“…but you can’t have everything you want.” Those wise words come from one of Barbara Sher’s life-planning books, I believe. The idea is that, if you devote yourself to it, you can achieve pretty much any goal you set your mind to — pretty standard stuff in that kind of book — but by the [...]
Archive of entries posted on September 2008
GTD Progress
While I was gearing up for my most recent attempt at GTD (and my most successful one, by far), I went to the local office-supply store and picked up several boxes of file folders. GoddessJ, my wife, protested: “what do you need all of those for?” (My flip answer, “it’s a GTD thing, you wouldn’t [...]
There’s No Antonym of Authoritarian
In a conversation a while back, I needed a word to express the opposite of authoritarian. I couldn’t find one in my memory, which struck me as odd, so I later looked it up. It seems that there is no English word that describes the opposite of authoritarian; the closest thing I found, after perusing [...]
A Site That Celebrates Tortured English
I’ve always been rather sensitive to spelling and grammar. Maybe a little too sensitive. Little errors in written English drive me nuts. I’ve finally found a place for other people who, like me, shudder at misplaced punctuation, “creative” spelling, abused homonyms, and atrocious grammar: Wordsplosion! “Showcasing the best of the worst of the wide world [...]
The Stack Overflow Website
Stack Overflow, the programmer Q&A site that Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) and Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror) have been putting together, finally opened its public beta doors yesterday. I’d been following its development closely through their podcast, and when I came up with an obscure programming problem this morning, I decided to try [...]
“Cost/Benefit of Terrorism Security”
Bruce Schneier recently pointed out an analysis that proves what I’ve suspected for several years now: the country really overreacted to the 9/11 attack.
Multithreaded Programming
A little while back, I ran across a rant about multithreaded programming on The Register (NSFW due to strong language), which starts out with this paragraph: I don’t know about you, but every time I have to program with threads and shared resources, I want to remove my face incrementally with a salad fork. Locks, [...]
The Litter Robot
(This is a follow-up to last year’s post on the cat-crap problem. As I said then, if you’re bored or offended by talk of the removal of feline waste products, don’t read this entry any further.) Our third Littersweep Ultra died a few months ago, worn out the same way as our first one. I’m [...]
“Flawed” Humans?
I was reading a LifeHacker post on How to (Not) Get Banned from Commenting this morning, when I ran across this section: Do you ban readers who criticize your posts? Nope. We thrive on constructive criticism. We’re always listening to what you have to say and trying to improve. If you do think something we [...]
I love spam…
One of the (few) spam messages that survived to show up in my junk folder today: Subject: Hilarious! Could it be true? See inside. Jessica Simpson Breathes Air READ FULL STORY Um… unless Jessica Simpson is a fish, a methane-breathing alien, or dead, why would that pique my interest? Isn’t that rather like exclaiming “Amazing, [...]