Entries in the "General" Category

July 30, 2008
A while back I started tinkering around with Shelfari.com, which is kind of a social networking site for book ...people. Since then, the developers have continued to tweak, improve, and add to the site so that I'm liking it more and more. It has also accumulated more and more...

August 25, 2007
I did a search on Amazon for the GameBoy game "Mario Golf Advance Tour" and got this (click for larger): Top two results: Mario Golf Advance Tour by Nintendo of America Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Agroecosystems (Advances in Agroecology) by Mario Giampietro That second guy has got a good agent....

May 31, 2007
10 years 9 e-mail addresses 8 cell phone numbers 7 computers 6 jobs 5 cars 4 cities 3 houses 2 kids 1 marriage In other words, Geralyn and I are wishing each other a happy 10th wedding anniversary today. Yay! ...

April 5, 2007
While looking at my traffic logs to investigate Sam's Mean Face, I noticed something else amusing. The terms that people use in search engines like Google to find this site often crack me up, mostly for their sublime absurdity. Reading through some of the recent ones, I noticed that many...

April 3, 2007
So this is kind of weird. I was poking around in my traffic logs today when I noticed that I was getting a number of referrals from search engines for the phrase "mean face." Curious, I typed it into Google Image Search and was mildly surprised that this picture of...

March 15, 2007
So I've finally done something new to boost my geek cred: I installed a build of Linux on one of my computers. I had an old laptop that used to belong to my dad, and since it had an install of Windows 2000 Pro that was flakier than a fresh-baked...

March 13, 2007
My sister Shawn has recently done two things. One, she (and her husband Brent) moved to London. Two, she started a blog about it called News from the Mews, which takes its name not from cats, but from the style of house they ended up in. Like myself, Shawn and...

January 28, 2007
David asked me in the comments to my Great Gatsby review to talk about the movie Clerks II. This stuck me as a sufficiently bizarre juxtaposition that I'd just make a whole post about it. And I'm probably going to have to disappoint him on Clerks II, too. There...

December 28, 2006
I've written before about how I periodically suffer from gout, and I've had another recent flare-up. The short definition of gout is that it's a condition brought when a person has too much uric acid in his blood so that crystals build up in certain joints, causing massive swelling, hobbling,...

December 16, 2006
4:25 a.m,. contractions less than 10 minutes apart, we're headed for the hospital. Wish us luck!...

December 14, 2006
I've been poking around the directories at BlogExplosion.com in the last few days, looking for new stuff to add to my RSS reader. I've found some really top notch stuff there, but after looking through probably a couple hundred blogs or so I'm also struck by how many of them...

December 1, 2006
The running joke about the weather in this part of the country is that if you don't like it, wait a minute. And it's true, as these two date-stamped pictures of Sam playing in our back yard can tell you: From 70º to 25º in less than 3 days is...

November 30, 2006
As I mentioned in the last pregnancy related update, the act of gestation has lost some of its intensity this time around given that we've been through it before. We're no longer desperately trying to cram baby-related information into our fevered minds and thanks to the survival of Sam's nursery...

November 24, 2006
A while back I mentioned a photography contest that I entered and in which I won second prize. In addition to a cash prize, the winning photographs were to be published in an issue of a local magazine later that month. That issue arrived in our mailbox last Wednesday and...

November 23, 2006
Today is Thanksgiving here in the States, and I hope you all are getting a break from work or school to enjoy yourselves and devouring obscene quantities of oven roasted fowl. For the first time in a while Ger, Sam, and I will be able to spend the holiday surrounded...

October 19, 2006
It occurs to me that since announcing Ger's pregnancy a while back I haven't really talked about it much. This may seem kind of weird, since I wrote about Ger's first pregnancy every week leading up to Samantha's birth. I also obsessively read books, scoured websites, went to classes on...

August 12, 2006
One of the cool things about moving to a new house is that you uncover neat stuff you had long ago crammed into some cardboard box and forgot that you even had. Sometimes that stuff turns out to be real treasures, like original artwork from one of the creators of...

July 8, 2006
Family Room You are in the family room on the main floor of the house, having just moved into your new place earlier that day. There are boxes and furniture everywhere. A couch sits haphazardly in the corner. >SCORE You are 8% moved in out of a possible 100%....

June 22, 2006
Actually, no. And not just no, but hell no. What is wrong with the world such that something like the Daddle is allowed? I mean, I love giving Sam piggy back rides, but that's beyond the pale. She may be able to ride me around and treat me like any...

May 31, 2006
Geralyn and I have been married for 9 frickin' years today! I only say "frickin'" because it doesn't seem that long ago that I was a starving grad school student mooching off her and her parents for free food and laundry service. Which, come to think of it, I've been...

March 30, 2006
There's a short article on The Job Blog about how one job seeker's new gig was torpedoed by her personal blog. Apparently after a job interview the prospective employer Googled this person and read something that was awful enough to curl their toes and make them drop-kick the blogger from...

March 20, 2006
As someone on another board said, we've weathered their support for armor-piercing bullets and assault rifles, but this is really going too far: I mean, are they being hunted for sport, or shot from a catapult like big blue skeet? The mind boggles....

March 10, 2006
MADIGAN - Harold J., 70, passed away on Thursday, March 9th. Harold was born on New Year's Eve, 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He attended Fordham University where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics. Harold served in the U.S. Army Armored Division as a Tank Commander. After...

February 10, 2006
When I hear about a new book I want to read, I often add it to my Amazon.com wishlist. I was just looking through said wishlist and noticed what a wide, weird array of things are on there: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by...

February 2, 2006
For like the last week I've had two songs stuck in my head. The first is "When the Children Cry" from 80s hairband White Lion. Probably because of VH1's recent "I Love the 80s" marathon where the song was featured on a glamrock ballad compilation at every commercial break. The...

January 1, 2006
Happy New Year. Another year gone by and another bunch of books read. Here's some fun statistics: Books read (or heard on audiobook): 61, or about 1.2 per week on average    Paper books: 15    Audio books: 46 Nonfiction books: 16 Fiction books: 45    Classics: 9    Fantasy: 15    Horror: 6    Sci-Fi:...

October 20, 2005
This is quite possibly the most absurd and comically pointless article I've ever seen. It pretty much speaks for itself: Act now to minimise impact of bird flu on business Companies should take practical steps to minimise the impact of any potential bird flu pandemic on their business, analysts have...

August 25, 2005
Ohio's News Channel 5: There are 490 female students at Timken High School, and 65 are pregnant, according to a recent report in the Canton Repository. The article reported that some would say that movies, TV, videogames, lazy parents and lax discipline may all be to blame. School officials are...

August 24, 2005
Amazon.com has started offering a service called Amazon Shorts where you can download short stories for just $0.49 each. It's a pretty cool idea made better (for consumers, anyway) by the fact that it comes with absolutely no digital rights management whatsoever. You can read an HTML version of your...

August 18, 2005
Man, I thought I was a fan of Chipotle, the quasi-fast-food restaurant that specializes in fantabulous burritos the size of your head. I eat there at least once a week (and on occasion, more often), I'm in bliss every time I scarf down one of their massive offerings, and...

August 16, 2005
So as an obedient fan should, I picked up the new The Simpsons Season 6 DVD set today. I love the show and based on the first disk that I watched tonight the DVD content is still top notch. They once again have commentaries for every episode, along with tons...

July 13, 2005
I just completed my registration for the San Diego Comic-Con to be held this weekend. I'm actually only going one day, Saturday, but I'm going by myself --sans Sam and Ger as was agreed upon last month as a belated Father's Day gift. I know what you're thinking: "NNNNEEEERRRDDSS!" You're...

June 13, 2005
Ger and I finally got to go see Revenge of the Sith last night (movies are quite a bit more expensive when you have to hire a baby sitter). It's been discussed to death all over the 'net by this point, so I won't say much. Except that the Separatists...

June 2, 2005
It's kind of old news given that the Indianapolis 500 is over, but I saw an interesting story on Defective Yeti about Danica Patrick, a female racer who ended up finishing up fourth. Or specifically, it's about the comments of another racer, Robby Gordon, who refused to participate because them...

May 31, 2005
Did you know that as of today Geralyn and I have been married for eight years? What's more, we dated for a long time before getting married, so we've actually been a couple for over fourteen years. Before long we'll have been together for over half our entire lives! Let's...

May 27, 2005
Sometimes while driving on the highways in Southern California, traffic comes to a complete halt for no apparent reason. Just cars stacked up as far as I can see. When this happens, I often catch myself hoping that it's because of a wreck, because you can get past a wreck...

May 20, 2005
Hey, everybody, click on the "comments" link below to wish Geralyn a happy birthday! Samantha doesn't speak English and I'm still in L.A. at the moment....

April 27, 2005
I'm not normally a big fan of blog memes, but I saw one on The Zero Boss (by way of Aurorealis.com) that I couldn't resist: "What are ten stupid things you did as a kid?" I'm sure my family will gleefully supply additional stories, but here's ten I actually remember...

April 5, 2005
Wow. This is amazingly cool: Google Maps has upgraded their mapping/directions service to include satellite photos. So you can enter an address in and see a photograph of the location. You can then zoom in, zoom out, or drag the map around to see surrounding areas. Astounding. The little red...

March 5, 2005
I consider myself a modest number of talented things, but a handyman is not among them. This is somewhat odd given that I apparently possess enough mechanical know-how to score around the 90th percentile on the Bennett Mechanical Aptitude test whenever I take it. But while I know which direction...

January 18, 2005
I've done a lot of focus groups in my past. You know: those meetings when you get a bunch of people in a room and start jotting down their thoughts on a flip chart. It's kind of a poor man's survey, but it can be quite useful if directed, controlled,...

January 13, 2005
I have a few self-imposed rules about what I post on this blog. I don't post about politics, I keep the language relatively clean, and I try not to just post a link to something else without providing some kind of commentary of my own. These rules are flexible and...

December 31, 2004
Happy New Year to everyone. This year, for the first time I can remember, we're staying home for New Year's Eve. We can't exactly pack Sam up and take her out with us, and we waited too long to look for a sitter. It's just as well. I'm already tired....

December 29, 2004
Well, okay I'm not. I'm actually sitting on the living room floor, but I could be doing it from the bathroom or just about any other room in the house. My sister and brother-in-law gave me a wireless router for Christmas and I got it up and running last night....

December 27, 2004
We're back from our Christmas trip to St. Louis. I'm going to write up a detailed account, but I need a half day to recharge first. I will say, though, that it was freaking COLD in St. Louis. It was the kind of cold that when you get out of...

December 22, 2004
Yep, this year we became one of those families that puts pictures of its kid on its Christmas Cards. It's a bizarre insanity to which we were not immune, and we make no apologies: Click for a larger version. Hope you have a great holiday season! ...

December 21, 2004
Let's face it, Santa can be kind of creepy, especially for kids. He's a loud, strange man with a partially obscured face. He wants you to sit on his lap and tell him secrets. He may reek of gin. I guess that's why this photo gallery cracks me up so...

December 14, 2004
I had a light lunch, so around mid-afternoon today I wanted a snack. Specifically, I wanted a bag of Doritos. Mmmm... Crunchy, salty, fake-cheese smelling, and covered in that orange powder. Just so. With this in mind, I embarked on a quest that turned out to be more epic and...

December 3, 2004
As I've mentioned before, Ger, Sam, and I pass by some great views on our walks around our neighborhood. Part of it is up on a hill overlooking this: This is my first panoramic shot, so make sure you scroll to the right to see it all. If you don't...

November 5, 2004
Hey, just wanted to tell the Internet some good news: My sister, who lives in Houston Texas and recently graduated from Law School, just found out that she passed the Bar! Woo! On her first try, too, which is not as common as you might think. And don't think that,...

November 5, 2004
Presenting the best thing in the history of anything. I mean, I have a thing about llamas so you know I'm going to love it, but I dare you to watch this thing without smiling. Go on, I dare you. ...

October 30, 2004
This was interesting. It lists the ten most lucrative fictional characters. They are: Mickey Mouse & Friends Winnie the Pooh & Friends Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings Harry Potter Nemo, Finding Nemo Yu-Gi-Oh SpongeBob SquarePants Spider-Man Wolverine, X-Men Pikachu, Pokémon Not too surprising. Near misses include Homer Simpson,...

October 28, 2004
I normally leave politics off this blog, but this article from thestranger.com is an absolute riot. It is also terrible. But in a funny way. It's a do-it-yourself guide to this year's scariest Halloween costumes, like this one: Arrested Protester Capture the rebel spirit of New York City during the...

October 26, 2004
Finally catching up on photos. I've added the ones Geralyn took of Jenny Seliga's wedding out at The Farm (a bit of vacation land in rural Missouri owned by Ger's family). [Editor's Note: Removed the photos to free up some space. e-mail me if you want them.] I'll point you...

October 21, 2004
Ger: Has that been like that all day? Me: What? Ger: Your tee shirt is on inside out. Me: Well, whatcha gonna do? Ger: Fix it? Me: Meh....

October 8, 2004
HIM: Isn't there's a correlation between intelligence and how socially graceful people are? So if you're really smart, you don't get along with people well? ME: No. HIM: What, you don't think that's true? Why not? ME: It sounds too much like something stupid people would say just to make...

October 5, 2004
HER: Thanks for calling Islands! How may I help you? ME: Yeah, I'd like to place a carry out order. HER: What can I get you? ME: Uh, a Big Wave Burger, medium well. HER: Would you like cheese on that? ME: No thanks. HER: How about bacon? ME: No....

September 28, 2004
Apparently, Jon Stewart recently appeared on Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor, a right-leaning talk show on FOX News. For those of you who don't know, Stewart's Jon Stewart Presents Jon Stewart's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are more than a bit left leaning, and it airs on a youth-oriented...

September 21, 2004
I finished Ayne Rand's The Fountainhead a few days ago. Reading the book didn't change my life, though, so I can only conclude that I didn't do it right. I checked all my paradigms when I was finished and not a one of them had shifted around. I do, however,...

September 14, 2004
This website is one year old today. I started the site for two basic reasons. First, I wanted to chronicle Ger's pregnancy and Sam's first months for the benefit of the friends and family who live so far away. I wanted them to have news and lots of pictures so...

September 11, 2004
I mentioned the other day about how I got a new computer. I love it, but a little part of me was disappointed that I couldn't afford a nice new monitor to go with it. It may feel like a new computer, but without a new monitor, it didn't look...

September 7, 2004
Hey, if your significant other is playing DOOM 3 in the dark with headphones on, do NOT come into the room and grab him by the shoulder right as he opens a particularly large monster closet. It's likely to give him a FREAKING HEART ATTACK. Ask Geralyn. She knows. ...

September 1, 2004
Someone on a messageboard I read pointed out that MSNBC.com put up a poll on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Dandy! Polls are fun! In fact, we all had a good laugh over this one: The response options they give you seem ...inadequate. In fact, it reminds...

July 27, 2004
Imagine that you had a business that sold oh, let's say plumbing equipment. So if someone has plumbing problems they can just look you up in the phone book. Except you don't want potential customers to be able to do that without first giving you all kinds of personal information...

July 21, 2004
Every time I go to Krispy Kreme I look at the donut conveyor line and joke that I could just put my head under the glaze "waterfall" and hapilly let it flood into my mouth. Apparently, someone there was listening, according to this article. Once the fried dough embodiment of...

July 14, 2004
I've mentioned before how much I love my Apple iPod, and it bears repeating. I'm listening to it now, and one of its best applications has been listening to audiobooks. Between my half hour commute and a visit to the gym, I can listen to an hour and a half...

July 7, 2004
Last weekend Ger, Sam, and I went to the San Diego County Fair. Now, if you'll pardon the pun I'll point out that I'm not that much of a fair person. Rickety rides that are built to be broken down? Pass. Hucksters trying to get me to play rigged games...

July 2, 2004
The people at video game publisher Interplay must really like their job. Enough to work without pay and without hope. The company, based right near where I used to work in Irvine, California, is essentially kaput. They have no money and no future. But according to this article, that hasn't...

July 1, 2004
I must point out that last weekend Geralyn made the best cheesecake ever to exist in the history of man or the dung-flinging apes that he evolved from. Here's photographic evidence: It's got a key lime thing going on with a chocolate brownie crust. Jealous? I'm hungry just thinking about...

June 26, 2004
I noticed this story on BoingBoing.net about the web magazine Fast Company's bizarre linking policy. You know the Internet, right? Built on the concept of hyperlinking and sharing (or at least pointing to) new information? Yeah, FastCompany thinks that's silly. From their "Linking Policy": Due to the large volume of...

June 25, 2004
I don't normally talk politics here. It's just not the sort of thing you do in mixed company. But I have to say that regardless of which side of the fence I were on, I'd still find this new ad by the Bush Campaign utterly insane (I think you can...

June 17, 2004
I used to like Garfield the comic strip cat when I was young. That hardly makes me special, as it seemed every other kid in my school also had a bunch of the books and learned to draw him on our textbook covers (and a few pages, despite our burgeoning...

June 16, 2004
I've posted another short story, this one entitled The House off Route J. It's the second story I wrote for the Great PlanetCrap Writing Experiment, which I'm enjoying quite a bit. One short story a month is about the right pace. That being said, I'm not really sure how much...

June 15, 2004
Yeah, we just had a sizeable earthquake here in San Diego, right off the shore. And there was apparently another one up near L.A. It measured 5.1 on the Rictor scale, which is only moderate. Still, it's pretty freaky to be on the second floor of a 19 floor office...

June 12, 2004
Okay, I'm caught back up on Sewing Oats, with page 17 and page 18 now up. One note here: If you're reading this, you should re-read the lat bit of page 16. I was originally going to have Thomas and Angela chased through some corn fields by an armed attacker,...

June 10, 2004
Okay, I'm back. Sorta. As you can see from the stories below, we've been busy the last couple of weeks. Ger, Sam, and I flew from San Diego to Saint Louis, then drove from St. Louis to Tulsa, then drove back to St. Louis, then drove from St. Louis to...

June 5, 2004
A buddy of mine from graduate school got married this weekend and did me the honor of having me as his best man. The wedding was in Taylorville, Illinois and was the main reason why Ger and I were traveling (we scheduled Sam's christening the day after and a trip...

May 28, 2004
Page 11 of my novel Sewing Oats went up last Wednesday, according to schedule. And page page 12 is up today. And since I'm going to be on vacation all of next week and the following Monday, I've worked ahead and also posted pages 13- 16. Here are all the...

May 24, 2004
Sewing Oats, pag 10 is up. In it, a grown man mocks a little girl. ...

May 21, 2004
Hello, my name is Jamie and I have the gout. When I tell people this, they usually look at me with a mix of pity and disbelief, as if I had just told them that I have brain herpes or face cancer. My favorite thing to do in these cases...

May 21, 2004
Sewing Oats, page 9 is now available for your reading pleasure. Here Thomas and Angela are paired up. Also, Thomas punches a guy. A lot. So, is anyone out there reading this? I plan on finishing this draft regardless, but I'm curious to know if there is anyone checking back...

May 20, 2004
Everyone please wish Geralyn a happy birthday! With Sam still too much of a baby (literally) to party hard, we're keeping it low key this year, but there will be cake (shhh... I haven't told Ger yet) and --GASP-- dinner out at a real restaurant. With cloth napkins at a...

May 19, 2004
Sewing Oats, page 8 is up. The action continues, replete with face crunching, bone snapping violence. And yes, more weeping. I have also posted a second draft of a new short story, Good Deeds. This story contains much less action and weeping, but I still like it. It's about two...

May 18, 2004
As I mentioned earlier, I took a couple of days off from my real job and attended the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this year, freelance writing for GameSpy.com. The show was a stupifying jumble of sensations, but here's 28 things I remember: Just sitting around talking about what games are...

May 17, 2004
Two quick congratulations are in order. First, my sister Shawn went through graduation last week from the University of Houston law school! She's officially a law school graduate, and she's going to sue you if you tick her off. Unfortunately she's not getting much of a break, as she has...

May 17, 2004
Sewing Oats, page 7 is up. It's got action! Weepy little girls! Profanity! ...

May 14, 2004
Sewing Oats, Page 6 is up. All the cool kids are reading it, so you should too. In this bit we finally get into some real action now that things have been set up and characters have been introduced. More face punching coming on Monday with Page 7. ...

May 12, 2004
Here I am at E3 2004 for GameSpy.com. I'll be here covering the show today and tomorrow. At this point I'm just kind of sitting around waiting for the show floor to open so I can go gape and goggle along with everyone else. I should be able to see...

May 11, 2004
This is interesting. According to State Farm, my home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma has two of the deadliest intersections in the whole U.S.A. They are 51st and Memorial and 71st and Memorial. That struck me as very odd, since Tulsa isn't that large a town --certainly not anywhere as large...

May 10, 2004
Since I'm going to be up in Los Angeles on Wednesday covering E3 for GameSpy.com, I went ahead and put up page 4 and then page 5 of Sewing Oats. Better to work ahead than catch up, eh? In these two pages we briefly meet Angela, Thomas's foil and the...

May 7, 2004
Sewing Oats, Page 3 is up. Make with the reading. In today's page, we have the first mention of "magicwerks", which is the element what makes me mention "fantasy" and "gaslamp" (among other things) when people ask me what kind of story this is. But I really didn't want to...

May 5, 2004
The second page of my novel has been posted. It's kind of short, but only because I came upon a natural break in the narration. If you haven't read page 1 yet, do that, too. ...

May 3, 2004
As promised, I've added a Words section to the site and posted the first page of Sewing Oats, the novel I wrote last year as part of National Novel Writing Month. It's only enough for us to meet Thomas, the first of the three main characterers (or "MCs" as those...

May 1, 2004
And now, a few words about words. On the reading side, I'm finally getting my "to be read" pile under control. About a year ago I went nuts and bought books faster than I was reading them. I stopped, and as you can see in the picture below my read...

April 29, 2004
So the other day someone convinced me to check out Friendster.com, which is one of them new-fangled "social network" services. The idea is pretty simple: Fill out a profile that includes your name, a photo or two, and a laundry list of hobbies/interests. Here's a picture of my profile (as...

April 27, 2004
A while back I mentioned that I was thinking of posting, in small pieces, the novel I wrote late last year. It's still tentatively called "Sewing Oats." Several visitors said they'd read it, and I haven't forgotten about it. My unexpected trip to Tulsa just pushed the timeline back a...

April 23, 2004
If I get paid to design a web site, that makes me a professional, right? Maybe not necessarily good at it, but that's not really part of the definition is it? One of the side projects I've been fiddling with at work is the redesign of my department's Intranet page....

April 22, 2004
I try not to just link and run, but this list of really awful metaphores supposedly taken from actual writing exams still has me chuckling. Some of my favorites: The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't. Her eyes were like two brown...

April 21, 2004
Observe: someone has scanned and posted Action Comics #1. For you philistines out there, this is the first appearance of Superman circa 1938. I normally wouldn't link to this kind of thing (copyright violation and all) but I figure this is pretty close to being in the public domain and...

April 7, 2004
Wow. Somebody is good with Photoshop. There's this whole page full of bizzare animal/animal and animal/human amalgams, like this one: There's tons more. Some of it is pretty trippy, but it's guaranteed to entertain. Update: Looks like a lot of those pictures came from Photoshop contests at a place called...

April 1, 2004
Earlier this week I finally started a second draft of the novel I wrote for National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo). I had really intended to start on this a couple of months ago, but you know ...baby and all. It's still called "Sewing Oats", but only because I haven't...

March 31, 2004
I mentioned in Sam's 3/28/04 update that Spencer and Nancy Stang, friends of ours from Graduate School, came to visit us last weekend and brought their 7 month old baby, Carson. We had a great time hanging out, grilling, and comparing babies, but to keep things from being too All...

March 29, 2004
I mentioned a while back that I was giving the web browser Firefox a try as a replacement for Windows Internet Explorer. I've been using it ever since, but wasn't really convinced it was better than IE until the other day when some of the guys at the Quarter to...

March 26, 2004
If you get bitch slapped by Richard Simmons, can you really call yourself a man any more? PHOENIX (Reuters) - Flamboyant fitness guru Richard Simmons was cited by authorities for allegedly slapping a man in an airport who was poking fun at his exercise videos, police said on Thursday. ..."He...

March 25, 2004
TiVo, I think, is the best product I've ever owned. I use it more than any luxury/entertainment product with the possible exception of my computer. This is true even though I really only use two of the little black box's features regularly. I use it to record and pause shows...

March 22, 2004
In response to my discussion of iTunes and my new iPod, Christine mentioned that WalMart.com sells downloadable music for 88 cents per song. That sounded about 11 cents better than iTune's 99 cents per song, so I checked it out. Unfortunately they've decided to cripple the service by only allowing...

March 18, 2004
I wrote yesterday about my experience buying an iPod from the Apple Store. If you haven't already, go read it now, because it kind of sets the tone for this update. I'll wait for you here. Done? Good. As promised, I thought I'd write a bit about my foray into...

March 17, 2004
My current employer has an awesome annual bonus program, and I did well this year. To celebrate, I decided to spend part of it on an overpriced toy, preferably something with blinking lights and the ability to annihilate any money that comes close to it. The gadget I decided on...

March 13, 2004
If I were to start a band, I'd call it "Pavlov's Dog." Our first album would be entitled "Life Outside the Uterus." Or possibly "Nipple Confusion." That's all. ...

March 9, 2004
You learned reading comprehension in school, right? If you went to college, you were most likely tested on it before they let you in. You have to be able to read a passage of text and tell what it means. Analyze it. And if you were taught well, you'll understand...

March 6, 2004
The baby parade continues, with the Lorenzo Thomas Evans as the latest participant. Lorenzo was born on Sunday February 29th to Kevin "Earl" Evans and his wife Marina. Kevin and I are fraternity brothers who went to University of Tulsa together. He was also the best man in my wedding....

March 4, 2004
The other day I noticed something odd in the locker room of my gym. Something besides naked old men with no sense of decency. I noticed a sign that forbid club patrons from taking pictures with those nifty little cel phones with built-in cameras while they are in the locker...

March 3, 2004
Pound for pound, second for second, Family Guy was probably the funniest show I've ever seen. It took a shotgun approach to comedy, scattering jokes like buckshot and hoping that enough of them hit the target. And did they ever. Just thinking about the scene in the Quahog courthouse where...

March 2, 2004
We voted. Did you? ...

February 28, 2004
Remember Sinistar from way back in the mid-eighties? Here's a picture in case your memory fails you or you're too young to be that cool: I was a complete arcade junkie back then, spending more time there than anywhere else but home or school. I knew all the arcade attendants...

February 27, 2004
Everyone please join me in wishing my mom & dad a very happy 38th wedding anniversary. Wow! Okay, I admit: It was yesterday and I forgot until just now. But still --happy happy! I feel like Ger and I have been together a long time at six years (seven come...

February 27, 2004
I doubt we'll ever see an American CEO do something like this. To make with the quoting: Japanese Internet company Softbank Corp. said Friday its president and six other senior executives would forgo part of their pay to take responsibility for the leakage of personal data for over 4 million...

February 24, 2004
This is a riot, but an important public service. It can tell you how Good or Evil a website or passage of text is. To quote: The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a...

February 20, 2004
A friend of mine by the name of Chris Buecheler recently redesigned his website, opting for a more professional look to help his new career since leaving GameSpy. The site is well worth a look, as Chris is a professional web designer, artist, and aspiring writer. The site contains samples...

February 19, 2004
While I was at GameSpy one day our CEO decided that I needed some "project management training" and that I should get some post haste. I acquiesced, pinched my nose, and signed up for a Stephen Covey class on project management. I figured if the company was paying for it,...

February 17, 2004
Last week I mocked the Atkins movement. That isn't to say I mocked the Atkins Diet when followed strictly, but rather the whole "anti carb" movement that suggests that adding "Atkins Approved" foods to their diet will make you loose weight. The whole concept is naive and weird. While poking...

February 14, 2004
After hearing a few horror stories about Very Bad Things taking over Internet Explorer, I decided to try an alternative browser. I've never had any of these kinds of problems myself, as I have the amazing Google Toolbar to kill popups and I never click "yes" when a webpage asks...

February 12, 2004
Or is it the new sugar? At any rate, the Atkins low-carb diet seems to be maturing from its former cult status to more of a mainstream product. Suddenly I'm seeing not only commercials for things like low carb burgers and low carb beer, but Atkins is being turned...

February 3, 2004
Woah, trippy. Check out elgooG. It's fully functional, but you have to type in your search terms backwards. Like "nagidaM eimaJ" It makes my head hurt, but it's a pretty neat feat of programming. ...

February 2, 2004
Maybe it's just that I've long since passed through the social mine fields of adolescence and high school, but it seems to me that the terms "nerd" or "geek" aren't quite as derogatory as they used to be. To be sure, they're still not up there with endorsements like "jock"...

January 24, 2004
A while back, right after I finished reading George Orwell's Animal Farm, I quipped that the novel's message was so apparent that to point it out would be "...akin to opening up the Sunday newspaper circular for Wal-Mart and saying 'See, what the author is trying to tell us here...

January 23, 2004
Let's be honest: despite Geralyn's best efforts, my diet isn't perfect. I have not, however, eaten at McDonald's or its ilk in quite some time. Years, even. That stuff is poison, and I don't see how anyone can not hold themselves responsible for eating too much of it. To remind...

January 22, 2004
I've been reading a lot in the last 6 months. Certainly more than I did during the years I spent obsessed with video and computer games. I track what I read on the Now Reading page for your convenience and sanitation, and as you can see in the pic below...

January 17, 2004
Man, want to waste some time? Check out www.ratemykitten.com. I must have just clicked through a few hundred pictures of kittens, cats, and the occasional blob of unidentifiable fur. The gist of the site is that people submit pictures of their kittens, then you get to rate them from 1...

January 14, 2004
One of my earliest memories involves discovering that the perfection and omniscience of adults --particularly one's parents-- is a brittle ruse. The memory in question involved a huge set of orange and black Encyclopedia Britannica books that my family kept, for some reason, in the hall closet. For those who...

January 9, 2004
For fun, here's a screenshot of my computer desktop at work today. I decided to just snap it when my mind started wandering, as it usually does when I need a break. Click for a bigger version. I like to keep things tidy, but if you look closely you can...

January 6, 2004
I found this link to Johnny Cash Desperado, but With Monkeys on a site called The Big Smoker ("Now including both stuff and things"). It's fantastic and comes to me via Todd's site, and came to him via Joost. ...

January 5, 2004
Forgot to mention this the other day, but Happy 35th (!) wedding anniversary to Joan and Greg, Geralyn's parents. The actual date was January 4th, so I hope they forgive me for posting it a bit late. Congrats!...

January 2, 2004
The annual trifecta of familial special occasions ends with a quick note to say "Happy Anniversary" to my sister Shawn and brother-in-law Brent. I think this is year #11. Zounds. Congrats!...

January 1, 2004
Having parents born only a year and a day apart sure makes their celebrations easy to remember. Happy birthday to dear Mom, who turns 69 today. She was a New Year's baby. Again, wish I could be there, especially since my Dad is still stuck in Houston with the flu....

December 31, 2003
Happy Birthday to my dear Dad, who turns 68 today. Wish I could be there to say it myself instead of just calling, but alas. He's actually spending his birthday stuck in Houston with the flu after visiting my sister and brother-in-law for Christmas and being too sick to fly...

December 30, 2003
Hey, everyone else seems to be listing their favorite things from 2003. Why not me? Best Game: The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker Part of me wants to give this to Skies of Arcadia: Legends, which gave me warmer fuzzies. But the craftsmanship of The Wind Waker can't...

December 28, 2003
My review of Terminator 3: War of the Machines went live on GameSpy.com today. As you'll see if you check that link, I didn't like the game at all. At 1 out of 5 stars, it's the lowest rating I've ever given in a review. I think it deserves it,...

December 25, 2003
Merry Christmas, all! I hope that you and yours are well. Geralyn and I are spending Xmas in California this year instead of going to either Tulsa or St. Louis as we normally do. Ger's parents came over to visit us, though, so we're having a good time. Earlier today...

December 8, 2003
Looking over my last few posts, all of the non-pregnancy ones have been pretty negative. So I decided I should talk about some of the good things in the world. I just recently discovered one such bastion of delight in the form of the Nickelodeon cartoon series Invader Zim. The...

November 30, 2003
We just got back from our Thanksgiving vacation. Ger flew to St. Louis for baby showers (see the pregnancy update below) and I followed on Wednesday. Ger and her parents picked me up at the airport and we drove straight out to their country place called "The Farm". I love...

November 26, 2003
I recently started listening to John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces on CD. So far it's fascinating, due maily to its singular main character, Ignatius J. Reilly. He is an idiot with a huge vocabulary, a severely stupid and beligerant man who spews colorful invictives at everyone he meets...

November 22, 2003
Well, I am now an unpublished novelist. Whee! That's right, tonight I typed the final and 51,152nd word of my first novel, all as part of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. The final word was "gurgle". I like that word. As a reward, I got what I expected:...

November 20, 2003
I spend a lot of time on Internet messageboards and e-mail listservs because I like getting opinions on things like games, books, and politics without having them go through the filters of "professional" media outlets. There's also details and insights on messageboards and e-mails that you only get from people...

November 12, 2003
Last night, for the first time, I stumbled in my march towards finishing my NaNoWriMo project. I had to drive up to Los Angeles and back yesterday and I had to leave the house at 6:00 am to get there in time for a breakfast meeting. I didn't get home...

November 6, 2003
I'm going to run out of cute headlines soon. National Novel Writing Month is progressing well for me. Even though it means getting up at 5:00 am to get in a couple hours' worth of writing each day, I'm having fun and feeling (ever so slightly) proud of the work...

November 3, 2003
Actually, my NaNoWriMo project is coming along better than I had hoped. I'm really starting to like my main characters, and more importantly I'm starting to like writing about them. I'm pretty much at the end of my premeditated material, though, so it's going to be mostly new stuff from...

November 1, 2003
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has started! I'm participating this year, and just got done with my writing session for today. As I said before, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I sait down with trepidation this morning. I had thought about...

October 29, 2003
Thanks to everyone who called or sent an e-mail or instant message expressing concerns about our safety over the last few days. Geralyn and I are both fine and are counting our blessings. The fire that was burning near our house is contained and never really made it close. However,...

October 26, 2003
Apparently, huge chunks of San Diego are ablaze at this moment. Wildfires are gobbling up houses, trees, and even highways as I type this. People have died and property has been burnt to ashes. Several highways are closed, and my plans for driving to the NaNoWriMo kick-off party are toast....

October 21, 2003
My review of Freedom Fighters went up on GameSpy.com today. I loved the game, but thought it was way short. Still, it has some of the best teammate AI I've seen yet, and it's undeniably fun. See the full review for the skinny. Video games aren't the only thing I've...

October 17, 2003
So, after much anticipation, Apple is now offering a Windows-compatible version of their iTunes online music store. For those of you that don't know, it's a program that will allow you to buy, download, and play music from the Internet. It's been out for the Apple operating systems for a...

October 14, 2003
<RANT> I saw something quite charming yesterday. I'm on a e-mail list for fans of an author named Raymond Feist. The author is quite active on the list and is willing to endure both insightful and banal questions about himself and his work. Yesterday a gem came through from a...

October 10, 2003
As promised, I snagged a new GameBoy Advance SP yesterday using some of my birthday proceeds and a few trade-ins. I also got a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I'm loving both. The GBA SP neatly solves the major problem I had with the original --no backlight. So the...

October 8, 2003
Happy birthday to me. I scored a nice dinner (grilled salmon steaks, asperagus, and parmision and herb orzo, mmmm...), cake, some new shirts for work, and a gift certificate to Best Buy. Phat! I do believe I'm going to take my loot and buy a GameBoy Advance SP and a...

October 8, 2003
I feel compelled to comment on the Recall Election results. When I was in grade school, there was a guy who bordered on being too smart for his own good. Let's call him Phillip. Phil loved impressing people. This is fine, really, but tends to be difficult when you're not...

October 7, 2003
Just got back from the polling place for the California Recall Election, which the government was kind enough to put in someone's garage across the street from my house. There was free coffee served from paper cups on a Pottery Barn TV tray. I think the apple pie was still...

October 3, 2003
I have a saying: "I know how we can tell the truth. We'll vote on it!" Like many of the things I say, this is best appreciated when viewed through a lens caked with sarcasm. Why do I bring this up? I was recently reading through the August 2003 issue...

October 3, 2003
Just a few quick news updates for friends and family. First, I noticed that Brent Smith (family) has article appearing in this quarter's Journal of Applied Psychology (unrelated to my rant above). Second, I hear that Gary Hunt (UMSL) and his fiance Jennifer have set June 5th at 2 PM...

October 1, 2003
By December 1 I plan to be a novelist. Oh, not a published novelist, mind you (though technicallly I have authored 3 published, non-fiction books). Today I signed up to take part in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea is pretty simple: Do whatever it takes to write...

September 26, 2003
Quick note: My StarCraft: Ghost fansite has been updated with some new screenshots, art, and miscellaneous information that has come to light on account of the Tokyo Games Show. As I had hoped, StarCraft: Ghost is turning out to be the perfect game to run a fan site for at...

September 25, 2003
I watched the California gubernatorial debates last night, and let me tell you: There has yet to be an hour and a half of better comedy than this. If featured the comedy troupe Schwarzenegger, McClintock, Camejo, Huffington, and Bustamante. Here's how a typical question went: Ordinary Citizen: Hi, my name...

September 23, 2003
For your compulsive clicking needs, we now have some photos of the new house with all our stuff unpacked and neatly stacked about the place. Also, I drove to downtown Los Angeles yesterday, as I ocassionally do for work. I forgot to pick up a parking pass for the Gas...

September 21, 2003
Saw Underworld yesterday. For those of you in a rush, here's a few phrases that I think describe it: Ultra-violent, stylish, exciting, inconsistent, twisty, and goth. For those of you still reading, I thought it was worth seeing, even through I almost didn't go after seeing the litany of bad...

September 18, 2003
I just read a pretty good chapter on training program design. Not something I'm normally interested in, but this was a good chapter by M. Anthony Machin called "Planning, Managing, and Optimizing Transfer of Training." It's in a book called Creating, Implementing, and Managing Effective Training and Development. What I...