Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM — at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she’s about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) “long-winded, but in a good way,” she has recommended a coffee mug rating system at the top of each post. You know, to indicate how many mug of coffee you should expect to need to get all the way to the end of the post. Should I pester our developer for this functionality?
Then, today another ScienceBlogger and I had a top-secret meeting:
Category Archives: Personal
A pair of keyboard related questions.
- Do you touch-type, or (like me) do you kind of know where the keys are but “freestyle” type, looking at the keyboard on a semi-regular basis?*
- Are any of the letters wearing off on your keys?**
In answer to #2, I’ve completely lost L and N, and A and S are fading fast. Which, given my answer to #1, suggests that there will come a point where I’ll be in real trouble.
A few words on names and expectations.
You’ve probably seen the posts (here, here, here, here, here, and here.) responding to the University of Florida study claiming that women’s names affect the social support or discouragement they’ll get for pursuing technical subjects. (Those with the more “feminine” names will tend to be discouraged from “manly” activities like math, although apparently a frilly name won’t hurt their performance in those activities.) Since the above-linked posts give the reasonable critiques of the research, I’m going to veer immediately to personal anecdata:
Why we don’t have a pet snake.
I was reading the comments on Dr. B’s brief query on ethical lines in response to a horrific story about the feeding of a live puppy to a large snake for the “entertainment” of teenagers, and I could not help but recall a conversation I had with my children a couple years ago about the feasibility of a pet snake.
New York Articles ‘collects’ content from another (sic) sites, sells ads, clogs cyberspace.
As you might guess, my site is one of the sources of content. If you’re reading this post at New York Articles (or at “Articles”, whose tagline is even more grammatically incorrect) rather than at my actual site, you are partaking of a suboptimal experience.
I’m not going to give you the URL for the lesser, because there is no value-added to speak of, unless you count the pennies that come in to the leech that grabs the RSS and sells the Google Ads.*
Does such a site do anything to improve an already crowded blogosphere? Does anyone treat a sloppy feed aggregating site of this sort as a regular destination (or really, as anything but an accidental destination)?
Pathetic.
There has to be a less slimy way to make money off the internets, don’t you think?
Rules of engagement.
To address an issue that came up in discussion of posts on other blogs, I want to make clear the principles I follow when dealing with real-world scenarios here or via email:
ScienceBlogs Big Boom one year out.
One year ago, ScienceBlogs experienced a major expansion. In that year, I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, though given the size of this operation, I’ve only met the proprietors of about a fifth of the blogs here.
So far.
Happy blogiversary! Cupcakes for everyone, and pictures (with links to the blogs of the pictured bloggers) below the fold.
Seeking advice on a rental that might be a risky call.
Because I know some of you are better acquainted with late 20th century science fiction movies than I am, I’m asking for your input on this.
Today, I find myself possessed of a serious hankering to track down and watch Flash Gordon — not the Buster Crabbe version from 1936 (which I watched on public television when I was a kid), but the 1980 motion picture.
Is it a law of nature?
Today the soccer team I coach (on which the younger Free-Ride offspring is a player) had its last game of the spring season.
“Yay! Trophies!!” screamed the players at the end of the game. So, off we all went to the traditional end-of-season pizza party and trophy distribution event.
At the pizza parlor, as the players were running around and shaking down their parents for quarters, it hit me: All the pizza parlors in our area have quarter-gobbling arcade games. The one with the fewest has no fewer than four. The one where we were today had at least a dozen.
Now, we eat pizza at home without needing to play video games or foosball, let alone trying to navigate a claw to pick up some little plastic toy that will break, end up underfoot, or both within 48 hours. Why must every “dine-in” pizza experience occur against a backdrop reminiscent of the slot machines in the terminals at the Las Vegas Airport? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t enhance the flavor of the pizza.
I suppose I should be thankful that at least there were no giant singing rats.
I wonder if I can beg off of the elder offspring’s end-of-season pizza-and-skeeball party this evening.
Commencement address bullet-points.
Having finished grading (yea, having submitted the final grades themselves), I attempt to resurface from my cave.
It’s really rather bright out here!
Anyway, as you will have deduced from my last post, there was a commencement-sized break in my grading activities on Saturday. The commencement speaker, Google senior vice president of global sales and business development Omid Kordestani, gave a nice address to the grads and their guests, so I’m reporting on his big points here.