The In-Law's New House
My girlfriend's parents have been spending the past winter building a new house in Ann Arbor, MI, and I finally got to go home and see the results this past weekend. The house is very, very well designed. It's a timber frame house, but I'm not referring to the architecture when I say that the design is good. I'm referring more to the little things that make living (or visiting) the place much more enjoyable...
Context is King
When I was about halfway through high school, I became convinced that all high school teachers were idiots. I suppose there was some mindless teenage rebellion in it, but it was based on my experience with the public education system. Now, I went to a good high school. A very good high school. Most high schools would be lucky to be half as good as mine was. In hindsight, I'm very glad that my parents...
Santa Barbara, One Year Later
So now it's been about a year since Tara and I have relocated to Santa Barbara. I moved out here to start a new job, which was a hectic time for us, living in a filthy basement infested with spiders, no kitchen. Eventually we found a nice apartment in a great location very close to downtown and main street, and just over a mile from the beach. During the past year, I left the job...
A Fair and Balanced Look at Absolutely Nothing
Tell me if this has ever happened to you: You come to a crosswalk at a major intersection where a bunch of people are standing there, staring at the "Don't Walk" orange hand across the street. There's a similar group of people across the street, waiting for the light to change so they can cross to where you are. All of these people seem to be in a daze. You approach the curb and look...
What I Hate about Salads
Last week I was having lunch with a friend of mine at a Mexican restaurant, and in the interest of not passing out into a food coma during the afternoon after we returned to work, we both had salads. As my friend got to the bottom of his, he pointed out something about his salad. "These chunks of [some component of the salad] should be diced up into larger squares and not these flat little...
Making Software That Doesn't Suck Isn't Easy
Microsoft takes a lot of crap from just about everyone. If you're a writer who uses Word for most of your projects, you probably have a problem with all of those auto-whatever features that interfere with your work by making annoying attempts to format what you're writing as a list, or finishing writing words for you after you've only typed the first few letters of one. If you're an avid fan of pornography who surfs...
Minor Inconveniences
Bad design can ruin our entire day with one fell swoop. Last Friday, I went to Merrill Lynch to talk retirement funds and bonds and whatever else. When I got to the entrance, there were two huge wooden doors with large wrought-iron handles just begging for me to pull on them. I pulled. Nothing. The doors didn't budge. Okaayyyy. Push. Still nothing. Hmmm...do I have the wrong day? Are they closed? Nope, I can see...
A Week with Children
So, I've just made the long drive across a stretch of desert from Tucson back to where I live in Santa Barbara. That's not a real long day, but it's enough that my brain feels like a fried egg and I'm having some difficulty trying to re-adjust to the computer keyboard from which I've been away for about a week...it's quite a bit louder than I remember it being a week ago. In any case,...
Mental Threading
"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -Henry Ford Like most aphorisms, Henry Ford's quotation is revealing and makes sense at a cursory glance, but when left completely on its own and analyzed thoroughly, it is incomplete. It doesn't really matter how driven I am to make everyone in the world interested in reading the crap I'm writing in this blog...not everyone in the world will take an interest in...
Thinking in References
A funny thing happened to me on Facebook recently. After struggling for about 37 minutes to come up with a status message of pure hilarity, I finally opted to put in a bunch of characters that you get when you hold down shift and furiously hit the numbers at the top of your keyboard. It made it look like I was saying something full of expletives, but they were left to the imagination of the...