Someone should write an essay about how Facebook is an interesting way to find cast-off ephemera. There's all kinds of random junk I've pursued and learned about just because someone I knew posted a link to it ( Read more... )

How do you display tables correctly here that have been generated in Word?

Worth mentioning in passing: good lord is this a depressing year for news. The oil spill, probable political disaster, stupidity in the Middle East... and today's main news story in the Times is that we're going to get to relive the Depression of 1937. This neverending stream of bleakness out there right now is definitely not helping things.

I think that I was dreaming about hotels and walking on underground walkways in hotels, and then this one walkway started in the lobby of a hotel and at some point became a vast pedestrian-only bridge going from the South Hills of Pittsburgh to the Pitt campuses. Like a highway but only for people ( Read more... )

I really have to stop watching politics in this idiotic excuse for a country. It's so deeply hardwired into me, though. I am truly sick to my stomach.

I just dropped a bunch of friends who a) never post/went to FB or b) I don't feel like I "know." I'll add you back if you want me to.

The election in MA has me down. This brief window of time when anything good might happen in this country has passed and we're back to, at best, a period of defense against the crazies yet again. And the signs for the House in the fall are horrendous. This was all quite predictable, but still, the ferocity with which the electorate eats itself ( Read more... )

With the inevitable agglomeration of "friends" on Facebook comes a plethora of short, pithy "status updates" when you log in. Boxes with faces that bear a distant relation to a half-remembered visage from some previous life or other -- an old job, high school, a trip to Israel -- ten or fifteen or twenty years in the past. All in their thirties, ( Read more... )

It is insane to go. It will be cold, there are a lot of people, we're going to miss the parade, and I have no idea exactly how we'll get back to the train station in time ( Read more... )

You have to love car dealerships. I get a recall notice from Toyota about bolts for the passenger windows, so I decide to finally bring it in. They tell me it will be "about an hour." After an hour goes by, she comes in with a whole list of things that "really" need to be done -- new tires, battery, timing chain, crank case. Um, and the windows ( Read more... )