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Residuals

12 January 2009

Sydney posed for me over the weekend. I call it "the beehive":

Hair Up

9 January 2009

As of this week, my brother Brian is able to walk for the first time in 2 years without the aid of a wheelchair, walker, or crutches. What a great week!

On June 21st, 2005, Brian was in a motorcycle accident, suffering broken bones, severed ligaments, nerves, and arteries in both legs. Thanks to a number of surgeries, a lot of rehab, and a lot of prayer, Brian was miraculously able to keep both legs.

Here is a link to all of the articles posted to Jayber about Brian's recovery.

Since the accident, Brian has gone through a roller coaster of physical therapy and recovery -- too many ups and downs to list here. However, due to one more surgery a few weeks ago, he's now able to put all of his weight on both legs, and walk without aids.

Although this is by no means the end of the healing process, it is a major testament to God's healing hand, and a significant milestone in Brian's recovery. Congratulations bro!

Here's a picture of Brian and I from Brian and Jill's wedding in 2004:

30 December 2008

Niles Wallace Benson was born on December 28th at 2:17 am and we couldn't be more glad. He was 7 lbs 10 oz, and was 20 3/4 inches long. Mandy has some pictures on her blog -- here's one of my favorites:

Sleeping

24 December 2008

This year, we had a family Christmas at the Schumann's. Unfortunately, Mom, Dad, and Karen couldn't make it due to illness. Here's a quick video that Mandy put together of the festivities:


Christmas at the Schumann's from Mandy Benson on Vimeo.
11 December 2008

Building management just posted a note disallowing the "extended use" of bathrooms on floors other than the one we work on. Discrimination! Exhibit A:

Building Notice

7 December 2008

Sydney loves to chew rawhide on her back, and it cracks me up every time.

Sydney - Upside Down

14 November 2008

Here's something I didn't plan on finding today: a senior adult church hip-hop choir called Funky Fresh Seniors. They don't seem too engaged at the beginning with Eminem's lyrical work, but they definitely warm up nicely to Nelly at the end.

  • 0:20 - "Loose Yourself", Eminem.
  • 1:15 - "Ridin' Dirty", Chamillionaire.
  • 1:45 - "Hey Ya", Outkast.
  • 3:10 - "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me", Pussycat Dolls.
  • 3:40 - "Can't Touch This", MC Hammer.
  • 4:05 - "It's getting hot in here", Nelly.

Bonus: they're available for weddings, private parties, and bar mitzvahs! I only have one question: what church approves of their elders singing "It's getting hot in here, let's take off all our robes"? This is highly disturbing on multiple levels.

12 November 2008

My favorite photo of the day: Eddie Murphy's giant head, traveling down the interstate.

7 November 2008

Interesting article from Edward Champion on Michael Hyatt's recent Book Review Blogger Program, which gives people free books from Thomas Nelson Publishing in exchange for writing a 200+ word review: There's no such thing as a free book. Champion argues that the program is inherently flawed:

While Hyatt's marketing strategy appears to have yielded results, there remains the more troubling question of what this means for the blogosphere. Will Thomas Nelson stop sending books to those who write negative reviews? Will the publisher demand 400-word reviews a few months from now? Will other publishers begin setting more extraordinary terms for hotter titles? And, most importantly, will the blogosphere ever understand that surrendering to marketing forces simply isn't a substitute for journalistic integrity?

Personally, I'm confused about why this is a big deal. Hyatt doesn't require that reviews are positive. Instead, he says that reviews can be "positive, negative, or somewhere in between." Don't journalists get free books all the time for writing reviews? Why is this any different?

30 October 2008

This weekend, we had a great trip to Chicago for a baby shower with Mandy's family and friends. I'm still working through the pictures we took, but here's a nice one of Wendy and Shelly:

Wendy and Shelly

20 October 2008

In response to my friend Jenny, here are 6 "random things" about me. To give it a twist, I'll choose one from each year in grade school:

  • 1st grade. I learned what it felt like to covet as I desperately desired my friend's remote-controlled A-Team van.
  • 2nd grade. While trying to beat a girl to the water fountain, I chipped my front tooth on a set of concrete stairs. I got it fixed 20 years later.
  • 3rd grade. I got my tongue stuck to a frosty pole at the top of a slide. My taste buds were subsequently ripped off as the person behind me impatiently forced me down the slide.
  • 4th grade. I stole a spot on the swing set from a friend. Her punishment for me: severe whiplash and 6-weeks in a neck brace.
  • 5th grade. I was transferred to advanced English. After failing to wrap my mind around the definition of a paragraph, I was transferred back the following day.
  • 6th grade. I stopped wetting the bed.
9 October 2008

Another gem from McSweeney's: In the Likely Event of My Posthumous Fame

My birth, death, and high-school graduation should be celebrated with a feast, a day of mourning, and a Sadie Hawkins dance, respectively.

At the Sadie Hawkins dance, the women ought to feel a subtle, needling pressure to pick older brothers. Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" should be played at least twice. All kisses will be French.

1 October 2008

I just read a portion of When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris 1 on the bus. I came across this section, and couldn't help but smile.

I was at my desk one afternoon, writing a letter, when I heard a faint buzzing sound, like a tiny car switching into a higher gear. Curious, I went to the window, and there, in a web, I saw what looked like an angry raisin. It was a trapped fly, and as I bent forward to get a closer look, a spider rushed forth and carried it screaming to a little woven encampment situated between the wall and the window casing. It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.

26 September 2008

The last days of David Foster Wallace.

When David was 5, his mother recalls, he decided that he had two careers to look forward to. He would be a professional football player, for one. In the off-season, while the other players were recuperating or doing whatever it is that pro football players do when they're not running or passing or slamming their bodies into each other, he would be a neurosurgeon. His mother has no idea how, at 5, her son might have heard about neurosurgeons or what they were or did, but he had. The first day of his medical career, he promised his mom, he would take out all of her frayed nerves and fix them. "Somehow he knew about neurosurgeons," she says, "and he knew that my nerves needed fixing."

By the way, McSweeney's is collecting memories and tributes from readers and friends. I'm still in disbelief.

24 September 2008

In light of the fact that it's National Punctuation Day, please join with me in fighting the nefarious overuse of exclamation marks. (From the archives.) Bang!

21 September 2008

Piece 24/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Mitch

20 September 2008

Piece 23/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Buttercup

19 September 2008

New Texting Acronyms for the Elderly:

  • BIMD: Back in my day
  • ROFLACGU: Rolling on the floor laughing and can't get up
  • ML2N?: Matlock tonight?
19 September 2008

Piece 22/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Mert

18 September 2008

Piece 21/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Sam

17 September 2008

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. An essay about tennis, tornadoes, and a coming of age, by David Foster Wallace. (Via Heavy.)

17 September 2008

Piece 20/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Michael

16 September 2008
16 September 2008

Piece 19/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Pete

15 September 2008
An introduction to the broad and diverse world of brand name pencils produced in the US and abroad. BNP has been featured in Coudal's Museum of Online Museums (MoOM). I love the Lovely 447's from Empire Pencil Co.
15 September 2008

Piece 18/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Johnny

14 September 2008
David Airey's roundup of typography-based Flickr groups. Besides some of the obvious gold-mines here (Found Type, Urban Typography, Arabic Typography, Japanese Typography, Typography of the 50's), there are others that are downright humorous (Bad Type, Typography Abuse, Crimes Against Typography). At what point do we pass a bill and start prosecuting?
14 September 2008

Piece 17/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Henry

13 September 2008
13 September 2008
The Seattle Post Intelligencer is reporting that Amazon is buying Shelfari.  I've tried using some of the popular social book sharing sites (LibraryThing, Shelfari, Good Reads), but can't get past their hokey designs (i.e. Shelfari's wood-grain bookshelves). Also, there doesn't seem to be a clear winner yet between the three. I'm still holding out.
13 September 2008

Piece 16/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Robin

12 September 2008

One of the better subtitles I've come across recently:

I am not a nerd. I am a Level 9 Warlord.

12 September 2008

Love this image of getting down and dirty for a good shot: Rainy Shoot.

12 September 2008

Piece 15/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Steve

11 September 2008

Who knew what musical treasures would be our reward when we agreed to a new roof and siding? Unfortunately, I had to experience this one second-hand. Mandy has more: My heart will go on.

11 September 2008

Another fine piece of journalism from The Onion: I Was Under The Impression That Everyone Loved My Headlocks.

My entire life, I've always loved some good old-fashioned horseplay, and I assumed everyone else felt the same. So you can imagine my surprise when, out of nowhere, right in the middle of my youngest son's baptism, my wife asks me to please stop putting everybody in headlocks because, as she claims, "No one enjoys it and no one ever did."
11 September 2008

Piece 14/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Harry

10 September 2008

Radiohead gave permission to NPR to record their live show at the Santa Barbara Bowl on August 28th, 2008. NPR now has it available for download through their All Songs Considered podcast.

10 September 2008

Umbrella Today? A service where you can sign up to receive a daily text message telling you just one thing: do you need an umbrella today or not?

It's like totally the simplest weather report ever, Julie.

In case you need a refresher, you might also brush up your Umbrella Etiquette.

10 September 2008

Piece 13/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Jake

9 September 2008

Piece 12/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Hopper

8 September 2008

Todd Holmberg, a college friend of mine, is doing stand-up comedy and pottery in the Twin Cities. (With audio and video samples! For instance, Re-Possessed.)

8 September 2008

Piece 11/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Dino

7 September 2008

Piece 10/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Alf

6 September 2008

Piece 9/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Rudy

5 September 2008

Dennis Benson, Piano Service, Web Design, and Photography Services. Dad just finished a fancy new website design. Nice!

5 September 2008

Piece 8/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Carlos

4 September 2008

Piece 7/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Stanley & Norm

3 September 2008

Due to popular request (read: Chloe), I'm enabling comments for recent entries.

3 September 2008

Footnotes, Endnotes, and Parentheticals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis:

  • 3 Who, although a gifted academic, is still a douche.
  • 8 Right? No, he did. I think. No, I'm pretty sure he did.
  • 10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre

(Via Kottke.)

3 September 2008

Piece 6/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Tom

2 September 2008

My friend Dan just shared with me a stupendous and inspirational resource: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century. From the introduction:

Dear Gentle Reader,
Many of the following pages have graphic and clear images of the masculine mustache in all its forms, both sublime and grotesque. My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject. The Nineteenth Century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms.

I can assure you that the Monsters with Mustaches series will derive significant guidance from these classic styles.

2 September 2008

Piece 5/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Heavy

30 August 2008

Piece 4/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Terry

29 August 2008

Piece 3/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Travis

29 August 2008

Piece 2/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Carl

29 August 2008

Piece 1/24 in an illustrated series of mustachioed monsters.

Drago

28 August 2008

Brand Name Pencils -- an introduction to the broad and diverse world of pencils produced in the US and abroad. BNP has been featured in Coudal's Museum of Online Museums (MoOM). I love the Lovely 447's from Empire Pencil Co. What a gold mine.

25 August 2008

The US Open starts today at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, NY. All eyes are on Rafa.

22 August 2008

Design Observer on the dry wit and extensive use of double entendre in the port-a-potty branding biz. Examples: Drop Zone, LepreCAN, Loader-Up, Royal Throne, Tee Pee, Oui Oui Enterprises, Doodie Calls, and Yesterday's Meals-on-Wheels.

19 August 2008

Sydney, on her tie-dye blanket, waiting to be chauffeured to the park.

Tie-Dye Sydney

8 August 2008

The Guardian is reporting that a gloomy autumn is on the way for French writing.

Avid readers across France are gearing up for "la rentrée littéraire", the deluge of new novels that hits the country every August in anticipation of France's autumn swarm of literary prizes. But this year's rentrée strikes a sombre tone, and brings a halt to a seemingly unstoppable trend with a marked fall in the number of this year's new titles.

Here are a few examples of what's to come (from the article):

  • Régis Jauffret's recounting of a suicide in Lacrimosa.
  • Valentine Goby's novel about abortion Qui touche a mon corps je le tue (Touch Me and I'll Kill You).
  • Emmanuelle Pagano's Les mains gamines (Innocent Hands) tackles the story of girl abused by her classmates.
  • Mathieu Riboulet's L'amant des morts (Lover of the Dead) confronts the Aids epidemic of the 1990s with the story of a man who sleeps with his own father.
  • Tristan Garcia's La meilleure part des hommes (The best of man), a novel which the author describes as a "faithful record" of the "betrayals of human existence, a portrait of the worst of mankind and - in negative - the best".

I understand that good novels are not necessarily happy -- in fact, I'd prefer otherwise -- but I have to admit these don't seem like ones you'd want to read when you're alone on your Birthday.

"These books are fairly dark, very depressing - a bit like France," said Vincy Thomas of Livres Hebdo. "There is a 'grande malaise', a sort of depression, in France at the moment. This is not a joyful country; when you think of France, you don't think of a party country. The social reality in France is a real concern about the future and this is reflected in the books." Aurélie Delfly, of one of France's largest publishers Gallimard, agreed. "We aren't very happy in France, and that is being felt in the subjects of the literature produced."

7 August 2008
4 August 2008
29 July 2008

Logic is having a 6-story egg drop contest next month. Last night, I spent some time scheming about a potential design. I don't know if it's possible for me to not win. Bwa ha ha haaa.

Hair-Brained Egg-Drop Scheme

11 July 2008

Make - Volume 11 describes how to unpimp a Bianchi Milano and turn it into something that looks like a piece of crap, to deter thievery.

3 July 2008
25 June 2008

The Minneathlon is this Friday. Our team profile (Lefty and Skinny) was recently posted, and there seems to be some decent banter in the trash-talk section. Also, since the race coordinators are running the prize give-away like a horse-race, they're posting revised odds as people make their bets.

13 June 2008

Minneathlon v2.0: Brains vs. Brawn. This is Logic's version of the Amazing Race in and around downtown Minneapolis, to be held on June 27th, 2008. This year, Jason and I were granted entry as team Lefty & Skinny. More updates to come.

29 May 2008

Welcome to Haley Jo, born on Tues, May 27, 2008, 6lb 10oz and 20".

Haley Jo

Haley Jo

Haley Jo

What a cutie. Congratulations Brian and Jill!

28 May 2008

Jon Henley on the fate of the semicolon. The debate on the value of the semicolon goes on. Some authors love it, some hate it. Why is this discussion so divisive? The semicolon is just a misunderstood grammatical outsider with a split personality -- sometimes a comma and sometimes a period -- that wants to be left alone.

Here are some quotes from the article. First, Guillemette Faure:

It's true that computer programmers use an awful lot of them, mainly as separators. And that's surely the last step on the line before it's reduced to a mere email emoticon.

Obviously Mr. Faure has not heard of ML. Next, George Bernard Shaw to TE Lawrence, on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

Err, childish? Next, Kurt Vonnegut:

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Yikes! I haven't finished thinking about that one. Finally, George Orwell:

I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.

Hm, hard to argue with G.O. on style.

27 May 2008

A Cooks.com user-submitted recipe for Wiener Water Soup. (Via Serious Eats, Kottke.)

Wiener Water Soup

1 pkg. wieners
3 c. water

Combine wieners and water in a two quart saucepan. Bring to a boil until wieners are cooked. Throw the wieners in the garbage. Serve soup. Serves 3.

20 May 2008
19 May 2008

Saw Prince Caspian last night with Mandy and was pleasantly surprised by the closing song, sung by Regina Spektor, called The Call. The style differs markedly from the full majestic orchestral phrases that were common throughout most of the movie, but the lyrics and the modern folk melody seemed to correspond well with the closing geo-time-travel from Narnia to England.

9 May 2008

Digable Planets - Rebirth Of Slick. I still love these guys (Butterfly, Doodlebug, Ladybug Mecca, Silkworm).

We be to rap what key be to lock.

3 May 2008

I was going through some old jayber.org designs of mine, came across a few that caught my eye, and realized that they all have a common theme in that they are: (1) urban, and (2) green. Here are some samples:

Jayber.org Design Concept (2006)

Jayber.org Design Concept (2006)

25 April 2008
22 April 2008

Pimped-out van on Flickr. Dang, wouldn't want to take that thing off road. Nice wings though! By the way, is that a chihuahua in the front window? This definitely one-ups the Popemobile. (Via Matt H.)

16 April 2008

'skine.art. is a site dedicated to Moleskine lovers and their art.

[...] we encourage anyone and everyone to [...] submit their artwork. There is no "good" or "bad" art, just Art.

There's some good stuff on there. Like this. (Via Dan O.)

16 April 2008

A Peek Inside the Popemobile - Newsweek

The popemobile isn't its official name, because it doesn't have one. In fact, Pope John Paul II pleaded with journalists to stop using the term in 2002 because he thought it sounded "undignified." So it's not surprising that a Vatican spokesman couldn't say whether popemobile (small p) describes every car in the pontiff's fleet or whether only the car in use by the pope is the Popemobile with a big p [...]

I just like the name Popemobile for some reason. I can't get it out of my head. I just keep saying it silently. Popemobile, Popemobile, Popemobile.

15 April 2008

My professor continues to keep the compiler-theory zingers coming. Today, he rattled off another set that had me laughing quietly.

Fortran is structurally deficient. It's really a shame that people use it.

Zing!

Algol is the father of all sensible languages we have today. And then, there's C...

Bwa!

3 April 2008

Hong Kong Handshake. White & Gold foil stamping on White Shiro 80, 1400gsm.

31 March 2008
25 March 2008

I remember driving by this sign every day for a few years on the corner of North Penn and West Broadway in North Minneapolis: Love Thy Bro (cf. Mark 12:28-31).

24 March 2008
21 March 2008

Martial Arts Knockout. Nice tornado.

5 March 2008
4 March 2008

I've been listening to Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for "good winter" and spelled wrong on purpose) recently (thanks EA). This album is deeply contemplative, which I deeply appreciate. Justin Vernon:

It wasn't planned. The goal was to hibernate.

28 February 2008

Nearly without fail, each time my compiler theory class meets, our professor comes up with some linguistic boner that a language (not based on Lambda Calculus) commits that further validates the righteousness of ML. Here's the compiler-theory insult of the day.

The only time I could conceive of this type of approach for resolving shift-reduce conflicts is in C++, which I would consider more of an ad-hoc language--not a real language.

Zing!

25 February 2008

I've waffled for a few days on whether to post this or not, but the font that Obama's campaign uses for their "Change We Can Believe In" marketing material, uses Gotham, which was originally designed for GQ by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, inspired by a sign for the NY Port Authority.

H&FJ say of Gotham's original aesthetic intent:

GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it. It also needed to look very masculine and 'of-the-moment.'

Seems to go well with Obama's message. Perhaps we should add Typography to the list of our country's important political issues.

22 February 2008

lowercase L.

[A website dedicated to] hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L.

Find out more about what the L this is all about. (Via DF.)

22 February 2008

From Ironic Sans, a new typography term: Keming. Bwa!

19 February 2008

Awry. Great photo and orientation of a catawampus shed by Charlie Clark.

18 February 2008

Nick Fraser on the American novelist, Richard Yates, quoting a character from Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, on the topic of Revolutionary Road:

I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in a cold-water bedsit, [...] It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.

Ellen Barkin, producer of an upcoming film based on Easter Parade:

Brits immediately get Yates - maybe because they have never bought into anything as dumb as the American dream. There's no "glad morning" in his books.
18 February 2008
16 February 2008

I just added Jayber Mobile, formatted for cell phones. So far, I've only viewed it on a forgiving Moto Q9c, running at 320x240.

11 February 2008

Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters, just won album of the year. Still, one of my favorite albums of all time is H.H.'s tribute to Gershwin.

11 February 2008

The National MS Society is having a series of 150-mile bike rides this summer to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis research and treatment. One of the races goes from Duluth to Blaine. Mandy and I are thinking of riding, so if anyone else wants to join in, let us know.

10 February 2008

Tinley Park cheerleaders are state champs.

While it's only two-and-a half minutes, their exerting all their total energy while yelling as loud as they can and have to look happy about it at the same time.

Andrew H.S. is Mandy's Alma Mater.

8 February 2008

Super Bowl Ads. A roundup.

23 January 2008

Great news from East London:

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on Last.fm.

Also, independent artists can upload their own music and, depending on a song's popularity, share in the profits.

22 January 2008

MC Hammer's social networking side project, Dance Jam, will be debuted later this month. From a Washington Post interview on the topic:

At the right time, I will introduce several styles of the Hammer Dance -- including tips on executing some of the classic moves [...]

Hammer Time!

21 January 2008
18 January 2008

Using passive amplification alone, designer Tristan Zimmermann came up with the Phonofone II, which transforms a personal music player into a sort of mini victrola.

From Science & Sons:

[...] Without the use of external power or batteries, the Phonofone [...] exploits the virtues of horn acoustics to boost the audio output of standard earphones to up to 55 decibels* (or roughly the maximum volume of laptop speakers)

This would fit nicely on top of my full-size victrola at home. (Via Veer.)

18 January 2008

John Maeda gave a talk at the TED conference this last year entitled "Simplicity Patterns". In the talk, he argues that we, as humans, want to reduce complexity in areas that we deem mundane, but desire complexity in areas that excite us. Also, check out his related book: The Laws of Simplicity, available for free from the MIT Media Lab. (via Jim Hoar.)

18 January 2008

Hello readers of Jayber Residuals. The residual links have now been combined with the main blog, which means that there is now only one RSS feed for Jayber. The main feed (http://jayber.org/index.xml) contains both regular posts, as well as residual links. The old feed (http://jayber.org/residuals/index.xml) has been... terminated.

18 January 2008

Bobby Fischer dies in Iceland.

Bobby Fischer, America's first and only world chess champion, who beat the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky in a blaze of Cold War publicity in Reykjavik in 1972, has died in Iceland at the age of 64.

18 January 2008

ESV Bible Online: Chronological Reading Guide. Daily readings are structured in the order they occurred chronologically. For example, the book of Job is integrated with Genesis because Job lived before Abraham. (More on the ESV and its philosophy of word-for-word translation.)

17 January 2008

Thanks to EA, Jayber is being hosted on a new server, and I'm exploiting the opportunity to realign the design. Things are a bit broken at the moment, but if you have any input, let me know.

6 January 2008

Good People by David Foster Wallace.

6 January 2008
6 January 2008

13 Photographs That Changed the World. Good collection and descriptions.

4 January 2008
4 January 2008

Hingis given two-year ban for failed dope test. Now, her November retirement announcement is making more sense.

2 January 2008

Health Efects of Clutter.

Too often [hoarders] approach clutter and disorganization as a space problem that can be solved by acquiring bins and organizers.

31 December 2007

Frost Bot. A co-worker brought this dandy to our holiday potluck.

27 December 2007
13 December 2007
12 December 2007
4 December 2007
University of Minnesota: Dissertation Calculator.
27 November 2007

Hugs and Leashes; a dog-loving website by a friend of mine: Ryan Van Slooten.

4 September 2007

OttoBib. Useful for finding BibTex refs.

23 August 2007

Video from my Dad's recent trip to Drabiv, Ukraine. Fast forward to 1:31 to see him doing the Hawaiian War Chant in a hula skirt and coconut bra.

6 August 2007

LinuxBootArgs for uboot. Why oh why didn't I know this before?

5 August 2007

Bike Messenger Race. Check out the sweet move at 4:10.

20 July 2007

Fixed Gear Bike Gallery. I hope to pimp my Peugeot in like fashion.

19 July 2007
15 July 2007

Breakdancing Street Fighter Baby Kick. Gee, I hope that kid is alright.

7 July 2007
6 July 2007
3 July 2007

Creature Comforts. The first scene of the first episode had me hooked.

18 May 2007

Armstrong Food Fight. A friend's brother was an "instrumental" organizer.

8 May 2007
7 May 2007
18 April 2007

Georgina Bush. A fine portrait indeed.

17 April 2007
17 April 2007
12 April 2007

Protect the Boys at all costs.

12 April 2007

Recoupin'. One out of one Dr. T's recommended. Absoludicrous.

11 April 2007
9 April 2007

Restroom Renascence. A poem in iambic tetrameter about boundaries, freedom, and porcelain.

9 April 2007
5 April 2007

3041. Destruction and sadness.

4 April 2007
3 April 2007
2 April 2007

Ira Glass (of This American Life) on storytelling: 1, 2, 3, and 4. (Via EA.)

23 March 2007
22 March 2007
14 March 2007
9 March 2007

Asian Landscape from my good friend Paul Olson.

9 March 2007

PlotKit. Javascript chart plotting.

9 March 2007
8 March 2007
6 March 2007
5 March 2007

Whatever you do, don't click on this. You'll never be the same again.

5 March 2007

Tony Danz[ig]. I can't stop laughing.

5 March 2007

TextPad 5.0 released. (Via Hilden.)

5 March 2007

Incomprehensible Intersections. See if you can figure out how to make a left off Rosanov Street in Moscow. (Via J.B.C.)

3 March 2007

Design update: I increased the width to take advantage of 1024x768 resolutions.

28 February 2007

Sir Ken Robinson. On creating an education system that values creativity as much as literacy.

19 February 2007

Beatboxing Flute Player: Inspector Gadget Remix. This is totally def.

14 February 2007

A Guide to Writing Well. Joshua Sowin works for Desiring God.

10 February 2007

Purple and Brown Bubble Gum, Growl, Balloon, and Sneeze. (Via Josh L..)

7 February 2007
6 February 2007
6 February 2007

Finetune - music recommendation.

6 February 2007

Mog: Save the world from bad music.

5 February 2007
5 February 2007

Rodney White Art. Acrylic on wood.

5 February 2007

12 Stone Art. Online art gallery specializing in museum-quality fine art prints of Christian artwork.

5 February 2007

Superbowl Commercials. (The Fedex Moon Office had me cracking up.)

5 February 2007
4 February 2007
1 February 2007

The Knack. "Utter social ineptitude."

31 January 2007
31 January 2007

Digital Bibliography and Library Project. For Computer Science Journals and Proceedings. This is incredibly useful. XML available for download.

31 January 2007
30 January 2007
30 January 2007
30 January 2007

Modern Concurrency Abstractions for C#. Touches on the reasons for adding concurrency abstractions as language extensions as opposed to libraries--the point of .

30 January 2007

Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make. Third in a series. See also one and two. Disturbing.

29 January 2007

Cheerleader and Marching Band Bloopers. Dad sent this to me and it had me cracking up. The last scene is worth it.

25 January 2007
25 January 2007

100 Best Fonts. The top 5 are Helvetica, Garamond, Frutiger, Bodoni, and Futura.

23 January 2007

Paper Prototyping. Along the same lines as the Hipster PDA and the DIY Planner.

23 January 2007

The Purloined Sirloin. Why Americans love to shoplift meat.

22 January 2007

Multithreading invites string of nasty bugs. Precisely why I'm studying this for my Master's thesis. (Via John Collins.)

22 January 2007
22 January 2007

Over the weekend, Erik Freed made some French Flambe' for us with vanilla ice cream, mangos, grain alchohol, and a touch of pyrotechnics. (Video on YouTube.)

21 January 2007

Chicago Uncommon. Urban photography by Dawn Mikulich.

21 January 2007
20 January 2007
18 January 2007

iJigg. Submit, converse, and rate new music. For example, Unravel.

18 January 2007
18 January 2007

Acceptable Written Forms for the Bullwhip Sound Effect. Make sure to mouth the words for each one.

17 January 2007

Japanese Foliage. More great brushes from Jason Gaylor.

17 January 2007
15 January 2007

Pearl Crescent Page Saver. Firefox extension for below-the-fold screenshots. (Example. Via Cameron Moll.)

10 January 2007

Wendell Berry Interview from NPR (1998) where he reads from his "Window" series of poems.

10 January 2007
8 January 2007
28 December 2006
13 December 2006
6 December 2006

TrueCrypt. Open-source on-the-fly encryption.

5 December 2006

Penguin Books. Mmm... Book cover design.

4 December 2006

Fimoculous 2006 Lists. A compilation of "best-of" lists for 2006.

4 December 2006

SourceMonitor for static complexity analysis.

4 December 2006

LocMetrics. Source code line-counting tool.

4 December 2006

Flickr: Camera Finder. Interesting that the D50 is now more popular than the D70.

30 November 2006

Furnish for designing living spaces. (Some more options.)

29 November 2006

BuzzFeed. I'm unusually unskeptical.

29 November 2006
29 November 2006

kuler. Adobe's color theme generator.

28 November 2006

BarCamp / MinneDemo. "[...] where we showcase [...] kick-ass software [...] and have [...] beers [...]".

28 November 2006

John Piper is Bad. The video.

2 November 2006
25 October 2006
24 October 2006

ACM SIGSOFT 2006 / FSE 14. I'll be attending this year thanks to a National Science Foundation fellowship.

24 October 2006

2-Channel Infrared Picco Z Mini Helicopter. I guess I just started my Christmas list.

24 October 2006

David Kupferman. Boston artist specializing in abstract images using acrylic on canvas or paper. David is a nice guy; I got to chat with him on a plane from LAX to Pheonix.

18 October 2006

Spin Master. Wicked!

5 October 2006
26 September 2006

Tesla Motors. The first 100 were sold each for $100,000.

6 September 2006
30 August 2006

RadioShack lays off employees via e-mail. "Employees were invited to ask questions on the company's intranet site."

15 August 2006

Kakuro. A number-based crossword puzzle. This site was engineered by an old friend of mine: Aaron Kardell.

15 August 2006

Aussies on lookout for ugly sheep. "So far only 10 [...] have been found [...]"

10 August 2006

How to Survive a Freestyle Rap Battle. I could have used this last Friday. (Via T3sk3y.)

2 August 2006

Choral Evensong--a BBC Radio programme of Anglican choral music--has been broadcast weekly since 1926. (Listen to the latest.)

26 July 2006

Layout Grid Bookmarklet. A useful tool to change the background image of the page, to a grid, to aid in layout and wireframing. Inspired by Khoi Vinh and Smiley Cat.

26 July 2006
25 July 2006

LogoPond identity inspiration. (Via Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain.)

25 July 2006

Fresh Foliage Photoshop Brushes for High Resolution [Part II]. More fantastic brushes from the generous Jason Gaylor.

20 July 2006
18 July 2006
18 July 2006

activeCollab open source project management and collaboration tool.

18 July 2006

Wiring VoIP to home phone jacks. I’ll be doing this shortly.

17 July 2006

The Lovers. Poptrical Sophistifunk!

12 July 2006
10 July 2006

Brave wife 'fends off' big tiger. "A woman in Bangladesh armed only with an oar from her rowing boat fended off a Royal Bengal tiger which was attacking her husband, police say."

28 June 2006
20 June 2006

Three Rivers Park District. Regional parks in and around the Mississippi, Minnesota and Crow rivers.

16 June 2006

Welcome to Zombo.com. This is Zombo.com. (Via Patrick Haney.)

16 June 2006

Interactive Urbanisation Map from the BBC for visualizing urban growth as a function of time.

5 June 2006

Slashdot Redesigned. The result of the recent contest.

1 June 2006

Flash Frogger.

1 June 2006

Wiki + Maps == WikiMapia.

1 June 2006

Picasa for Linux, just released. It uses Wine, and the Gecko engine, which makes me wonder what the performance will be like.

1 June 2006

Nevaeh (Heaven spelled backwards) has become the fastest-growing name for baby girls in more than a century. Check popularity history with NameVoyager. (Via Kottke.)

30 May 2006

Doug Bowman is going to Google to be their new Visual Design Lead.

22 May 2006

Web Developer's Handbook. Lot's of good material here.

22 May 2006

List of Trend Aggregators. Popurls should really be in this list.

18 May 2006

Bikebox. Trailors for bicycles. Ideal for ghetto blaster transport.

5 May 2006
3 May 2006

BBC is requesting submissions for a home-page redesign. A new Apple laptop is the prize.

2 May 2006

Apple launches 'Get a Mac' TV Ad Campaign. Funny stuff. (Via Daring Fireball.)

1 May 2006

ABC.com: Full Episode Streaming. Hopefully other networks will follow.

1 May 2006
30 April 2006
26 April 2006

Color Box. A color-theory game based on the additive color system.

24 April 2006

Tank Chair. Off-road and custom.

24 April 2006
24 April 2006
24 April 2006
24 April 2006

Pimp My Snack. (a.k.a. Snacks for Pimps. (Via del.icio.us popular.)

24 April 2006

Fifty Ways to Take Notes. I admit it, I'm a sucka' for new ways.

24 April 2006

Roger Ebert's list of 101 movies you must see that "everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate'".

24 April 2006
21 April 2006

Robot Dance. Mad skillz.

20 April 2006
20 April 2006
Sun Opens Modeling Tools. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m willing to wager that the UML modeling components are better than Visio.
20 April 2006

John Gruber has quit his job at Joyent to write for Daring Fireball full-time. John is the best MAC writer on the web right now, as far as I'm concerned.

20 April 2006

Mowing the Lawn. A vibrant photo of expectation from File Magazine.

19 April 2006

New Avis / XM Commercial. Funny video of a car full of white-collar business men, rap-sync'ing.

19 April 2006

Monobrow.com. Celebrating the unity of your eyebrows.

19 April 2006

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is an ensemble of 15 students, each seated on a pillow with a laptop, and a 6-channel speaker. (Listen; via Coudal.)

18 April 2006
17 April 2006
17 April 2006

Wheee! Funny video of various browser icons, if they had personalities.

17 April 2006
17 April 2006

The AIGA and the U.S. DOT have released a set of symbol signs, designed for transportation hubs and international events. (Via Veerle.)

13 April 2006
13 April 2006
13 April 2006

Flashbag. USB flash drive with micro pump that changes the size of the device depending on the amount of data it holds.

13 April 2006

Google Calendar, now live.

13 April 2006

Incredible Machines from Pistol Wimp. A 12-minute collection of rube goldberg inventions from the Japanese TV show.

13 April 2006

Artnatomy. Anatomical basis of facial expression learning tool.

12 April 2006

The Visual Work of Scott Hansen. Fantastic textures. (Via Cameron Moll.)

12 April 2006
12 April 2006
12 April 2006
11 April 2006
7 April 2006

Type Navigator. Interactive visual font search.

6 April 2006

Every Stock Photo. Stupendous and long-needed CC photo search.

6 April 2006

View Rendered Source. A Firefox extension to display source in its altered state after the DOM has been manipulated by JavaScript.

6 April 2006

Ace of Lace. Make it stop! © Coudal.

5 April 2006

Pizza All Day. I love the first slide: "I sure love pizza! *gomp*, *gomp*."

5 April 2006

Boot Camp. A public beta that will eventually ship with OS X Leopard to help install Windows on Intel-based Macs.

4 April 2006

Edmund Hall Portfolio. Nice use of posterized, simplified, layered, and worn common objects.

4 April 2006
3 April 2006

Cameron Moll Portfolio redesigned with worn leather and judicious use of Jason Gaylor's foliage brushes.

3 April 2006

ATDT. "Go into Microsoft Frontpage and select Build > Community > Non-Designed > Ugly > Cash Cow and just wait for someone to offer hundreds-of-millions to buy you out."

3 April 2006
3 April 2006
3 April 2006

Church Beauty. Inspiring church websites.

31 March 2006

Wookieepedia. Star Wars wiki.

30 March 2006

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." -- Steve Jobs. (Via Airbag.)

30 March 2006

SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards. 300+ sites, 38 categories, 21 interviews.

29 March 2006

Grups (AKA, yupsters, yindies, and alterna-yuppies). The ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood and killed off the generation gap.

29 March 2006

Best bumper stickers. "Save the trees, wipe your butt with an owl."

28 March 2006

Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content. "Design is that it is almost always about something else. The more things you're interested in, the better your work will be."

27 March 2006
27 March 2006
27 March 2006

Never seen this before: a righteous 1950's megaphone helmet with a shoulder-mounted battery pack. (Via Boing Boing.)

25 March 2006

B#. An OO language for small-footprint embedded systems.

24 March 2006

To help organize notes for school (warning: highly-variable quality), I created a new Reference section that I like to call, "Konichiwa Buffet."

24 March 2006

Sleeping Giants. Aviation afterlife in the desert.

24 March 2006

UX. A new magazine about user experience.

23 March 2006

A number of people have asked about the Scrambler script that's used on the navigation for Jayber, so I created a project page containing a demo, and a download.

23 March 2006

Robert Sapolsky lectures on the physiology of stress. (iTunes direct.)

22 March 2006

Iron-On Resistance. Lovely independent art products. Don't miss their Proletariat's Day sale.

21 March 2006

How to destroy the Earth. Everything you've ever wanted to know about geocide.

20 March 2006

Tronical. Automatic electric guitar tuning system with replacement tuning pegs (with servos), a knob that lets you change between tunings, and a controller.

20 March 2006
19 March 2006
19 March 2006
18 March 2006
17 March 2006

SimpleBits has been realigned. This "Arkanoid Edition" has embellished footers, muted colors, and maintains a nice balance between fixed and fluid layouts.

16 March 2006

My Dad just got done directing the music (vocal and pit) for Chicago, which played at The Barn Theatre, in Willmar Minnesota over the last few weeks.

16 March 2006

Selenium IDE. HTTP automated testing. Posh.

15 March 2006

Ma.gnolia.com's domain has expired. Such short life spans, these Web 2.0 companies have. Update: account restored; I wonder what happened?

15 March 2006

Maximizing your ROI at Pizza Hut. How to straight milk them, with only one trip to the salad bar.

14 March 2006

The Web Standards Project has been redesigned by Malarky. It's nice, to be sure, but I don't know about "grassroots"; it feels more like "bumblebee."

14 March 2006

Inbox Zero; Merlin on the current productivity pandemic.

13 March 2006
13 March 2006

isolatr beta.

People always used to approach me to try and talk about this or that. I wanted to punch them in the throat. Now they leave me the hell alone. Thanks isolatr!

Also, see the upcoming alpha of the IMolatr where you are:

[...] always listed as away, and if people try to contact you, IMolatr will actually set their hands on fire!
13 March 2006
10 March 2006
9 March 2006
8 March 2006

American divers off the coast of Easter Island have found a new species of crustacean (Kiwa hirsuta) that resembles a furry lobster with silky, blond fur. Peachy.

7 March 2006

popurls.com. A collection of pop-buzz urls (digg, del.icio.us, newsvine, flickr, reddit, tailrank, slashdot, youtube, google news, topix, and comagz) all on one page.

7 March 2006

Flickr Leech. View Flickr "Interestingness", without paging.

6 March 2006
6 March 2006

Logic featured in The Columbian (Vancouver print.)

6 March 2006

AJAX Press. Dude.

6 March 2006

Design Education. Thousands of design resources. Thanks Gustavo.

2 March 2006

Un-Pimp My Ride. New commercials from VW that had me laughing pretty good.

2 March 2006

StepUI. A Microsoft Research project that lets you sort your mail and organize your photos using a dance pad. Think Dance Dance Revolution meets David Allen. So, who's going to hack this into an MMORPG?

2 March 2006

Newsvine Launches. Check out the article-specific live chats.

2 March 2006

Veerle's blog, redesigned with smart and crafty flair.

2 March 2006
2 March 2006

Fresh Foliage Photoshop Brushes from Jason Gaylor. Also, he's got some great "worn" brushes as well (I, II and III.)

2 March 2006

South Dakota passes abortion ban.

South Dakota became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning abortion in virtually all cases, with the intention of forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 decision legalizing the procedure.

All that's left, is for Republican Gov. Michael Rounds to sign it, which he probably will.

28 February 2006

Andy digs up Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors.

[The game has a part called] "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, [...] the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up.

There are reports of two guys playing this game for like 4 days straight. Their high score? 12 points.

28 February 2006

Fl.ower. Greg Story talks about the making of Ma.gnolia.

28 February 2006
27 February 2006

Man sentenced for ride-by bottom slap.

A Colombian man has been sentenced to four years' house arrest for slapping a woman's bottom as he rode by her on his bicycle, sparking debate on whether the punishment fit the crime.

I wouldn't advocate this type of barbaric behavior (even though it's somewhat humorous), but doesn't the punishment seem excessive?

27 February 2006

Make PCB's with a laser printer using the EAGLE Layout Editor, semi-glossy photo paper, a laser-jet printer, soapy water, etchant, and an iron.

27 February 2006

Top Cameras Used on Flickr.

[...] top camera makes and models used to create photos uploaded to Flickr [...] generated automatically by periodically sampling the EXIF data from the stream of recent uploads.

The Nikon D70, and the Canon EOS 20D are fighting for #1.

27 February 2006

A sampling of avant-garde composer George Crumb's art. Crumb arranges his scores in forms of circles, peace symbols, and crucifixes, and are playable. (Via Coudal.)

26 February 2006
24 February 2006

Official Google Blog: History deserves the best. Pilot program to digitize video content from the National Archives.

24 February 2006

Mint Last night, I installed Shaun Inman's Mint to track stats on Jayber and found myself giggling at how fun it was to see for the first time. Mint meets a simple need well, and is designed with extraordinary attention paid to detail.

24 February 2006

Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink, and writer for the New Yorker) is blogging.

23 February 2006

Google Pages. Free hosting with 100MB of storage. It was only a matter of time.

22 February 2006

NBA 2006 Dunk Contest. A highlight video, in case you missed it, like me.

22 February 2006

A few weeks ago, I added a TTS (Text to Speech) feature to Jayber. All posts are now voice-enabled which means that if you click the link titled "audio version of this article", Susan, Cheryl, Jackie, or whatever the sam hill her name is, will read the post to you.

22 February 2006
22 February 2006

Do-it-yourself remotely-managed music player using a discontinued netgear router running Linux, a $12 Japenese LCD kit, and an $8 USB audio adapter.

21 February 2006

Zillow. Models home valuations and comparable sales using hard-to-find county tax data. Sweet Moses!

21 February 2006

Man in Vietnam hasn’t slept in 33 years.

[...] Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.

Wha?

21 February 2006

Firefox extensions for web developers. I'm a sucker for a good list.

21 February 2006

Sorting Algorithms, along with complexity analysis and source.

21 February 2006

Minneapolis Traffic Map. A Google Maps mashup of Twin Cities traffic data, including accidents, congestion, construction and cameras. (Via Erik Mitchell.)

19 February 2006
19 February 2006

Microsoft says so-long to FrontPage. Good riddance, far as I'm concerned. (Via Kottke.)

16 February 2006

Podbop. Get podcasts of bands coming to your town. Here's the link for Minneapolis.

16 February 2006

The Web Design Times has assembled a collection of free grunge fonts.

16 February 2006
16 February 2006

Campfire group chat released.

15 February 2006
14 February 2006
14 February 2006

The Beastles. A Beastie Boy, Beatles mashup. Brilliant.

13 February 2006
13 February 2006

Nonviolent Westerns. "A Man Called My Little Pony."

13 February 2006

Engadget Mobile. Daily coverage of mobile gadgetry.

13 February 2006

earBuddy armor for your buds.

13 February 2006

FireBug is the silver-nugget Firefox extension that helps tame the ECMA script debugging beast.

12 February 2006
Cheney Peppers "Friend" with Birdshot. "The nature of quail shooting ensures that this will happen. It goes with the turf."
10 February 2006
Free Trebuchet Plans. How to build a homemade contraption to whip small things really really fast!
10 February 2006
10 February 2006
10 February 2006
9 February 2006
9 February 2006
"A former New Zealand navy diver left adrift at sea for three days survived by eating crayfish and sea slugs after he became separated from friends while diving near an island off the country's coast." "'This defies survivability, it's bloody awesome,' said police search and rescue Senior Sergeant Bruce Johnson."
9 February 2006
9 February 2006
9 February 2006
Variable fixed width layout. Interesting, I didn't notice that Rosenfeld was using this technique.
9 February 2006
Design Melt Down. I'm appreciating the attention to color palettes.
8 February 2006
Free color-customizable icon set: Clearbits. This uses the "Magic Icon" technic described by Dan a few years ago. If you like the style of these icons, you may also appreciate Biticons, or the more controversial article on DIVless layouts by the same random dude.
8 February 2006
Amazing Photos of China. Beam me up, please.
7 February 2006
7 February 2006
Opera 9.0 Tech Preview 2 for Windows released today. Updates include a bittorrent client, "widgets", and many user-interface udpates.
7 February 2006
Gtalkr. Combines Gmail, Google Talk, Flickr, YouTube, and Newsfeeds into on flash-based app.
7 February 2006
Some guy visiting the Fitzwilliam Museum, tripped, fell down a staircase and smashed three rare Chinese vases. Bummer dude. Later, the man received a letter from the director of the museum kindly asking him "not to visit the museum in the near future."
7 February 2006
Matthew Levine lays out a possible end to the search for the holy grail of web design layout.
7 February 2006
NYT Announces Gmail Chat. Chat through your browser. Update: Google's updated their help files.
7 February 2006
Dan ditches the second person and you thank him for it.
7 February 2006
GrApple has some fantastic-looking Mac OS X Firefox themes: Aronnax`s Firefox Themes. Now, if I only had a Mac...
6 February 2006
Six degrees of Wikipedia. This makes me giggle like I'm in Junior High.
6 February 2006
6 February 2006
Alternatives to innerHTML, specifically standards-based DOM-oriented scripting.
6 February 2006
Speed Reading. Advice from a Princeton Seminary grad.
6 February 2006
VMware Server. Now available for free.
6 February 2006
37signals introduces the troll cap.
6 February 2006
Becoming an Email Ninja. A re-cap of recent email productivity tips from Merlin.
6 February 2006
Helldesign. Slick!
6 February 2006
Five Simple Steps to Typesetting on the web: Dashes. A good refresher on Hyphen, En Dash, and Em Dash usage. Via.
6 February 2006
3 February 2006
Blogneato JSON Headlines. Heavy whipped this up today, and I promptly added it to the side bar. Cool huh?
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
John Gruber's Daring Fireball officially joins The Deck.
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
2 February 2006
Definition lists - misused or misunderstood? I've been doing some thinking on DL, DT, and DD usage. More on this in a later post.
2 February 2006
1 February 2006
SimpleTicket. "Open Source Trouble Ticket System for Small & Medium Sized Businesses." Nice simple interface.
1 February 2006
Worst-Selling DVD's at Amazon. Somebody needs to stop making Hammy the Hamster. Via.
1 February 2006
Google Redux. Whether you agree with Andy or not, it's a fun read.
1 February 2006
Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams after 145 years. What is this world coming to? Via.
1 February 2006
Ganging your mosquito tasks. Some more great advice from Merlin on making sure your task list isn't too granular.
1 February 2006
The recent IE7 Beta has really nice font-rendering. I didn't want to be impressed, but I am. Here's a screenshot of Jayber, using the IE7 beta. Smooth edges, huh? I can't find any details about the rendering engine used in IE7. I assume it's been mostly re-written. Anyone know? I noticed that the IE controls in Outlook and FeedDemon are using the new engine as well.
1 February 2006
1 February 2006
Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant, describes his condition in a recent Guardian piece. Tammet can speak 7 languages, can recall pi to 22,514 decimal places, but can't tell right from left, drive a car, or wire a plug. Quite an amazing story of both astounding talent, and real-life disability.
31 January 2006
Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview. The RSS feed reader looks pretty good. The rest of it seems to look and behave like the old crappy IE we're all used to.
31 January 2006
SupersizedMeals.com - Foodstuffs of Epic Proportions. This is downright nasty. I love it.
31 January 2006
CSE - Research Areas. I get to pick from one of these for my Master's thesis, and am having trouble. So many great areas!
31 January 2006
Memoirs. Nicely-designed blog, and I really like the method for navigating the archive. By chronology, and by taxonomy.
31 January 2006
Getting to Grips with LaTeX. This is coming in especially useful right now for me at school.
31 January 2006
AJAX: Getting Started. From the Mozilla Developer Center. Great design (of the MDC) by the way.
31 January 2006
Waterfall '06: International Conf. on Sequential Development (humorous). Heh, "User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use".
31 January 2006
Last night, I added Text To Speech (TTS) functionality to Jayber which was somewhat arduous. Try it out and let me know what you think. The entries that are particularly funny to listen to are the ones that make liberal use of slang. Try Mr. Afro's Barbershop, Skim Shady, My Pimpin' Ride, or Burrito Bandit, for instance.
30 January 2006
Federer defeats Marcos Baghdatis and wins Australian Open. Federer's Grand Slam record: 2 Australian Opens, 2 US Opens, 3 Wimbledons, and 0 French Opens.
30 January 2006
Standpoint let's you A) stand up for your convictions; B) build the case for what you care about; and C) share what you believe.
27 January 2006
Nickelback Mix. Thanks to anderiv for digging up this one.
Some guy out on the SA forums took [two of Nickelback's] hits and mixed them down into one mp3. One of their songs plays in the right channel and one in the left. Normally, doing this with two songs would produce something that is completely un-listenable. Not so with Nickelback. The songs are in the same key, have the same tempo, and use the same chord changes.
Listen to the mp3 here.
26 January 2006
Fake braces become teen fashion fad in Thailand. And people who make fake dental gear could spend time in the slammer.
26 January 2006
Explore the Linux memory model. An article from the IBM Linux Technical Library by Vikram Shukla.
25 January 2006
25 January 2006
I updated some small design details on Jayber. I can't decide if I've hurt or helped my cause. I added a main border, and toned down some of the shadow intensities. Someone please help me--I have absolutely no idea what the hek I'm doing.
24 January 2006
24 January 2006
How to make a Cat Helmet ("Feline Protection and Enhancement System") from an Orange peel.
23 January 2006
MODx, the new AJAXy-ish CMS on the block.
23 January 2006
It's Korean, it's beta; it's a massively multiplayer online dancing game similar to Dance Dance Revolution, but with like 50,000 people. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce, Audition. T3sk3y, I'm looking in your general direction.
23 January 2006
23 January 2006
"The city as an avatar of itself". Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs that look strangely like scale models. Via Waxy.
23 January 2006
Sticky notes for the web: Mystickies.
22 January 2006
Know Your Type. Starting points for typographic inspiration.
21 January 2006
Sleeves + Blanket = Slanket!
20 January 2006
Taiwan breeds green-glowing pigs. Hah, hah. Wait, I don't get it.
20 January 2006
In two years' time, Henry Lim has created a Harpsichord built entirely of Legos (leave the strings). He's got an audio clip to prove that it works, which sounds like absolute crap. Props for the effort though.
19 January 2006
18 January 2006
I haven't listened to SomaFM in a while, but in the last few days, due to my need for getting in the zone, I've been listening, and loving it. If you're new to SomaFM and want some solid grooves to study, or code to, I recommend Groove Salad.
17 January 2006
In Praise of Slow Design. Michael Bierut's analysis of how the New Yorker's design has (very, very) slowly evolved over the last 80 years. Got me thinking about Cameron's recent excellent piece in A List Apart.
16 January 2006
Pretty funny photoset on Flickr titled, "no sampling, please." This one's for you, Blogneato.
16 January 2006
Here's a list of sites that offer free stock photos for Graphic Designers and Web Designers.
15 January 2006
At the Detroit Auto Show this week, the New Camry was unveiled. I really like the rounded grill, longer wheel base, and the fact that they're going to offer a version of it as a gas/electric hybrid. There's a reason this is America's most popular car.
13 January 2006
13 January 2006
Breaking News: Slashdot Not Dead. Kottke gives a bandwidth analysis of a piece that was featured on both Digg and Slashdot and how that compares to recent data highlighted on Alexa.
12 January 2006
Argentine Family Photographs Themselves Once a Year Since 1976. Titled "Time".
12 January 2006
Bellygraph - Have a laugh while you graph. Some of the examples are pretty funny.
12 January 2006
Top 10 websites you should know about.
12 January 2006
Blummy - The bookmarklet management bookmarklet. Cool that you can define your own (MT, WP, etc.).
12 January 2006
Music Search. A clever way to search for music hosted elsewhere on the web. How useful! Hopefully this guy doesn't get sued.
12 January 2006
555 Design. Sweet-daddy "dirty" CD covers.
12 January 2006
2BrightSparks makes one of the best WinXP backup utilities and it's free. I've been using it for some time and really love it. It's nice to see all the attention it's been getting lately. Although, it doesn't do anything rsync/cron can't.
12 January 2006
12 January 2006
11 January 2006
The Prejudice Map. Found by typing things like "germans are known for *" into a Google search. Quite interesting.
11 January 2006
The University of Minnesota is launching a new Zipcar service. You can sign up for a measly $30/yr and start reserving transportation. Not bad.
11 January 2006
11 January 2006
Package Mapper. Shows you a Google map of your FedEx, UPS, or USPS package route. Definitely worth a shout-out.
11 January 2006
A new Firefox extension from Design Meme called X-Ray lets you see the underlying tags used on a web page without viewing source.
11 January 2006
Just say it. VOCO gets it. New product debuted at CES last week. Won't be available until the end of 2006.
10 January 2006
10 January 2006
The Optimus keyboard is coming Feb 1. Check the Russian upper-case screen shot.
10 January 2006
hanzo:web. Social web-archiving service.
10 January 2006
8 January 2006
Best of CES Awards. CES is the Consumer Electronics Show that was held this year in Las Vegas.
8 January 2006
8 January 2006
Top 10 Weirdest USB Drives Ever. Including shrimp, sushi, rubber duckies, and a Barbie where the head rips off to expose the plug.
8 January 2006
Catalog. A great set of portraits.
8 January 2006
8 January 2006
6 January 2006
5 January 2006
Mogo Mouse. Business-card sized, charged via PCMCIA, and uses Bluetooth.
5 January 2006
5 January 2006
Chuck Norris Facts. "Someone once tried to tell Chuck Norris that roundhouse kicks aren't the best way to kick someone. This has been recorded by historians as the worst mistake anyone has ever made. "
5 January 2006
Cats in Sinks. Another choice link from Blogneato.
5 January 2006
Stuff On My Cat. Stuff + Cats = Awesome. Thanks Blogneato.
5 January 2006
Another tool to shorten long URLs: url(x). Check out the live preview.
4 January 2006
37signals has published a list of tools they regularly use to do development and run their business.
4 January 2006
Slickr. Flickr Screensaver. Thanks anderiv.
4 January 2006
Kottke's 2005 Favorites Music, Movies, Books, and Weblogs.
29 December 2005
Silk Icons. 700 free PNGs, for any use.
29 December 2005
Associated Press Top 10 News Stories of 2005:
  1. Hurricane Katrina
  2. Papal Transition
  3. Iraq
  4. Supreme Court
  5. Oil Prices
  6. London Bombings
  7. Asian Quake
  8. Terri Schiavo
  9. CIA Leak
  10. Bush's Struggles
As-voted by AP members.
29 December 2005
29 December 2005
29 December 2005
29 December 2005
29 December 2005
28 December 2005
27 December 2005
27 December 2005
Firefox Blog Editor by Performancing. Wow. Really nice app.
27 December 2005
27 December 2005
Nick Bradbury just posted some FeedDemon 2 Screenshots which won't be out until early 2006. I can hardly wait.
26 December 2005
23 December 2005
23 December 2005
Feed Icons -- Help establish the new standard.
23 December 2005
23 December 2005
22 December 2005
Tony Dungy's son, 18, found dead in Tampa suburb.
22 December 2005
22 December 2005
Visual Complexity. A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. The Code Profiles one is flippin' sweet.
22 December 2005
Double-Mouthed Fish Pulled From Nebraska Lake. Olberding--who caught the fish--said, "I'm going to smoke it up and eat it,"
22 December 2005
PocketMod disposable personal organizer. If you want to make one, they've got a nifty flash app that lets you design and print your own.
21 December 2005
Kindergarten children watch a Santa Claus smoking a cigarette.
Update: Link was broken. Should be fixed now.
20 December 2005
19 December 2005
19 December 2005
19 December 2005
Dark Eye - Living design showcase.
16 December 2005
15 December 2005
14 December 2005
Russian squirrel pack 'kills dog'. "A 'big' stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked." Mikhail Tiyunov, a scientist in the region, said "[...] If it really happened, things must be pretty bad in our forests."
13 December 2005
13 December 2005
"Chicago [...] passed a law on Wednesday to ban smoking in most buildings and public spaces except for bars, where smokers can puff away until mid-2008."
13 December 2005
13 December 2005
13 December 2005
13 December 2005
Stanley Tookie Williams (co-founder of the Crips) was executed last night at San Quentin while supporters protested.
12 December 2005
In my quest for the perfect pen, I recently bought a Rapidograph Koh-I-Noor technical pen which I've been loving except for the fact that it occasionally leaks, which obviously sucks. I just found out why.
10 December 2005
8 December 2005
Symphony web publishing bliss. Always nice to see XSLT used for a templating language instead of some homegrown crap. Demo.
8 December 2005
28 November 2005
Google Map Hack Blog. A blog dedicated to Google Maps Mashups. I think Heavy should take his killer White Castle Finder to the nation and run for President.
28 November 2005
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to allow a California man to be sentenced to spend a day outside a San Fran post office wearing a sandwich board that says, "I stole mail. This is my punishment." Chalk one up for Social Penology.
28 November 2005
Gollum, the Wikipedia Browser. Keep the "criminal inventions" coming, Harald.
27 November 2005
DropSend. A cool way to send and store files online.
27 November 2005

I went and updated the design again. I liked the last one, but it had a really fine sheen to it, which was much more polished than I actually am as a person. My intent is that hopefully this design (and the addition of a swappable photo) represents me in a more realistic way.

27 November 2005
25 November 2005
22 November 2005
Cooking For Engineers. Hey Matty, we finally found our home!
22 November 2005
You gotta love the creativity behind this flash-based site, Phatterism. Props to pops for the link.
22 November 2005
PHP Ajax Sans XmlHttpRequest. Useful technique, especially if you want to support grandma's browser.
22 November 2005
Press-Bot. A Nalgene coffee press. This lovely delight has been moved directly to my christmas list.
21 November 2005
AJAX-S. A lightweight slideshow based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Kind of like S5, but not. The coolest thing: it uses XML source.
20 November 2005
18 November 2005
Riffs. The author, John Hicks says, "Riffs is a recommendations engine, a place to rant and rave about anything, recommend and get recommendations." It's still in alpha but If nothing else, you gotta respect Hicks' design.
18 November 2005
Famous press photos from the last 50 years. Some of these are absolutely shocking.
14 November 2005
Google just released Google Analytics. Ars Technica has the story. I'll be signing up immediately. Thanks to anderiv for keeping me up to date on world events.
13 November 2005
Eddie Guerrero died last night. My friend MJC happened to be on the same plane from Phoenix as Eddie on Saturday evening and was telling me about it after I picked him up from the airport. Little did we know Eddie's life would end only a few hours later. Crazy stuff man.
12 November 2005
Tape It Off The Internet, or "Tioti" is some sort of TV torrent-based social-network. There isn't yet a beta and right now it's all hype. Interesting concept if you like to waste time watching TV.
12 November 2005
Gif of Jif?. What else is there to talk about? Via Airbag.
10 November 2005
10 November 2005
Free online backup: Mozy. The only catch: they advertise via email. I'm trying it out right now. So far, so good.
10 November 2005
Motorist struck by flying deer. "Motorist Robert Brooks thought he hit a deer. That is, until he got out of his car and the deer hit him." Wrong place, at the wrong time, I guess.
10 November 2005
Firebombings, looting, and fierce street fights between vandals and police are appearing to subside says the Boston Globe and Jacques Chirac admits that France has “undeniable problems”.
10 November 2005
A Canadian bank robber, who politely presents a hold-up note on a recipe card, has hit 29 banks in four months.
10 November 2005
Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die. "Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster than we used to doesn't mean we should do it." Amen and amen.
10 November 2005
CSS Reference Sites. Captain, I think we hit the mother lode.
9 November 2005
Coleman and Rybak coast to victory in the St. Paul and Minneapolis mayoral elections, respectively. Randy Kelly is a victim, I tell you!
9 November 2005
Bruce Cockburn has a new instrumental disc out, Speechless. Cockburn is pretty decent--especially if you're a socially-liberal Canuck. I may have to pick this one up, aye.
9 November 2005
Cool Windows CSS tool: CSSVista which allows live CSS editing with Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously. Note: Requires .NET 2.0.
9 November 2005
Cool flash app that shows how name popularities change with respect to time. It's called the Name Voyager.
9 November 2005
The Vatican has issued a statement defending Darwin's theory of evolution stating that "the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution [are] 'perfectly compatible' if the Bible [is] read correctly."
8 November 2005
8 November 2005
Heavy just created a nifty social events calendar. He says, "If you're in the Minneapolis area and your hands hurt from sitting on them all the time, allow me to whet your social whistle."
8 November 2005
I recently added an "about" page which includes randomized flickr photos.
7 November 2005
Coudal Partners: Copy Goes Here. Or was it over there?
7 November 2005
Flickrfs. A Flickr virtual filesystem for Linux based on FUSE. Sourceforge project page.
7 November 2005
Somali pirates attack luxury cruise liner in the Indian Ocean. Note to self: cancel 2006 horn-of-Africa tour.
7 November 2005
Earliest Christian church found in Israeli jail. "Archaeologists suggested the mosaic was the earliest site of Christian worship yet found in the Holy Land."
5 November 2005
Kottke and Meg are off to Asia. I'll look forward to some good photos. Just don't eat the Kimchi.
4 November 2005
4 November 2005
Gospel Spectrum. Visual representation of the harmony of the Gospels.
3 November 2005
Yahoo! Maps, Driving Directions, and Traffic. Beta. All done in Flash. Pretty impressive actually.
2 November 2005
10 Tips To A Better Form. Another gem from Particle Tree. This will be useful as I need to generate a few forms in the upcoming weeks. Good to refresh my memory, learn about accessibility, and re-think semantics.
2 November 2005
2 November 2005
2 November 2005
Write effectively for the Web. Basics people. Straight basics.
2 November 2005
Alright. This is the funniest dang video I've seen in a long time: I want it that way. Two Chinese students passionately singing Backstreet Boys--and with choreography!
2 November 2005
"Every Halloween in Lexington, KY, they block off the streets and recreate Michael Jackson's Thriller video." That's it, I'm moving to Lexington.
2 November 2005
SimplytheBest Fonts Archive. Free fonts searchable by category.
2 November 2005
Designing Scientific Posters. Excellent template mid-way down the page. Right-on.
2 November 2005
2 November 2005
Nightly News Online. Next week, ABC Nightly News will be streamed online after it airs.l Since I don't have a TV, this may come in handy.
1 November 2005

This has been floating around on del.icio.us and digg for the last few days: Resources for Getting Things Done Online.

1 November 2005
The Nikon D200 was just announced. Digital Photography Review has a hands-on preview. Sweet moses.
1 November 2005
10 Free .NET Development Tools. Good list. I've especially found Nant, Nunit, FxCop, and NDoc to be useful.
1 November 2005
I made a few design changes last night. The header has, [gasp] a butterfly. I know, I know, it's ballsy and traditionally not very manly, but I ain't compensating for nothin', so let it be, OK? I also added a dynamic fade resizer on the Notice on the front page (look for the green apple). The notice is cool and all, and I want it there, but most people who re-visit the site don't re-read that part; they just skip over it and get on to the rest of the content. So, by making it able to be dynamically shown, and hidden by default, it re-claims some screen space.
31 October 2005
Pastor electrocuted while performing baptism. "[He] was electrocuted inside his church Sunday morning when he adjusted a nearby microphone while standing in water, a church employee said."
31 October 2005
31 October 2005
Bush nominates Alito to take Sanda Day O'Conner's position in the Supreme Court.
28 October 2005
I'm on my way to Chicago right now (my wife is driving; I'm riding shotgun), and I'm online thanks to a handy Sprint PCS EVDO card from work (props to anderiv), and a power inverter thanks to the Hildens. Oh yeah, and I just got done slamming a sleeve of Spicy Cajun Pringles. This is the life, I'm telling you.
28 October 2005
Cheney's top aide resigns. "Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, resigned on Friday after federal grand jury indicted him on charges related to the CIA leak investigation."
27 October 2005
Supertacks. My friend Ryan Van Slooten's band based out of Duluth, MN.
27 October 2005
New worries for S.Korea over national dish kimchi. "[...] authorities banned imports of the spicy pickled dish from China last week because samples contained parasites found in human excrement." Huh. Weird. I actually like kimchi; had it the other week. Hopefully what's imported to the US is the non-parasitic version.
27 October 2005
South Side redemption. The Sox sweep the Astros to win the World Series.
27 October 2005
Flickr Prints. Now, you order prints of your photos online through Flickr and have them mailed to you or you can pick them up at your local Target.
27 October 2005
moo.fx. Very lightweight (3kb) Javascript effects library. Nicely done.
27 October 2005
Miers withdraws Supreme Court nomination. Back to the drawing board.
26 October 2005
Iran Leader Calls for Israel's Destruction. "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world," Ahmadinejad said.
26 October 2005
26 October 2005
25 October 2005
25 October 2005
25 October 2005
25 October 2005
I saw Scott Schiller's site about a week ago, and was really impressed. Creative use of JS, and XMLHTTP to dynamically move things around.
24 October 2005
The Deck, "the premier advertising network for reaching web and design professionals" was introduced today by the web design trifecta: A List Apart, 37signals and Coudal Partners.
24 October 2005
Venezuela police scramble to squash pumpkins laced with messages inciting political rebellion against Hugo Chavez.
24 October 2005
Matt pointed out that Blogger added a new feature to its front page that scrolls recently-updated blogs. This is one of the few examples of useful AJAX.
24 October 2005
24 October 2005
Next year at the WTA Championships, male fashion models are going to be ball boys. Hurrah! Let the sexism begin!
24 October 2005
21 October 2005
Man extends prison term to match Larry Bird's jersey number. "He said if he was going to go down, he was going to go down in Larry Bird's jersey."
21 October 2005
Crocheted infant Yoda ears. That kid's gonna love seeing those pics again at high school graduation.
20 October 2005
Symfony open-source PHP5 web framework.
19 October 2005
Apple Aperture, released today.
19 October 2005
TIME Magazine critics pick the 100 Best Novels.
19 October 2005
19 October 2005
18 October 2005
I just found Matt Ohlmstead's blog: Hopeful Pilgrim. Matt is a friend of mine from church whom I look up to greatly. He recently raced the Twin Cities Marathon and posted about some lessons he learned during the race. Oh yeah, and his daughter, Mikalah has a blog too: Golden Poem, although I'm not sure if she's still updating it.
18 October 2005
I'm in the process of installing Fedora Core on an old crappy server right now. Estimated time remaining: 16,452 minutes. That's 274.2 hours, or 11.425 days. Yeesh, I hope that's wrong. Maybe if I'm lucky, It'll finish before November.
18 October 2005
Made-up words in The Simpsons. Where's "Crapulence"?
18 October 2005
18 October 2005
List of Free Win Dev Tools. Including editors, compilers, tutorials, debuggers, installers, and diff utils.
18 October 2005
The Windows version of GIMPshop was just released. This is a hack of Gimp to make it look like and act like Photoshop. I'm impressed. Usability issues have been the main reason why I don't use the Gimp. Maybe this will change it. If any of you photoshop peeps get a chance to check it out, let me know what you think.
17 October 2005
FBI: Violent crime rate declines again. It's still bad though: "One murder occurred in the United States every 32.6 minutes [...]".
17 October 2005
17 October 2005
Vim 6.4 Released [Slashdot]. Vi[m], we salute you.
16 October 2005
EULAlyzer. Analyze license agreements for interesting words and phrases.
16 October 2005
Meet the Life Hackers [NYT]. How periodic distractions affect our productivity.
15 October 2005
12 October 2005
New Strib Pages. The redesign was launched today of both the print and online editions.
12 October 2005
New iPod from Apple. This one is thinner, wider, and now supports video.
12 October 2005
Syrian interior minister commits suicide. "Hours before the news broke, Kanaan spoke to a Lebanese radio station, denying reports in Lebanese media that he showed the U.N. investigators cheques paid to him by the late Hariri. 'I think this is the last statement I might give,' Kanaan said at the end of the phone interview with Voice of Lebanon."
12 October 2005
Man coughs up screw after operation. Verhees (the man who had the surgery), said, "I have had a cold for the past few days. I had a terrible cough a few days ago. That's when I suddenly felt something in my mouth. It turned out to be a screw." Yikes!
12 October 2005
Photos of Stacks of Stuff (industrial theme) by Tom Gally. Also, Outdoor Sleepers from Kawasaki, Japan.
11 October 2005
Via Newsdesigner.com, I learned that the Star Tribune is redesigning both their online and print editions. Hip-hip Hooray. Here's their fancy redesign page summarizing the changes to come.
11 October 2005
One of my favorite writers on the web right now, Greg Storey, has contributed a new article to the the venerable A List Apart, titled "Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)". Essentially just stating the age-old advice for just about any project: define strategy and objective to stay focused.
11 October 2005
10 October 2005
10 October 2005
BBC's in depth coverage of the South Asia Quake.
10 October 2005
I updated the design of the front page last night. Hopefully, it will be more usable as it's no longer a massive list of a hundred-thousand links. Nobody scrolled down to the bottom anyway.
7 October 2005
Google just released a Reader app. It's unique in that it uses a concept of a lens, where you magnify a particular story. You have to see it to understand it. Also, they have some useful short-cut keys for navigation through the list using only the keyboard.
7 October 2005
Placeopedia. Connects Wikipedia articles with their locations.
7 October 2005

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible. "The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true. [...] The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: 'We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.'" The title of the new publication: The Gift of Scripture.

5 October 2005
A Swedish hunter gets knocked unconcious after his son shoots a flying Canadian Goose which fell onto his head.
5 October 2005
Fad.tastic: a "multi-author web design community commenting on the current trends from the web design world."
4 October 2005
The much-rumored content of the joint Google/Sun announcement today was... yawn... pretty cool, I guess: Google will distribute Java. Whoop-di-doo.
4 October 2005
Google and Sun are going to release a statement today regarding a "joint effort". What will this be? Internet News is thinking it could be "Google Office" based on StarOffice and OpenOffice to compete with MS Office.
4 October 2005
3 October 2005
Here's a cool diagramming tool: Visual Thought. It does Entity Relationship (ER) modeling, so it's perfect for some of the stuff I need to do for school.
3 October 2005
OJ Simpson recently made an appearance in LA signing autographs at a Halloween show. Now, I don't know much about personal marketing, or crafting a public image, but this seems a bit odd, doesn't it?
3 October 2005
A technology that I haven't yet used, but desparately want to find the time to work with is Ruby on Rails. Targeting this framework is a new IDE called RadRails. It seems to be generating a lot of interest. The editor is based on Eclipse, and currently doesn't have all that many Ruby-on-Rails-based features. I'll give them a break though--they've only been doing development for 12 days!
3 October 2005

Zoho Writer. Is it just me, or has there been a flurry of office-type AJAX apps released recently? Although I think AJAX is sweet, and these office apps are cool, how useful are they-- really? Anyway, here's another one to add to the mix: Zoho Writer.

3 October 2005

Writeboard was released today by 37signals.

3 October 2005
29 September 2005
29 September 2005

elfURL. A new site that makes long URLs short I found is called elfURL. It's essentially the same thing as tinyURL, but includes a few new features. They claim that their URLs will never expire. Oh, and they offer some concept of statistics for links in their database. I'm not sure how useful that will be, but you gotta love their motto: "Statistics lie, elves never do."

29 September 2005
29 September 2005
29 September 2005

Some clever uses of technology just make me smile. Like Eric Meyer's standards-based slideshow system: S5. Particularly interesting to me is the simplicity of design, that it's standards-based, and accessible. It uses XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript and does a great job having highly semantic markup for the slides. Beautiful. Check out the introductory slideshow. Just use it like you would a Power Point presentation (space, down-arrow, right arrow, return, click, etc...).

29 September 2005

There's been a ton of new AJAX applications released recently, and I expect to only see the number of these increase. Here's one: Writely -- a web-based word processor that allows secure collaboration. And if you have a blog on Blogger, you can post there directly.

28 September 2005
A robot created by the Chileans and named "Arturito" which can detect stuff up to 50 meters below the earth's surface was used to find 600 barrels of loot on Crusoe island. This is roughly equivilant to 10 billian dollars. "The stash includes 10 papal rings and original gold statues from the Incan empire."
28 September 2005
Liquid Sculpture: A site dedicated to artistic photographs of drops, splashes, and liquids. Via Coudal.
27 September 2005
27 September 2005
A friend from work sent this link: Caring for Your Introvert. Good quick read. I've always thought I'm an introvert, but a recent Myers-Briggs test confirmed that I'm slightly extroverted. I'm still figuring myself out.
26 September 2005
Our friends Matt and Chloe just started a pair of blogs, one for their personal life, and one for Chloe's art. I added them to the Syndicated Feeds section and you can see a summary of the latest feeds for their blogs here and here.
26 September 2005
Check this out: The Patently Absurd Archive--an archive of (real) wacky US patented inventions. My personal favorites, Leaf Chaps, and Sunburn Cowboy. Shout-out to Dad for this gem!
26 September 2005
I just installed a new shell pack called Vista Inspirat. This is by far the best shell replacement I've used for Windows. This screen shot sums it up nicely. Note, the widgets at the top are from ObjectDock.
26 September 2005
I found this cool little app called ObjectDock yesterday, and installed it. It's actually pretty useful. I tend to get mesmorized by little bubbly, zoom in/out things, so I'm a fan. Here's a screen shot.
25 September 2005
Jacob and Sonja Broten just produced Evangeline Mattea, born at 8:55 PM on September 17th (7 pounds, 10 ounces). Congratulations guys! Also, Jacob just posted some pictures here.
23 September 2005

Reindeer Run 2005. Registration is now open for the Reindeer Run 2005 in Minneapolis. The race is December 3rd at Lake Harriet. Mandy, Chloe, and I ran it last year and it was a blast. I'm extremely bummed that I won't be able to run it this year--I've got graduate school classes all day.

22 September 2005
I just updated the Syndicated Feeds section. I removed a number of feeds and simplified it to just my friends, and a few blogs. The way I have the script set up, it caches feeds every hour. If no one has visited the page within the last hour, and you visit the page, the script will go out and fetch all the RSS feeds, cache them, and format them for display. Previously, I had something like 15 feeds configured, which would make the fetching process last about 20-30 seconds. With a reduced set of feeds, it should be more responsive.
22 September 2005
Good site I just found via delicious: Web Developer's Handbook. Very useful.
22 September 2005
Last night, Slashdot finally moved to a CSS-driven layout. Congratulations! It's about time.
22 September 2005
Here's an interesting site that suggests what book to read next. If you enter a book and author that you like, it will spit out a list of recommendations. Here's the result for "Jayber Crow".
22 September 2005
Hurricane Rita's barometric pressure near the eye of the storm has reached 897 millibars--the third most intense storm in history--as Texans flee.
21 September 2005

Well, as you can probably see, I redesigned the site. This is something I've been working on for a while, but I thought it was time to pull the trigger.

19 September 2005
This is really funny. Helvetica vs. Arial. "Move your Helvetica character left and right with the mouse, beat Arial by jumping on it using the mouse button." "Take the role of Helvetica, and let Arial know we don't need its type around here."
19 September 2005
An Internet Explorer developer toolbar was announced and released at PDC on Friday. I downloaded it an installed it. Alrhough I don't use IE, I do make sure that designs I work on, display correctly in it. This seems like the kind of thing that should have been released a long time ago.
19 September 2005
Our friends Rob and Jenny sent me a note yesterday that they were trying to get to this site (jayber.org), but accidently left out the "y" and typed jaber.org instead. Check it out. My favorite parts: 1) the window title says, "Hello world wide web"; and 2) the floating windows in the photo album. What a gem of a find!
19 September 2005
Let's just hope that North Korea is sincere when they said today that they are pledging to drop their nuclear program.
18 September 2005
Paragraph. A sort of mental fitness club for writers in NYC.
14 September 2005
Gaza is off to a bad start as it's "on the verge of anarchy" following Israel's withdrawal as "rifle-brandishing militants" parade around wrecking stuff.
14 September 2005
Well, it's not everyday you can say that your site is the number one ranking in Google for "Burrito Bandit". Now I can.
14 September 2005
Dr. Grammar's Frequently Asked Questions
14 September 2005
Google Blog Search Released today. Via Kottke, via Waxy and Slashdot.
13 September 2005
13 September 2005
13 September 2005
12 September 2005
Stevie's Little Wonder An interview by Time with Steve Jobs of Apple, on the new iPod Nano. Interesting parts are quotes from Jonathon Ive (leads Apples Industrial Desin group) that give hints in to the Industrial Design that went in to the product, including subtle details like the finish, reveals (contact between surfaces), and raised artifacts on the buttons.
12 September 2005
9 September 2005
Kick procrastination's ass: Run a dash Good idea's from 43 Folders on how to battle that ugly procrastination monster.
9 September 2005
Rubik's Cube Solver /me removes brain, puts on shelf. I'm coasting from here on out baby. No more sleepless nights thinking of Rubik's and riddles.
9 September 2005
What's Large and Where in the US A site listing all the claims to "largest" stuff in the US. I, of course validated the source by making sure that the Worlds Largest Twine Ball Made by One Man (Darwin, MN) was given adequate props.
9 September 2005
Napkin Folding 101 What more is there to say? My day is now complete.
9 September 2005
9 September 2005
Origami Rhino I made like an infinity of those at scout camp.
9 September 2005
Microsoft tries to recruit Eric S. Raymond Sent to me from a co-worker. I needed something funny to laugh at today. Thanks Gary.
9 September 2005
The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager See how popular your name is as a function of time. I know this has been around a while, but it's just so dang cool!
8 September 2005
I just added a new entry to the "Brian" section. It was the first time that Brian was able to put pressure on his right leg and use a walker Jill had sent me an Email update a few weeks ago that somehow got lost. Sorry everyone, it's probably my fault. I don't know what happened.
8 September 2005
First Baptist web site for prospective Minister of Music and Worship applicants This is the church I grew up in. My dad is chairing the comittee to search for a new worship pastor.
8 September 2005
Lakview Inn, Willmar MN My Dad just finished this site and put it online.
8 September 2005
Jason Garren in NYC My cousin Diana's husband Jason recently was hired as an intern for a production company (not sure which one) in NYC that makes shows for Bravo and small independent films. It seems like a great experience, but will require him to be away from family for 2.5 months. This website has family pictures that will be updated while he's gone.
7 September 2005
Apple - iPod nano Just released today. How sexy. I need to get one of these for my wife. Shhhh... don't tell her.
7 September 2005
6 September 2005
QOOP flickr Photo Printer. Now, you can print your Flickr photos directly to a perfect-bound book! $15.99 for 168 photos. Not bad considering that if you printed 168 photos at Walmart for $0.18 each, you'd be spending $30.24, and that's without a photo album to hold them.
6 September 2005
More Northwoods Triathlon Photos. I just added 24 more that were taken by my Dad. You can view the entire slideshow here.
6 September 2005
Chief Justice Rehnquist has died. October 1, 1924 - September 3, 2005. He was 80.
6 September 2005
Was Katrina Intelligent Design?. From John Piper, in response to NPR's Daniel Schorr's comments that if President Bush had correctly reflected his position on intelligent design and Katrina was the result of intelligent design, then "the designer has something to answer for."
2 September 2005
A Weblog Entry About Weblog Entries. This is why I have a mix of blog posts and residual links, similar to Kottke.
2 September 2005
God, New Orleans, and Repentance. Yesterday, I sent an Email asking my friend JB (Brojac) about his take on this article. He Emailed his response, and posted an entry to his blog.
1 September 2005
Looting chaos hits New Orleans relief effort. "Authorities are trying to evacuate all civilians from New Orleans" and "Tempers also were starting to flare along the rest of the Gulf Coast strip. Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, shot and killed his sister in a row over a bag of ice. Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing home bus and a truck carrying medical supplies for a hospital."
1 September 2005
1,000 killed as Baghdad pilgrims panic. "Up to 1,000 people were crushed to death or drowned after a rumour that a suicide bomber was about to detonate his explosives spread panic through a procession of one million Shia pilgrims in Baghdad yesterday."
31 August 2005
31 August 2005

I just added a Syndicated Feeds section to the site. It's still experimental and I'm in the process of working out a few functional and usability issues, but read on for more technical description of the script, and what syndicated feeds are in particular.

30 August 2005
Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off!. So, I know this is all old news, but I ran across this article that Wired published yesterday about the recent aquisition of Flickr by Yahoo and the Flickr users that aren't happy.
29 August 2005
Why This Band Plays On. Having recently attended "The Festival for Beatles Fans" in Chicago a few weeks ago, I was astonished by this very question: why the Beatles are still so popular. Mikal Gilmore from NY Times summarizes.
29 August 2005
29 August 2005
Hurricane set to lash New Orleans. "New Orleans may never be the same."
24 August 2005
23 August 2005
Google Talk just released. I just downloaded it, but don't have any friends to talk to. Anyone want to be my friend?
23 August 2005
Children Behind Bars: A Photo Look at a Juvenile Detention Center. My wife Mandy has worked as a chaplin for a Juvenile Detention Center and as a Social Worker for a halfway house for troubled-teens (most of them on their way in or out of jail). The stories told by Time are very similar to the stories Mandy has shared with me. How to discipline teens, and get them the help they really need, is a complicated and important issue. More Time photo essays here.
22 August 2005
22 August 2005
New version of Google Desktop. Now it's got a side bar mode. Also, there has been speculation of an Instant Messaging client from Google that may be coming out soon as well. I think it's a bit fishy that GDS out of the box has an option for searching through chat logs, but it's disabled by default. Hmmmm....
20 August 2005
16 August 2005
16 August 2005
152 feared dead in Venezuelan air crash. The pilot radioed before the crash, saying first one engine had failed, then both had failed.
15 August 2005
Oral Histories From Sept. 11. Compiled by the New York Fire Department and published by The New York Times.
15 August 2005
Viewing Color Code: A Color Portrait of the English Language. Each noun is color-coded based on a Google Image search of that noun. You can search around by meaning, or by color.
15 August 2005
Historic home price increases. Midwest stats: home values climbed 12.1 percent during the last 12 months to $167,800. The national median price is now $208,300.
15 August 2005
15 August 2005
Phil Mickelson wins PGA Championship. "Phil Mickelson delivered another dramatic finish in a major on Monday, flopping a chip out of deep rough to 2 feet for a birdie on the final hole and a one-shot victory in the PGA Championship."
15 August 2005
The Aug. 22 issue of The New Yorker, due out Monday, will contain ads only from Target Corporation. This is the first time in 80 years that the New Yorker has done this. "Target [however,] has been a sole sponsor before of issues of magazines, among them People."
15 August 2005
Less-Threatening Islamist Groups.. A list by McSweeny's contributing writer, Chris Wilkinson. Some of my favorites: "Hamas and Garfunkel", "Gene Loves Hezbollah", "Balsamic Jihad", and "Weird Al Qaeda"
14 August 2005
Picasso on Costco. What's next? Caskets and Yellow Diamond Rings? Oh wait, they've already done that.
14 August 2005
Greece investigates plane crash. "An investigation has begun into Greece's worst ever air crash, in which all 121 people on board a Cypriot airliner died."
14 August 2005
14 August 2005
ELCA Rejects Ordination of Homosexuals. "Delegates to the national meeting voted Friday to remain unified despite their differences over homosexuality, and voted against the ordination of homosexuals in the ELCA."
12 August 2005
Donald Weber, Ukraine (2005). The Underclass and Its Bosses
12 August 2005
12 August 2005
12 August 2005
Yarnzilla. Freakonomics T. This is quite possibly the nerdiest piece of clothing on the planet.
12 August 2005
Nurse Recalls Famous Times Square Kiss. On the famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse symbolizing the end of WWII. Unfortunately, no one knows who the sailor was. More than 20 men that have come forward saying they were the sailor. Edith Cullen Shain (the nurse) says, "'There were so many people kissing,' she said, 'I think they all believe they are right.'"
12 August 2005
Napoleon Dynamite Talking Toys. Numero Uno on my birthday list.
10 August 2005
HousingMaps. Dang dude. Downright slickety!
9 August 2005
Those crazy Olson's. are at it again. Ben, and Colin.
9 August 2005
US singer Cohn shot by carjacker. After he made the hit "Walking in Memphis", he was declared to be immortal. But surviving a shot to the head? Dang, I guess it is true.
9 August 2005
9 August 2005
Monson Wedding Photos from this last weekend.. Taken by my buddy P.O. and his wife, Heather.
9 August 2005
9 August 2005
8 August 2005
Calculator Heaven. Props to my friend, Curt M. for sending me this one.
8 August 2005
3 August 2005
2 August 2005
2 August 2005
Passengers, crew escape blazing plane. Amazing that all 309 survived.
2 August 2005
Air France jet burns after skidding off Toronto runway. More than 200 people were on board.
2 August 2005
2 August 2005
1 August 2005
50 Coolest Websites 2005 - TIME.com. I can't actually figure out when in 2005 this was published. Interesting nevertheless.
1 August 2005
NASA Grounds Shuttle Fleet. "Until they can eliminate the hazard posed by debris falling off the space shuttle, NASA officials halt further flights."
1 August 2005
Twins say Hunter broke ankle bone. He'll be on crutches for 3-4 weeks and may miss the rest of the season.
1 August 2005
First smokeless cigarette to go on sale. "The cigarette has been cleared for commercial release and should be on sale early next year."
1 August 2005
1 August 2005
1 August 2005
1 August 2005
29 July 2005
Beautiful Interfaces with CSS. God bless Douglas Bowman.
21 July 2005
21 July 2005

Things are going to be quiet around here for the next week. This afternoon, I'm leaving for Washington state to spend a few days camping and hiking around Mt. Rainier, and another few days at Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Mt. St. Helens.

21 July 2005
Joel Osteen's church (Lakewood) surpasses 30,000 worshippers a week.. The church is growing so fast, it just moved in to the old Houston Rockets stadium (Compaq Center) with a capacity of 16,000.
21 July 2005
Hey, not bad, although it's got a little bit of a "too cool for school" attitude.
21 July 2005
"Four 'explosions or attempts at explosions' reported on three London subway stations and a bus, police say."
20 July 2005
My Dad is leaving for this trip tomorrow (Thursday).
20 July 2005
I'm looking forward to part 3 where JD talks about using fractals to compress naturally-ocurring data. JD summarizes this by saying: "briefly, this boils down to trying to produce a fractal that is very close to what you want and optionally storing differences between the fractal and the original. The fractal and the differences will require much less storage than the original data."
20 July 2005
20 July 2005
In honor of the anniversary of the first landing on the moon by man (July 20th, 1969). Tip: zoom in all the way to see what the moon is really made of.
19 July 2005
Evidently the scroll contains a few verses from Leviticus written at "Nachal Arugot, a canyon near the Dead Sea, where Jews hid from the Romans in the second century."
18 July 2005
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold more copies in a day than The Da Vinci Code sold in one year."
18 July 2005
Hey, nice!
15 July 2005
Results from a new study coming out in the July/August issue of Child Development says, "The reasons why girls and boys gravitate toward dolls or trucks may have more to do with genetics for girls and environment for boys [...]"
15 July 2005
It's the end of an era, so to speak.
15 July 2005
More free stock photos.
14 July 2005
Free stock photos.
13 July 2005
"NASA on Wednesday delayed the launch of shuttle Discovery until next week at the earliest, postponing its first human space flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster due to a problem with a fuel sensor."
12 July 2005
Lance Armstrong kicked straight arse today as he recaptured the yellow jersey by swiftly climbing 13.8-miles to the ski station of Courchevel.
12 July 2005
I especially appreciate the ones from Marc Chagall. I have a print of one of his paintings (The Birthday) in my dining room.
12 July 2005
Lists the open source projects that the BBC has initiated and managed.
11 July 2005
Logos of metro stations from around the world.
11 July 2005
Its invite-only beta is finished and Odeo is now open to the public.
11 July 2005
"Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together." Some of these look downright scary. Cool nevertheless.
8 July 2005
A Quiz. Lately, I've been going back to my purist roots (catalyst: The Helvetica Meditations), and have been working on fine-tuning my typographic sensibilities. I'm embarrased to admit that I scored 9/10.