OR:

Egad, are we turning into coffee snobs?There is a Caribou Coffee kiosk at a local store, and I stop there often enough that I have their "perks" card (nothing to do with percolators) and a week or two ago it offered a 25% discount on Caribou merchandise. One item I had been considering, but was put off by the price, was a French Press. I'd ( Read more... )

Poll A Tuesday in August?

Last Thursday I was home and had decided on fish for lunch, so oven was heated to temperature, the fish put in to bake, and a timer set. Well before the timer was to go off, I heard a series of beeps. They then repeated. Uh oh. Something wasn't right. I went to investigate and the oven's display showed an error code rather than a time. I stopped ( Read more... )

Steampunk. Vinyl. Tubes ( Read more... )

I was 10 years old when Star Wars (just Star Wars, there wasn't a need to add more name or a number to it then) came out. I did not go see it. I did hear about it, ad nauseum since. By 1978, even not having seen it, I was well and truly sick of it. I did not watch the now infamous Holiday Special, though evidently perhaps it would have been ( Read more... )

Sometime in the 1970s the family got a dog, a very young puppy at the time. She wound up named Tippy from the white tip on the end of her otherwise black tail. We didn't ask about the exact date of birth (or whelp, if you must, but we never got that specific about it). Given the n-day old puppies and the day of getting her, we figured that 2 ( Read more... )

Sometime last year I bought a fancy bluetooth-enabled LED bulb (name: iSuperBlue) that could be controlled from a phone. It's one of those good ideas that doesn't quite work, at least not yet. The idea is neat: An LED bulb that be controlled somewhat remotely by a device you're likely to have with you anyway. The color can be changed. The ( Read more... )

My auto insurance, though rather minimal (it's an old car - bought it new in Fall of '97) does include glass coverage. I'm not paying any deductible for the replacement. And they'll have someone come out and take care of things tomorrow morning.

Around 1:40 AM Saturday morning two Arschlocher in a red Subaru (as shown in video, which sadly did not get a plate number, damnit) broke the front passenger side window of my car. They ripped out a GPS, an XM receiver, and a control head for an Icom 2820 dual band transceiver - and some of the mounting hardware for some of that ( Read more... )

Orvan and I have been following the According to Hoyt blog of Sarah Hoyt. A few days ago a guest entry was about "The rise of the Self-Insertion fic[tion]" where the reader of this or that group had to have a protaganist of the same group or else things were too conservative, traditional, triggering, whatever. And Orvan made a comment that he ( Read more... )