Music singles! Now that iTunes offers DRM free tracks, I’m building up my music library 99 cents (or 1.29) at a time. I have plenty of CDs but have purchased very little music in the past several years. This is your chance for you to give me a list of absolutely essential songs I should [...]

Tycho on today’s Penny Arcade: Making something that is bad on purpose – and not bad inadvertently, which is my usual process – is a whole-body thrill. It goes hard against every natural instinct to write this way. It has the delicious and irresistible texture of sin. It reminds me of this: Yes, that’s somebody [...]

A new effects box from Electro-Harmonix works more like I expected a talkbox to work: you plug in an instrument and a microphone and it mooshes your vocals to be in tune with the instrument. But that’s not all it does, it also can create vocal harmonies that follow what the instrument is doing. It’s [...]

If you’ve been following my photolog, you know that I just posted two versions of the same photo (click for a larger version): Quincy smelter (original edit) Quincy smelter (new version) A few years ago my friend Paul got married, and the day before the wedding he and Emily chartered a cruise of the Portage [...]

For the first time. I think the key is in the past I would use a spoon to “stir constantly” and it would never work. This time I used a whisk and it came together okay. I think I need to get a book on sauces.

I have seen the future; my path is laid straight

How did Clementines get their name? The traditional story is that it was “originally an accidental hybrid said to have been discovered by Father Clément Rodier in the garden of his orphanage in Misserghin, Algeria.” Father Clément. Clementines. Of course!

Much of the benefit of early cancer detection may be statistical smoke and mirrors.

Living in an apartment, we have assigned parking for our car, in an enclosed parking garage. Last weekend someone broke into the car next to ours, and stole the stereo system. So, you know, there’s a pile of broken glass on the ground. And it’s a big bummer for him, window broken, dash board cracked [...]

I just purchased a couple of songs on iTunes: I Like to Live the Love by B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Band, and Through the Fire and Flames by DragonForce. Both songs were marked with a “plus” icon in the iTunes music store. But when I downloaded them, the DragonForce song was probably encoded at [...]