Dev Blogs
Here is where Raymond gets to abuse his power as a blogger to get some free travel advice. I will likely travel to Sweden in mid-March, with a whopping total of five months of Swedish under my belt. I'm sure I will embarrass myself horribly, but that's sort of the point, after all. The question is, "So what's to do in Sweden?" I was thinki...
An overflow crowd attended The Seattle Improbable Show. It was, as expected, a rollicking good time. Mark Abrahams emceed and gave presentations, one on each of last year's Ig Nobel Prize winners, another chronicling various stages in the development of Project Grizzly. Other speakers were allotted five minutes (strictly and amusingly enforced) t...
I went through security three times at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport before my flight to Newark. My original flight was cancelled due to inclement weather in Newark, so I get rescheduled onto another flight that arrived three hours later. I thought to myself, "That's strange. Both flights are going to Newark. It's not like the weather in...
The lunatics behind The Annals of Improbable Research and The Ig Nobel Prize will be in Seattle tomorrow night, Feburary 13. The meeting schedule lists the AIR presentation as "8:00PM-10:30PM, Special Event: Annals of Improbable Research (open to all registrants), Sheraton Hotel, Third Floor, Metropolitan Ballroom". The AIR folks said "Open to the ...
Having grown up on the east coast, I imprinted on Dunkin Donuts. Once a month we would stop at DD on the way home and buy a shoebox of doughnuts. Toasted coconut and butternut, those were my favorites. Ironically, Dunkin Donuts is really a coffee shop disguised as a doughnut shop. (Doughnuts account for only 20% of their sales; coffee 50%.) So ...
It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was invited to join Orkut. But before clicking Submit, I always read the fine print: their Terms of Service and their Privacy Policy. (Oh great, you have to have scripting enabled just to read their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy!) Notice, for example, the terms for changes to their terms of service: ...
First, ABBA rises to stardom in their native Sweden with Ring, Ring. They then win the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, which is also recorded in English, French, German, and probably Spanish. Twenty-five years later, the English-language musical Mamma-Mia premieres in London and subsequently spreads through large portions of the world not y...
The Glass Engine is an interactive guide to the music of Philip Glass, organized by... um... at least they're organized. By something. Bizarre yet oddly compelling. (Perhaps if we ask nicely, we can get Marc Miller to tell the story of the time he actually met Philip Glass...) In a similar vein, a friend of mine directed me to Ishkur's Guide to Ele...
Dutch police have arrested 52 people suspected of defrauding gullible Internet users in one of the largest busts of the infamous "Nigerian e-mail" scam. Hooray for the Dutch police. Their next target: Web sites that illustrate a Dutch article with the Danish flag. (I must sheepishly admit that I too mistakenly identified the home of Ikea as Denmark...
Jeff Davis tipped me off to this Ikea walk-through. Frustratingly, the walkthrough doesn't include any cheat codes. Even though Ikea was founded by a Swede, its company colors match the Swedish national colors, all its product names are Swedish, and it is clearly associated with Sweden in the minds of everyone, it is in fact headquartered in Denm...