I’m mad at Rosetta Stone right now and I think it is a lesson in how NOT to run a company.
Here is the crux of it: Rosetta Stone is more concerned about preventing software piracy than they are about existing customer satisfaction. These things always come from the top down. Some big important MBA has [...]
There is a weird disconnect going on. I love weird disconnects because they are saying something. I don’t know what this one is saying.
We all like sex. Our culture is permeated with sex. And yet we never talk about sex in a real way. We joke about it and we might share a few details [...]
sparkfun.com had a sale. Everything was free, you only paid shipping on the first $100k they sold. They have a blog post congratulating themselves about it.
This is a hilarious act of denial. Their site was virtually unavailable during the sale. I was not able to accomplish a single thing at any point over the [...]
This is a long memoir by my late grandmother, Nora Dafoe.
My Life As I Remember It
By Nora Dafoe
Chapter 1 – Childhood
My mother tells me this story about my birth. My dad…
Here are my tweets, right here:
Get your own tweetwall here: http://www.tweetwally.com/
First of all, obviously, I’m no expert on Paris. I’ve been here a couple of days. But here, nonetheless, are my observations.
Our hotel room is ridiculously small. We could have spent more money, of course, but it came recommended to us and it’s not exactly cheap. I think they are all like this. We had [...]
I heard a great speaker on MPR — Daniel Gilbert talking about happiness. I highly recommend that you listen to it. A lot of things in the talk struck me and kept me thinking.
In particular, he talks about how married people are happier than unmarried people and that men in particular are much happier when [...]
This has come up before. Some bloggers are beautiful women. Some dudes comment that the woman is beautiful. All hell breaks loose in a flurry of accusations of sexism and misogyny.
I see both sides of this. There are huge double-standards when it comes to how men and women are treated. Women are objectified and marginalized [...]
Some lucky people don’t have kids so some things just don’t occur to them. That is understandable. This little post is to enlighten young waiters and waitresses on how they can help a family with kids who are eating at their restaurant.
1. Seat us where we won’t bother other people without dooming us to the [...]
Here is what your sig should say:
This email may contain confidential material. If you were not an intended recipient I obviously fucked up and it is my own damn fault. It is insane to assume that I can bind you to some agreement based on my own inability to send a fucking email. I should [...]
The Windows Weenies are mad (again) that people really truly seem to enjoy Apple products. Even journalists! How dare journalists enjoy Apple products! Don’t they know the appropriate response? Just ask Mary Jo Foley:
…I hear/see a lot more jeers than cheers in the Microsoft press rooms and events…
Umm maybe that’s because they make products [...]
I’m finding the Holiday season quite annoying this year. I have very fond memories of Christmas when I was a kid and I do enjoy seeing how much Myles enjoys the holidays. He sings Christmas carols and watches the holiday specials and loves the Christmas lights.
The bah humbug, for me, comes from the fact that [...]
(OK, sorry for the inflammatory title — just trying to get your attention!)
I think the financial model that most photographers adopt is ridiculous. The problem is, they don’t charge for what I do value and they charge a lot for what I don’t value. I have 2 examples to illustrate this.
We went to Smirk for [...]
Most of my readers know that I am an atheist. I’ve written about it extensively but let me summarize to say — atheism is a movement of hope, rationale and enjoyment of life. It is not an outlook which is depressing or fatalistic.
There are many people I love in this world but, if push came [...]
I noticed I haven’t been posting too much here lately and it’s because I have been posting elsewhere. I added The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast to my blogroll. Check it out! It’s going to be really cool and I need your help to spread the word.
We also have a few new things over at [...]
A further update from my previous post on my iPhone rocket launch.
This is kind of a cool plot using only the GPS data:
Here is a plot of the first few seconds of the launch from the accelerometer:
You can see that the data peaks at 3g when I was expecting 12g. The acceleration heads back up [...]
It’s taken me awhile to understand the data I got from the first launch. Using the video, the GPS data, the accelerometer data and my own recollections, I’ve put together a rough timeline of events. I’ve notated it on the plot of the altitude. A couple of weird things happened.
First of all, with the engine [...]
So…I’m sort of an obsessive person at times. I had two simultaneous obsessions going, iPhone development and model rocketry. I’ve posted a little bit about both of these. One late night I had an inspiration — I should launch an iPhone in a model rocket!
The reasons were obvious: the iPhone has a 3D accelerometer in [...]
So I’ve been building model rockets for the last month or two. It started when I told Myles how I used to launch rockets when I was a kid. He wanted to do it, too. So we went to the hobby store and bought a ready-to-fly (RTF) rocket, a launch pad and a kit rocket [...]
It was bumming me out that the tag cloud didn’t work on my old theme. Turns out it relied on something that doesn’t work on newer versions of WordPress. So I picked a new, random and nice little theme for now. It’s a little too cartoon-y for me, so I’ll work on it a bit.
But [...]
Contrary to most people, perhaps, I think it is the mundane nature of most twitter updates that makes it cool. People who try to make their Twitter feed “important” are the least interesting people to follow. The reason is — they misunderstand the medium. When I look at a tweats going by, I don’t want [...]
Apple is the latest company to release a product without having enough supply to meet demand. If this is a marketing tactic it is the dumbest goddamn marketing tactic I have ever heard of. You still can’t buy a Wii, for example, from amazon.com. WTF, guys, do you know anything at all about business? Now [...]
Here is the synopsis:
1. Two writers from Jezebel go on a comedy show hosted by Lizz Winstead, a co-creator (or something) of the Daily Show.
2. The show turns out pretty lame and uncomfortable and not that funny.
3. Lizz Winstead proceeds to lambast the Jezebel writers (and cross posts it on the Huffington Post), accusing them [...]
From MinnPost:
Just 23 percent of Americans live in rural areas, and their roads carry less than half of the nation’s traffic. Yet they account for more than half of the nation’s vehicular deaths, according to a report issued this year by the U.S. Dept. of Transportation. In 2006, for example, 55 percent of all motor [...]
Happiness is a process. I used to say that happiness only occurs in retrospect. That’s probably true for a lot of people. It doesn’t have to be, though. A lot of the whole “be here now” concept is just a matter of realizing how wonderful your life is, with all its warts and struggles. You’re [...]
I have to admit, I don’t like Teresa Nielsen Hayden. She has always struck me as a condescending know-it-all, even here on my own blog.
Then there is this shit storm and this utter bullshit of a post explaining what happened:
Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any [...]
Via UTI, this is really funny: Ask Calvin’s Dad
I blog when I’m mad a lot because being mad is a very inspiring feeling. I don’t mean that I like being mad, I don’t. I don’t like it at all. But when I am mad I am motivated to change things.
I’m not a violent person and I abhor violence. It represents so many failures. [...]
Dear homophobes — fuck you. Dear GLBT folks, bless you! Be yourself and damn the consequences.
I called the doctor today because my infant son was exposed to chicken pox. The person on the phone, after verifying my identify thoroughly (which I appreciate) proceeded to tell me that someone else had already called the doctor on behalf of my son but she could not tell me who it was.
So…the hospital can’t [...]
I realize that MNDot and DOT’s around the country are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. We hate road construction but we also hate under-maintained or under-capacity roads. The pain is impossible to avoid.
But I think that people in charge of these projects vastly underestimate the amount of economic potential that they [...]
Here, listen to this in the background while you read this: Play Music
It occurs to me that people go through 3 stages in their life:
Having no money.
Having negative amounts of money.
Having positive amounts of money.
That’s how it went for me, anyway. I had no money during high school and college. I had debt after college. [...]
I was looking at my stats and saw this gem in the search terms “women easy to fuck age”.
Cairnarvon started it.
lolife [10:15pm] % history | awk ‘{print $3}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
73 ls
53 svn
38 cd
35 ssh
28 lepton
21 sudo
19 vi
17 ping
13 exit
12 pwd
I use tcsh so my command [...]
Behold, my blog is now on WordPress. Note that this is not the final design, it’s just a temporary design while Kyle finishes up the new design. You will see some weird things happen, perhaps, from time to time as we try out the new design.
If you are a frequent visitor I would highly encourage [...]
Over at scienceblogs there is a recurring argument debate about “framing”. My definition of framing is wording an argument in a manner that your audience is going to be most receptive to. It’s crafting an argument carefully with the goal of convincing people of its authenticity.
Using this definition its literally self-evident that if you want [...]
First of all, I grew up in North Dakota and back in the day if you decided you didn’t want your cat or dog anymore, you killed your cat or dog. It wasn’t a big deal. You did it quick and humanely. (Although I have never personally killed a pet.) Being “put to sleep” is [...]
Geek Porn
Originally uploaded by lolife
We just finished remodeling our basement and I had my buddy Shane from SED come over and punch everything down all pretty. I don’t even need to show you pictures of my basement, this very nicely organized phone/cable/network box is all you need to see!
Kind of a fascinating read: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career)
Dear CNN, fuck you.
Michael
After the Pawlenty administration took over, I noticed that MNDot got much more heavy handed in terms of inconveniencing drivers in the Twin Cities. It seemed that the word to the road crews was: get the work done and we don’t care who you piss off. So now we have exits closed with no warning [...]
I was pissed that Weeds Season 3 wasn’t on iTunes yet so I ended up grabbing a few episodes off of BitTorrent. It worked fairly well for a while. Now I am getting more and more annoyed by it. I would much, much, much, much, much rather pay $1.99 for an episode of Weeds than [...]
This is a great radio show but the TV show version is really, really good, too. It seems to me, if you are willing to pay $2 for a cup of coffee or $4 to rent a movie, spending $2 to watch a really good show like This American Life is really a bargain. As [...]
Pippin, as you may know, is a musical. At the end of the show, Pippin stops chasing his dream for “something more” and realizes his dream is right here, with his wife and kids. His quest for greatness ends with he and his family alone on the stage, with the set, the costumes and the [...]
Christian Dating Tips…Honoring Christ, Your Date, and Yourself!
If a Christian man is kissing his date and it gives him an erection (often just the possibility of a kiss can do this), is God or his date being honored?
Yeah, I’m sure God is disgusted by the reproductive processes he invented.
Remember folks: God made sex fun! He [...]
There are two you’s — the normal, everyday you and the sexual you. I’m pulling out the sexual you not because of the normal human fascination with sex but for the more coldly scientific reason: you are a creature that reproduces. You are hardwired to be a creature that reproduces. Some have gone so far [...]
