I find myself in the odd position of needing a relatively nimble knife-sharpening device I can use to dull one of my knives. Can anyone let me use one of those diamond-coated ellipsoid-profile knife sharpeners for about ten minutes? (Not a straightening steel - something significantly harder than the knifeI have a cleaver I find very useful, ( Read more... )

I'm told that my radio silence borders on delinquency, so...

I've defended and submitted my dissertation, and am now a free man.

My life is nothing but one huge dissertation. But that won't be true forever, and Sarah is planning a party to celebrate this being over. If you want to be there, go take her poll!

Reading this Times piece about a freegan commune in Buffalo reminded me of Amsterdam. In one sense, it's a handful of people squatting in the ruins of a once-mighty civilization - a port city now bypassed and forgotten. But they can still sustain a non-impoverished lifestyle from the table scraps of the world that took its place. (In this case,

Things I like about the gym, #47:

At the gym this is a totally acceptable social interaction:

me: Spot me?
him: Sure.
[...]
him: Push...
[...]
me: Thanks.
him: No problem.

I've had plenty of good conversations at the gym, (hat-tip to the_macnab , roozle and others), but today I was at the gym because my head was full of bats, and what I was after was the ( Read more... )

Does anyone have a copy of A Fire Upon the Deep that they could lend me?

The genius of Beef Stroganoff is that you get something that looks and smells like a stew, but fast enough to be made after work, and with the surprise flourish of tender, rare strips of steak instead of the expected (though also good) flavor and texture of stewed beef. This trick requires a tender cut of steak - it works best with loin cuts (e.g ( Read more... )

One of the reasons that I've never switched from Safari to Firefox is that Firefox, unlike any well-written application, uses its own homebrewed text entry fields, rather than the ones that are native to the OS. The Mac OS text boxes are especially useful to me, since they duplicate the control-[abdefghknoptvwy] behavior I know and love from emacs ( Read more... )

The first five people to respond to this post, will get some form of art, by me, about [or tailored to] them. I make no guarantees about quality or type, but I will assure that I will give it good effort and that the art will be individual to you, so if you get a mixed CD or some sort of painting doodle, yours is the only one like it ( Read more... )

My friends moiety_tx and nescafe got married this weekend! It was beautiful.

queenofhalves performed the ceremony, and I was really, really impressed. This is a woman who's fairly shy, and isn't exactly at the lower end of the generalized-anxiety spectrum. But she got up there in front of a hundred people and married off two of her closest friends, and I'd say that she ( Read more... )