A year and a half ago, I went to a wedding with my girlfriend, and got struck down by Lupus while there. My joints ached, and so I wound up spending a portion of a lovely weekend in Santa Fe in bed. I'm not saying this to win your sympathy. By now, you should be used to my whinging about Lupus. It knocks you on your ass. You just lie in bed, ( Read more... )

Back ten years ago, when I was backpacking my way across Europe, my priorities were very straightforward. I wanted a cheap bed in a central location near all the sightseeing locations, and I wanted easy access to copious amounts of alcohol. If I was feeling particularly adventurous, I'd try to drink an appropriate alcohol to where I was (grappa in ( Read more... )

From the Gothamist Article about the police raid on Liberty Park.

No NYPD officer seemed to be in possession of the eviction notice. A man holding a copy on Church Street offered to let us shoot a picture of the text, but wouldn't let us touch it. "I'm putting it on ebay," he said. "I want my grandkids to know that I had a copy of this notice."
I ( Read more... )

Part of my job has become to teach a semi-regular lunchtime seminar on our database standards and practices. And because it's a lunchtime seminar on database standards and practices, it takes a lot of effort and energy to make it not the most boring thing on the planet. I think I'm pretty good at it. Of course, if the Dunning-Kruger Effect is to be ( Read more... )

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In honor of the three year anniversary of my heart surgery, I went back to the E.R. last night.

The heart palpitation issues that I wrote about the other night wound up coming back with a vengeance. Initially, I thought it was just that the episode of Friday Night Lights was just really exciting--it was! They played football!--but then the episode ( Read more... )

Fourth time is a charm and I can really confirm it, or at least, enough to watch the hell out the next time. For the fourth time in a row, I've taken a larger increase in Prednisone to deal with a Lupus flare (not even a huge dose--just 5mg rather than 2mg), and I'm experiencing a weird side-effect that can only be characterized as the one I was ( Read more... )

I'm trying to create a relatively easy to administer place to lad up the different types and subjects of Trivia rounds for the place where I host Trivia. Ideally, this database would make it easy to categorize in various different ways the types and subjects of our different type of rounds ( Read more... )

So Reed Hastings, of Netflix, emailed me last night. It was sent at 2:47am, which is the time of drunken emails--always a bad sign. In his email he starts up by saying, "I messed up. I owe you an explanation." He then proceeds with an explanation that defies imagination and common sense. Then, he doubles down. It all adds up to the dumbest ( Read more... )

Tea-party activists called McCain "out of touch" when the senator said he didn't know about United Nations "Agenda 21."One man described the initiative as a "takeover of the United States of America by taking over our farms." - From here
I just want to say "Damn you" to the Tea Party assholes for making me sympathize with that angry ghoul John ( Read more... )