Dev Blogs
My friend Jonathan is acting as my host in Uppsala, and he was responsible for preparing dinner for a staff party at his nation. He chose curry. The same thing he chose the last time he was responsible for preparing dinner for a party. The last time, one of the attendees ceremonially dumped the curry into the trash because it was "inedi...
McDonalds anonunced that it would no longer offer "Super Size" on its menu. The ostensible reason was that the addition of newer healthier options didn't leave room on the menu for "Super Size". This was of course laughable on its face. Now it's even more laughable, because it turns out that the so-called "healthy" options are even fat...
The weird stuff about Japan you were afraid to ask about. The Seldom-Asked Questions are interesting, but what I find the most fascinating is the pictures of various Japanese subcultures. [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.]
I've ranted before about privacy policies and how they don't actually protect your privacy. (All they're required to do is disclose the policy; there is no requirement that the policy must be any good.) Today I read MetLife's privacy policy and found to my surprise that it does not actively offend me. It's written in plain English, it's...
Something is wrong with the world when fark finds something "real" news organizations miss. (When I first learned about fark, I confused it with FARC, a different organization entirely. That's right, a terrorist organization has its own official web site. Gotta love the Internet.)Anyway, fark has pointed out that the guy that Pakistani fo...
So it happens that Opening Day of the baseball season coincides with Good Friday, a day of "fasting and abstinence" according to Catholic tradition. (Then again, after Vatican II, the definition of "fasting and abstinence" weakened significantly. All that most people remember any more is "no meat".) Catholics in Boston have applied to the ar...
For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn't even have a hood, so you can't poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, "Hey, ...
I was exchanging e-mail with one of the people I will be visiting while I'm in Uppsala [link repaired 10:43pm]. and we wrote in double-translation, first in Swedish, with English translation beneath it. But eventually he gave up and wrote exclusively in English. I went back to my previous dual-language message and found a few pretty stupid gra...
A Georgia State University study shows that U.S. senators have an uncanny knack for picking stocks that outpace the overall market. Professor Alan Ziobrowski's analysis of senators' financial disclosure data found that over a period of six years, the lawmakers outperformed the market by 12 percent. Professor Ziobrowski seems convinced ...
Commentator and novelist Christian Bauman recalls the excitement of receiving mail from anonymous well-wishers back home during his deployment with the U.S. Army in Somalia in the early 1990s. This was a fascinating listen. The coup, of course, was getting a letter with a snapshot or two inside. I don't know why, but the further west...