Showing tag results for Non-Computer

Some commenters mentioned that I should write a book. It turns out that writing a book is hard. A few years ago, MS Press actually approached me about writing a book for them. But I declined because the fashion for technical books is to take maybe fifty pages of information and pad it to a 700-page book, and I can't write that way. None of my to...

A British scientific study shows that a bit of classical music can persuade diners to buy more fancy coffees, pricey wines and luxurious desserts. "North has shown that playing German or French music can persuade diners to buy wine from those countries." I found this to be true in my experience. If you get two thousand people i...

The nice thing about the schwa sound is that you don't have to spell it. Many thanks to C-J Berg for fixing my Swedish spelling errors. I probably introduced some new ones here, though. But why Swedish? Well, it wasn't Swedish initially. Many years ago, I saw an ad in th...

Attended my first formal Swedish lesson last night. It's great to recapture the simultaneous thrill and frustration of trying to have a conversation in a language you don't really know. It's a small class - Swedish isn't exactly one of the "big-name" languages out there. I always feel sorry f...

I really did enjoy my trip. I just like talking about the goofy things. I intend to go back to Sweden in the spring. I'm currently enrolled in Swedish lessons but this trip came far too soon for me to have learned anything useful aside from "tack", "ursäkta" and "Jag taler inte svenska." Though ...

Here are some things I learned in Sweden, Germany and Denmark.

I can't sleep the night before an airplane flight. Certainly I'm not the only person with this problem, right?

Hurricane Isabel made a mess of my weekend travel plans, so I decided, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." My outbound flight was cancelled, and even with the best possible substitution - a flight out the very next day - losing a day on a weekend trip pretty much kills it. So I extended it to a weeklong vacation...

Joe Beda stopped by my office, clutching a stack of documents he had just had notarized, and told me, "Raymond, you should become a notary public." "Why?" "It'd be fun." "Notarizing documents is fun?" "No, just being a notary public - just know...

Bubba Ho-Tep will be playing at the Varsity Theater in Seattle for a limited run. (Check the release schedule to see if it will be airing in your area.) Be there. Or the mummy will have already won.