Alkahest

It’s things like this that embarrass me when I tell someone I’m from Louisiana.  The Louisiana House has voted overwhelmingly to pass the Louisiana Science Education Act which allows science teachers to use supplemental materials when teaching controversial subjects.  For those who haven’t been there, in Louisiana, controversial subjects include: evolution, global warming, Keplerian astronomy [...]

A few years ago, I participated in a six month program to train leaders in information technology. I learned a fair amount, perhaps enough to be disillusioned, and ever since the program, I can’t help but look at organizations in terms of their leadership. Case in point, the grapevine of ex-employees from my former [...]

Over vacation, I managed to convince K that we should get a new computer.  Our old one was bought just after I started my last new job, so… February 2001?  For most things, it worked pretty well: email, word processing and spreadsheets, etc were fine.  It didn’t hurt that we were running Linux, so there [...]

Testing, testing, is this thing on?  “My fellow Americans. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Er, wait, sorry - wrong decade.
Sorry for the lack of posting for the past few weeks.  K and I were out in Yellowstone and just got back last [...]

I’ve had the Sony Reader now for about a week.  In that time, I’ve taken it on a plane trip, read three full books, multiple days worth of the NY Times and I’m in the middle of two books right now.  Observations so far:

The electronic paper is very readable.  On my plane trip, I must [...]

About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, [...]

Yesterday, I bought a Sony Reader - the electronic book reader that uses E Ink’s electronic paper.  The electronic paper display on the reader is very nice.  It uses encapsulated white and black pigments that can be brought to the surface of the page.  The only power consumption involved happens when you make a change.  [...]

Thanks to Luis, I find out last week that Tracks 1.5 has been released.  Tracks is the implementation of the  “getting things done” methodology which I prefer.  1.5 is pretty nice.  In particular, I look forward to hiding actions until a particular date.  In the past, I’ve wanted to track a todo some six months [...]

One advantage of being in IT is that you often at least hear of cool things before other people do. You may or may not choose to adopt them, but at least you’ve got a choice. Thanks to Mr. Icon, I got an early gmail account, firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Great, unfortunately, I don’t have [...]

For as long as I can remember, any time I spent more than an hour or so walking (or hiking), my legs and feet have felt sore and tired.  Never having been very athletic, I assumed that I was out of shape or needed to exercise more.  But even with as much exercise as I’ve [...]