I love the moments when traveling where you can’t tell what’s part of the foreign culture and what’s just a misunderstanding. At least, I love them afterwards.

( misunderstandings and misadventures )

One of the services that Google Voice provides is telling you via email what it thinks people have said in the voicemails they have left. It's often comically wrong, but rarely as much so as when dealing with voicemail left by my Japanese grandmother. To be fair, she not only has a thick accent, but she has grammatical constructions that ( Read more... )

Saturday afternoon I was betrayed by yams. Well, yams and my own stupidity ( Read more... )

I had fun posting a craigslist ad today that I don't think anyone is going to answer or necessarily even read (not that many people want just two cardboard boxes, apparently, and I can't blame them really). So I'm posting it here to share and to preserve it past the time when CL will delete it.

( the largest Amazon box the world has ever known )

STEP 1: Prepare a talk where you have to cover hours or material in minutes.So, when I finished my thesis defense talk, my committee said, "Wow, that was a really great talk! But you tried to stuff three hours worth of talks into one hour. You somehow succeeded. But don't ever, ever do that again." In an attempt to learn from their advice, I ( Read more... )

How concentratedly oblivious can one person manage to be? I recently set out to find out ( Read more... )

So, H. (my startup co-founder and my partner in crime since 1995) decided to go for a nighttime walk in NYC [1] to see the Apple Flagship Store and the new 27" iMacs, because that's the kind of thing that's of course open 24 hours in NYC. We made it about 20 steps from the front door, down one flight of stairs, before we encountered the enemy ( Read more... )

It’s been a while since I’ve posted! I’ve been really busy, and also sometimes having limited internet access, so I haven’t been online quite as much as I’d like. I have lots to tell, however. Here are a few specific tidbits of what's been up:

• I've spent a lot of time working companionably with friends, often while they were screaming their ( Read more... )

is getting emails that start out like this: "I am in GREAT need of someone who is proficient in sheep brain dissection".

My phone rang this morning, waking me from an incredibly deep sleep. So deep that all I could do was stare at the number on the screen uncomprehendingly and then answer -- half just to make the scary ringing and buzzing noises stop.

Me: (croaking) Hello?
Man: (a bunch of words that go by too quickly for me to fully process them)... on Monster.com ( Read more... )