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  • Airheads “Super Tech” weekend

    I spent the weekend at a BMW Airheads “Super Tech” weekend, which is an amateur tech get-together that is, in tone, something like the following: The amateur birding lectures given by tweedy English boffins, except that the lecture is being given to cover the sound of Charles Bronson digging to freedom in the tunnel below,…

  • HOMF! HOMF! AAAAAARGH!

    Last week’s weight: 220 lbs. This week’s weight: 220 lbs. De-bigulation stalled at 22% complete, due to 48-hour Taco Bell/Ben&Jerrys incident. I’ve got a bad habit of not really eating anything (a cup of coffee, an Odwalla bar) up until it’s time to get on the train and go home at 3:10PM. By then I’m…

  • The “before” picture of my volcano lair. I hope.

    One of the most wonderful things about living in West Chester is having an honest-to-goodness garage to keep stuff in. It’s actually a separate building, the garage, which of course gives me delusions of grandeur. Yesterday, I got a chance to hang two of an eventual six shoplights, which I hope will start the process…

  • Make: “the brilliant John Young”

    Ahh, what better use of the “General Bragging” category? Yesterday, nerd-clique-captain Phillip Torrone of Make magazine referred to me as… excuse me while I enter a <blockquote> tag to properly set this off: “…the brilliant John Young.” Yes, that’s right. Make referred to me as “the brilliant John Young.” [emphasis not mine, those italics just…

  • Vote my mother in law for PA State Representative

    My mother-in-law, Barbara McIlvaine Smith, has re-entered politics to run for the Pennsylvania State Legislature this year. Barb last ran for this position in 2004, and achieved the highest-ever share (over 45%) against an entrenched Republican incumbent with a tenure of over 30 years. Here’s why I’m voting for Barb (and it’s not just because…

  • Andale, mas pequeno!

    Starting weight: 230 lbs Current weight: 220 lbs Target weight: 185 lbs Re-de-bigulation complete Overall debigulation: 22% complete Okay, so far so good, I guess: I’m back on track, having reached the lowest weight I hit last year, the lowest (for me) since college. Which is definitely a qualified measure of success, since the highest…

  • The Voice of Binky as philosophical muffin arbiter

    The Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, which was part of the very air I breathed during my childhood, classifies personality into four binaries: (I)ntrovert and (E)xtrovert, i(N)tuitive and (S)ensing, (T)hinking and (F)eeling, (P)ercieving and (J)udging. (I’m a fairly strong INTP, which is news to nobody.) The process of dividing things into binaries, then assigning things placements…

  • No good deed goes unpunished

    Starting weight: 230 lbs Target weight: 185 lbs Current weight: 222 lbs De-re-bigulation in progress Overall de-bigulation: 18% complete So each fifty calories, or each twelve grams of fat, in a food comprises one Weight Watchers “point”, according to their sekrit formula. (I reverse-engineered their Javascript, but it turns out that you can just read…

  • History in real time?

    So I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about creating a site that provides synchronized access to history. In other words, an RSS time machine. Today being Friday, January 6, 2006, for example, if you went to the site you could see and subscribe to any of these feeds: Newspapers and Periodicals Today in the…

  • I am become Shiva, stubber of toes

    You laugh, when you hear the stories of the hunters who freeze to death each year, when you read that they were 100 miles from the nearest road, out there with nothing buth a cheese sandwich and a stadium blanket. “It’s Darwin at work”, you think, and pride yourself YOU’LL never do something as dumb…