Last year, I made the mistake of predicting the outcome of Dancing With The Stars before watching any of the competitors. That was a disaster of epic, Charlie-Sheen-as-a-babysitter proportions. However, after the first viewing, my revised handicapping was pretty darned good, if I do say so myself (and I must, because no one else will).… Continue reading Handicapping DWTS, Season 12
Hey, does that thang have a first stage booster rocket?
I don’t know what possessed someone to do an in-depth comparison of the new Ram 3500 Heavy Duty pickup with a Delta IV Heavy rocket…but I like it! The truck actually compares very favorably with the rocket when it comes to payload, defined for the pickup as towing capacity (25,400 pounds) and for the rocket… Continue reading Hey, does that thang have a first stage booster rocket?
Redefining a Day
In anticipation of the watering restrictions scheduled to begin on April 1st in Midland and several surrounding communities, I reprogrammed my sprinkler system control box on Saturday, determined to get a jump on things rather than wait until the last minute. Our home address ends in an odd number, meaning that we’ll be allowed to… Continue reading Redefining a Day
Cultural Exchange Students
One side effect of learning to dance has been that our social adventures have expanded significantly. So it was that we found ourselves in a local bar last Friday evening, surrounded by curious patrons, and listening to instructions in Spanish. OK, let’s backtrack a bit. I had received an email from Richard Ortiz, a young… Continue reading Cultural Exchange Students
Stretching
Sorry, this is not a post about personal fitness or adjusting your gullibility while watching The View. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t come close to mastering my profession. I suspect that’s the case for most people who work in technology-related fields, as well as those whose focus is on creative endeavors (after… Continue reading Stretching
Zombie Movie Posters
The dismayingly prolific Neatorama website has an e-commerce arm called, appropriately enough, the Neatoshop, and I just discovered that it has an entire section devoted to classic movie posters that have been reworked with a zombie theme. While I’m pretty sure you-know-who wouldn’t consent to my hanging any of these on our walls (she can… Continue reading Zombie Movie Posters
Where were we?
Lots to get caught up on, as I notice that it’s been almost a week since I’ve blathered about on this here blog-like thing. I’ve been making mental notes for the past several days about things to write about, but now that I’m sitting here staring at the monitor, I either can’t remember them, or… Continue reading Where were we?
The Beatless
I made a couple of jesting comments on Facebook and Twitter about this article describing the first documented case of something called beat deafness, wherein a man named Mathieu “can’t feel music’s beat or move in time with it.” But it’s a bigger problem than those researchers probably realize. I’m sure that complete beat deafness is… Continue reading The Beatless
Ballroom Dance featuring “The Cutouts”
Alert readers (and I know that includes all of you, because you don’t let me get away with anything) will recall that our dance last Saturday night featured something different, something that to my knowledge had never been tried in the 20 year history of the Ballroom Dance Society: prerecorded music in place of a… Continue reading Ballroom Dance featuring “The Cutouts”
The Throwaway Special Effect
Yesterday, I ran across a link on Smashing Magazine‘s twitter feed to an article entitled The protocol-relative URL. This is a rather esoteric topic that will be of extremely limited interest to most (all?) of my readers (it provides a technique for avoiding certain warning messages that occur when a browser calls up a secure… Continue reading The Throwaway Special Effect