We get a lot of junk mail and mail for people who once lived here. Every couple of days or so one of my housemates empties the mailbox onto the dining table. Because we're all messy slobs the pile of unopened unimportant mail has been steadily growing. This is now a problem because it is pretty easy for one of us to miss an important piece of ( Read more... )

On Friday morning I visited the DMV to apply for California state ID. It's almost as useful as a driver license but doesn't permit you to drive. However, they don't make you pass a test of skill to get it. Anyway, I'd made an appointment via the Web a couple of weeks ago and wanted to confirm it before I left home in the morning so I tried looking ( Read more... )

I'd been thinking about putting this argument into words for several days now after discussing the issue with several people recently but this blog entry finally prompted me to actually do it. I'm a big proponent of individual freedoms, generally ranking them higher than other desirable goals like financial security, professional recognition, ( Read more... )

On Wednesday night the local Raging Grannies chapter screened a recent critical documentary about the world's largest retailer. The movie attacked Wal-Mart on several points; while some of these were certainly valid, others came across as purely emotional appeals with no sound reasoning behind them. Here is a breakdown of each accusation and my ( Read more... )

I was playing around with the newly released Google Base yesterday. It's pretty neat but there are some serious flaws, even after they fixed the nasty security hole. The idea behind the system is an excellent one but Google's implementation of it is not up to their usual high standards. I guess they've been forced to lower their traditionally high ( Read more... )

Last night was the annual football game between arch-rivals Stanford and UC Berkeley (known colloquially as "Cal"). After dinner James and I wandered around observing the fans as they left the stadium. It was clear that Stanford had lost, although I didn't realize at the time how badly they'd been beaten. Football really is the American Hockey. We ( Read more... )

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Jiunn-Rong Yeh, a cabinet minister for an economic powerhouse whose existence is formally acknowledged by only the pope and 25 econopolitically insignificant nations, about the history and prospects of his enigmatic country. The story of how this strange situation arose is a uniquely fascinating one ( Read more... )

While interacting with people in an informal setting this weekend I made an observation that I hadn't explicitly realized until now: people + food + trivial activity = good time ( Read more... )

Ever since I was a kid I have been unable to drink plain white cow milk without suffering from a powerful urge to throw up. I'm not lactose intolerant because if I add a strong flavour to the milk I can drink it with no ill-effects. So for years I drank chocolate milk to get the calcium that it seemed was best absorbed from milk. That's actually ( Read more... )

For the past few years I have watched as Sony continued to flout consumer preferences in favour of pushing it's intellectual property. They avoided open standards like CompactFlash & MMC (and even licensable collaborative ones like Secure Digital) in favour of their home-grown Memory Stick technology that had to be licensed from them. As a result, ( Read more... )