Category Archives: Everything Else

Most of the reaction in the mid 80’s to the AT&T divestiture was that it was a diastrous mistake, a conclusion no doubt encouraged and reinforced by AT&T marketing and the legions of AT&T employees coached by their management. However, when a monopolist has beaten down its potential competitors for years and years, it takes… Read More »

My wife is in White Horse, Canada, this week with some of her family, because her late grandfather was named the “Pioneer of the Year” by the Yukon Territory Transportation Museum. The big ceremony is tomorrow. Her grandfather was a bush pilot famous for providing the first airmail delivery to the Yukon Territory and for… Read More »

Technology Review is one of my favorite magazines, but they continue to show a lack of competence with respect to subscriptions. While their overall website has improved from bad to okay, renewing a subscribtion online is still a fool’s errand. I prefer online renewals, just like I prefer online bill pay. Technology Review has unfortunately… Read More »

If Google Maps wasn’t good enough to begin with, they had to go and add satellite imagery from their Keyhole acquisition. After navigating around on Google Maps to find a location of interest, click on the Satellite link in the top right corner of the screen to switch to satellite image mode. If you’re looking… Read More »

Thanks to my brother, who always has his finger on the pulse of amusing things drifting across the internet, I’m able to share a link to a video of possibly the greatest moment in curling history. Or maybe not. Hell, I don’t know. I’m an American. All I know is that it’s pretty funny listening… Read More »

As a nice accompaniment to my recent post about the dangers of multitasking, someone recently posted an excellent article on personal productivity at Kuro5hin. And who should the article have quoted, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Once again, the concept of “flow” reigns supreme. The author of the article at Kuro5hin provides several excellent suggestions for improving… Read More »

And in a somewhat less productive use of my time, I earned the “Wicked Sick!” announcement in an Unreal Tournament 2004 Team DeathMatch tonight.

Today’s Oakland Tribune has two good articles on computer reuse. One of the articles describes how Oakland Technology Exchange-West, or OTX, has supplied over 5,000 computers to families who would have otherwise found it very difficult to afford a computer. While much of the benefit to these families is financial, I suspect that a first… Read More »

DreamHost, the company that hosts my website, never fails to amaze me. Since I started with them nearly three years ago, they have increased the amount of disk space and bandwidth for my account by a huge factor, while increasing the annual charge for my account by exactly $0.00. They just tripled the disk space… Read More »