Recently I was standing at the whiteboard in a small airless meeting room (meaning we were all losing braincells while trying to resolve business issues) when the discussion veered to the whiteboard markers instead of the database being diagrammed. Namely that the standard smell of whiteboard marker (high acetone) is boring, redundant and wasn’t helping [...]

I’ve never met anyone that actually liked learning to spell or practices it as a hobby. It is, simply, a necessary evil. Something that was brought home by a tiny news item this week regarding a cookbook with a recipe recommending ‘freshly ground black people’. People vs pepper is in fact only a two character [...]

What would happen if advertising told you what you could really expect from the product?  How much weight you could expect to lose, how likely the dating service will lead to a wedding? Sit back and find out… In the spirit of this post, I should point out that I am not a lawyer or [...]

Did you know there are Census coffee cups, baseball caps, bumper stickers and other hot government swag out there? I just got off the phone after 25 minutes of pretty much useless questions about the upcoming census.  Questions like “How many conversations have you had about the Census with friends and family in the last [...]

Remember back to July 8th, 2009? Every news reporter on TV and half of the rest of the people were saying “hey, it’s 7,8,9 today!”  Which turned out to have absolutely no significance other than being mildly entertaining for 24 hours.  by 7/9/09 everyone had forgotten all about it. So how come we notice 7/8/09 [...]

You would have to really love something to recreate it using original parts in your garage.  I don’t quite see the appeal in the upper deck of the Pan-Am 747 but clearly this guy does and people should pursue their passions.  I can’t say as I’m surprised to read that he’s single but maybe he [...]

Nurdle.Net hasn’t even been live for a full year but already the spam filter has fished out over 1500 junk comments.  So no wonder that I’ve been reflecting on the amazing resilience of spam to survive just about anything (sort of like cockroaches…)  but aside from the usual complaints I’ve decided I have a certain [...]

Much of the world seems to think that the United States is just a little too greedy and ought to share more – that’s everything from Hollywood to baseball and dental care, not to mention the recession.  I’m not going to debate that because there are plenty of people out there that do and they [...]

There are business theories out there that every every new thing moves on a time line from practical applications to finally pure entertainment which is where the real money comes in.  So something like a computer starts with highly academic and military applications then becomes a mainstream work tool and then you get video games.  [...]

At least since C-Span entered the picture, American politicians have been known for their monotone, and rather boring speaking style.  Perhaps because there is so often no one else in the room when they present their bills. They seem to get more civil and less interesting with every passing session. Here’s a typical Congressional Debate [...]