on the backlash to the new artist back-end & resulting lack of any customer service or accountability after he sold the company to Discmakers.

(see comments at bottom from Derek):

CD Baby was all written in PHP + MySQL + Linux. ( Read more... )

Just wanted to share with those of interest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8G-o5t8104

...in order to play thinly-veiled smear-the-queer with GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings. (If you've heard of a 'gay-straight alliance', you've been impacted by Kevin's love and leadership ( Read more... )

Watch at your own risk -- I turned it off after 15 seconds or so and haven't seen the rest.

Click to view

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124336746233955539.html

Glad to see that busting this mythology is starting to get some serious press.