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somethingchanged:

Amazing.

I’m very excited to read this. What a strange cover, though…

sciencesalad:

keyholez:

The wife made an excellent, excellent point. Apple’s newly announced “social network for music” is called Ping. The Microsoft search engine everyone uses instead of Google (which no one uses anymore because it sucks in comparison lololol j/k) is called Bing.

?????

Also, ping is already a computer thing: in nerd land, you can ping your crush’s computer through Unix to see if they are live on the network so that you can walk by their office and look at them without having to make excessive creepy excuses to walk by and see if they’re there or not.

In my province of nerd land, we say “ping” interchangeably to mean IM or respond to/query an email thread for an update on something. There’s also Ning, the site for developing your own social network.

Though, not to be mean, I’m not sure what mrs. keyholez’s point was - just that -ing is a (th)ing?

“back2school”

My first year out of college I worked at the university I graduate from, so I was still more of less in the academic rhythm. The summer was quiet. Then, professors and students started to trickle back, leading to a frenzy of activity through the middle of the semester, followed by a winter lull and another peak of activity in the spring.

Since then, I’ve spent a couple of years working in the corporate world, and the academic rhythm that I grew accustomed to over seventeen (!) years has more or less faded away. 

Observing the whole back-to-school phenomenon as a nonparticipant feels weird. It’s remarkably commercial; “school” is almost an afterthought.

ebooks

A few weeks ago, when I visited Los Angeles, one of my LA friends gave me his Kindle 2. I’ve used it on and off since then. Here are my initial impressions. 

The device. The Kindle itself is pretty awesome - light, easy to use, and rarely requiring a charge. 

The ebook market. On the plus side, new books are generally cheaper on the Kindle, and of course you don’t have to tote hardbacks around. On the other hand, as someone pointed out on Tumblr (apologies, I forget who it was), there’s no market for used e-books. For those of us who buy a ton of books on the secondary market, this is a significant drawback. 

I’m surprised as a result of this that publishers didn’t embrace ebooks much more quickly. They can make a lot more money with a lot less overhead, scaling their sales without actually having to print books. Maybe piracy is a workaround to the absence of the secondary book market, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of ebook piracy.

Also, while there may be a way to borrow e-books from the library, I haven’t yet figured it out. My library-to-bookstore ratio is very significantly skewed to the library side. 

The intangibles. For a few other reasons, I’m still inclined to bring a “real” book whenever I have plans to read outside my apartment. There’s the obvious issue of theft - no one’s going to steal an Austin Public Library book off a coffee shop table, but someone may be tempted to steal a Kindle. Further, there’s that sense of progress as you more through a paper-based book that hasn’t quite been captured by the Kindle.

My brother as Winnie the Pooh.

guerrilla environmentalism

For some (strange? maybe not in TX) reason, my apartment building doesn’t offer recycling pickup. 

My old office was a short walk from my place, so I’d occasionally bring a big bag of recyclables and dispose of them at work. Nowadays I have a complex commute involving a bus and a bike, so I’ve developed a new recycling system: every couple of weeks, I sneak across the street to one of the offices nearby and deposit my recyclables in their recycling bin. 

As I do this, I often imagine being stopped by one of the office dwellers or a cop driving by. So far, my guerrilla environmentalism has gone undisturbed. 

fattailed:

“Someday, you might build a wood-burning oven — right after you start making your own vinegar, raising honeybees and churning butter with cream from cows you milk.”

—

Embarrassing how many of my food&garden desires are touched on & mocked by this throwaway passage from an NYT article on sourdough pizza crusts.

Sounds more like a horoscope!

My new bike, a 2010 Novara Express.