Today I emailed this photo to Flickr. I had taken it with my cellphone last month while traveling on business. Within minutes, Jogales added a comment which revealed the make of the plane, the airline, and pointed me to a far more interesting picture of this very same plane colliding with another [...]

One of the following five foods is different than the others.
A) Grape Nuts
B) Egg Salad
C) Eggplant
D) Egg Cream
E) Eggroll
Which is it?
The answer is given below, in the inviso-text.

The answer is “any of the above.” Here’s why:
A) The only one which does not contain the word egg.
B) The only one which contains the food in [...]

I’m still working on making artificial yet authentic 17th century vocal music, so I thought I’d provide some MP3 samples to listen to, and give capsule reviews of a few of the different software packages I am using, in particular, Flinger, and Tracktion.
If you haven’t read my previous post about this project, check it out [...]

It is harder for a big company to produce decent software than a small company, as illustrated by this ugly little dialog box:

Why do big companies have trouble making decent software?
1) They have too many employees.
I believe that design and coding should be done by very small teams, and that the same people who code [...]

According to a recent post in the Flickr Blog the ‘favorite’ color of the Flickr community is a warm brownish taupe. The blog points to a nifty application, favcol which computes the average color of all the images on Flickr recently tagged ‘favcol’.
In actuality, that brownish taupe color is what you tend to get [...]

I’ve been a little obsessed with cuckoo clocks for the past few weeks, and here are a few cuckoo-related oddments.
A friend of mine gave me an unwanted cuckoo clock, and I repaired it and hung it on a wall at home. Every time the cuckoo chime goes off, it makes me [...]

I have a peculiar problem with telephones. When ever I pick up a ringing phone, and say “hello,” there is invariably a long pause, and then the other person says, tentatively, “Hello? Is this Jim?.”
It turns out that many people assume that they are listening to a recording when I answer the phone. [...]

Lately, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of customer interaction scripts, you know, those little bits of canned dialog that people who represent large companies are required to say to you.
I contacted my cable broadband provider on Thursday night because my internet connection, which has been increasing flaky the last few months, [...]

This blog is intended to be lighthearted and fun, and it is not normally my policy to fill it with angst and invective. But sometimes a guy has to rant. Today’s rant is directed at lazy programmers. We know who we are.
Computers are labor saving devices, so it is natural that the programming [...]

There’s a drug rep riding up in the elevator with me to Doctor Schott’s office, a pretty young woman in her 20s. I know she’s a drug rep because in addition to a shopping bag with a big box that says Protonix on it, she is carrying a tray with four different Starbucks beverages [...]