En route to the Google developer's conference, I tried an electronic boarding pass (the kind you can show on your phone) for the first time. The TSA kiosk did great, but the AA scanner couldn't read it, right when dozens of people were behind me trying to board. They ended up typing in my seat manually.
Also, it was actually a little uncomfortable ( Read more... )

So I actually rate my songs in iTunes:  Assuming that the vast majority of songs I own are in my library for a reason, two stars is my baseline for unremarkable tracks, three stars is a reasonably enjoyable song, four is a really good and memorable song, and five stars is reserved for my all-time favourites.  The garbage gets one star.

I have a ( Read more... )

aerynne is getting rid of a couple dozen books. Raise your hand if you want one or more before they go out the door.
( ...and the titles are... )

We were still getting "Basic" and "Expanded Basic" Cable TV in addition to broadband with our Comcast account.  Besides the having-a-baby household budget analysis that brought scrutiny to the cable bill, the Comcast transition over to digital in December introduced a couple of converter boxes into our lives -- boxes that are still sitting unpacked ( Read more... )

A visit to a nuclear power plant while in my teens originally introduced me to the idea of substituting the periodicity in the periodic table of the elements with neutron count to give a sense of the known isotopes for each element.  But, while previously aware of strangeness, my periodic dips into 21st century particle physics had not previously ( Read more... )

My wife and I have a lot of books.  About a thousand, in fact.  Not as many as some, but more than many others.  So many books we have, in fact, that we're making a baby to help shoulder the load of reading them all.

The baby apparently comes with needs beyond books, though, and we're currently rearranging the house to make room for those needs that ( Read more... )

My cousin just won her third and final gold medal on the Canadian women's hockey team (woo!), so I was poking around the olympics today for snippets.  I found an interesting analysis by Richard Florida in The Atlantic calculating a Winter Olympic Medals Per Capita metric.

I certainly expected such a ranking to drop the U.S. a fair amount, but was ( Read more... )

This week we went to chilly Florida, where we got to see the last (scheduled) nighttime Space Shuttle launch.

The first night we were treated to a few of the wee hours hanging out in Space View park, freezing along with a few hundred other wanna-sees.  As the launch window approached our few hundred friends ballooned to a few thousand, all present ( Read more... )

Listening to NPR's 50 Great Voices this morning, and one interviewee's description of Ahmad Zahir as a great voice because he reminded people of the "good old days" of the 1970s, I had a rapid-fire barrage of impressions.  "Good old days?  1970s?  Rising crime?  Stagflation?  Watergate?  Vietmam?  Oil shocks?  Are you remembering the same 1970s as ( Read more... )

A few years ago I read an interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone about their choices when creating "Team America: World Police" that they considered the possibility of doing an all-puppet version of a Jerry Bruckheimer script instead of writing a new script.  In effect, the puppets would be a little flag that says to audiences "OK, this time you ( Read more... )