…I don’t twitter. But apparently several of you do. I’m curious why. It doesn’t really resonate with me — too much announcement, too little interaction, maybe? It seems like Facebook status on crack, with what is entered becoming a kind of social performance piece to up the entertainment value. It reminds me of the way […]
Stumped by the NYT
I think most people who would write a blog post “Stumped by the NYT” would mean the crossword, but I’m thinking of their online home. I find the layout baffling beyond belief. The very top isn’t so bad — it’s obviously the top news & other-section stories, plus links to sections. But getting below that, […]
Why I bother
Michael Pollan has an article in the New York Times magazine this week called “Why bother?” It’s essentially a long apology (in the old rhetorical sense) for personal action, personal virtue, in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions. One of the last entries I wrote in my old journal before I switched over was […]
Ride report: Edgewood/Cañada
I met some friends in San Carlos for a ride today, and we went up Edgewood Road past 280 to Cañada, and then rode up to 92, and came back the same way. Total distance: 18.2 miles. Edgewood Road kicked my ass, hard. I really wasn’t properly prepared for any ride harder than Sand Hill/Whiskey […]
101 in 1001 #8: 2 recipes from VwaV
I made two recipes from Vegan with a Vengeance this week as planned: orange-glazed beets and sweet potatoes with five-spice and watercress. Both are good. Beets I’m ambivalent about. Not to put too fine a point on it, they taste a bit like dirt to me. A nicer way of putting it would be to […]
The USPS really fails
I just navigated a long and stupid phone menu (which had no proper way of failing if you can’t give a phone number that matches your address except to wait for a long time and finally transfer you to customer service) and several customer service representatives who transferred me to yet another representative, with the […]
Does justice have anything to do with a disobedient whale?
I can’t resist: Now consider again Skinner’s sentence: Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale. This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of […]
The single-purpose gadget that could
I’m not generally a fan of single-purpose gadgets, but when they’re eminently effective and will get a lot of use, I’m down. Garlic press? Oh yeah. Chain scrubber? HELL yeah. One of my Nashbar purchases was the Park Cyclone Chain Scrubber. Chains are just a bitch to keep clean, in my experience. I’ve done okay […]
101: revised
I did end up revising my 101 goals, and I’m feeling much better about them. Many of the biggest changes I made were to change “Do all of this” to “Do N of this”, and that had a bigger psychological effect than I realized it might. Knowing that instead of cooking all the rest of […]
Comcast partially fails
My previous experiences with Comcast customer service haven’t been too bad, but I had an annoying one this weekend. First, I got an online chat representative who wouldn’t really tell me anything useful about my bill changing, and referred me to my local service center. He admitted the bill did not make sense to him […]