Archives by date

You are browsing the site archives by date.

Cover of The Backyard Homestead

Suburban Self-Sufficiency: The Backyard Homestead

I may be moving soon. My new job at NASA (squeeee!) requires a minimum 75-minute commute twice daily, usually in heavy traffic. While I’m okay with the drive itself–having grown up in this area, I have to be–I’m losing too much time. Even with audio books, three hours a day on the road is too much. So I’ve been looking at houses near Goddard. One is a small house […]

My, How Wired Has Fallen

My impression of the last half-dozen issues of Wired: Messy, cramped layout. Colors that clash and don’t add information. Tons of ads. And I mean multiple consecutive pages of just ads.  Very few full pages of content. Many stories have a fearmongering aspect. A good example is the article on Simon Singh, who was sued about his work on pseudoscience. This is portrayed like a Worrying Threat To Science, as though religious nutjobs […]

Screenshot from Swingers

Swingers

Swingers has heart. It’s clear that its main strengths lie in its script and its actors. The rest of the film fades away in comparison. Much like, say, The Big Lebowski. The script contains more memorable lines and sequences than the vast majority of films, and it does so at the expense of a strong, driving story. This is not a complaint; Swingers is about a man caught in an awkward time in his life. It’s […]

© Judd Winick

The Big Adventures of Barry Ween

A recommendation from the three guys at iFanboy means a lot to me. They know how to review and recommend a comic book. So on a whim, and after a stratospherically high recommendation from Ron, I bought The Big Book of Barry Ween. It’s an independent comic about a boy genius and the adventures he goes on. Thankfully, hilarity really does ensue. Cliched set up; hilarious execution. Judd Winick’s writing is consistently funny and his […]

Fly Me to the Moon

Fly Me to the Moon

I’m several weeks into my new job at NASA. I’m elated and frightened. I’m experiencing a new employee’s stress. Besides learning the location of the kitchen, and when the trash is collected, I’m incredibly scared of screwing up. Of missing some vital assignment or suggesting the wrong thing or telling the wrong joke. So much shared culture has built up here, and I’m afraid of suggesting the taboo topic, the subject that will forever […]

Taxi Driver is a Superhero Movie

Here’s the plot of a movie: A regular guy grows increasingly frustrated by the crime and evil that surrounds him on the streets of New York. So he gains the power to fight back, then sees a young girl in trouble and saves her from the men who’ve kidnapped and drugged her for money. That’s the plot of Taxi Driver. Three things intrigued me most while watching this film for the first time last week: 1) I thought […]

Cover of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

David Foster Wallace: Maddening Genius

I recently finished reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a collection of his magazine essays. Wallace himself is a recently-deceased literary darling, author of Infinite Jest and a number of short pieces. And now I have a problem. Wallace was a writer of rare genius, thoroughly engaging the reader with energetic prose that was often both familiar and bizarre, a conversational patter riddled with invented words. […]

Technological Manic Depression

Some days, I seek hyper-technology. I want to engage folks on Twitter, post on my blogs, and clean up every broken link on my websites. The online world feels so vibrant and interesting. On other days, I want to give up everything more advanced than a clock/radio. I want to sit down with a big stack of books and a hot mug of tea, or throw wide my kitchen cabinet doors and fire up the stove. The online world feels so shallow […]

Can’t Get Technoooo Satis-fack-shuuuuun

I’ve been dissatisfied with my blog for weeks now. During one of my long IM conversations (does anyone else have IM conversations any more?) with Saalon a couple weeks ago, I complained that blogs assume uniformity of content. That each entry will need to be formatted the same way. I also dislike the constant draw of a blog, the siren song that says, “You should be posting every day.” […]

New Job Update

I love my new job. I love love love my new job. I’m working with nice, friendly people, on interesting stuff. I review software that NASA’s developed to determine how it could be used by industry. How cool is that? And my quarterly allergy/asthma/something attack has mostly cleared up; now I just walk around with a throat full of phlegm. ‘Twas frustrating to spend my first few days at work sick. […]

I work for Amazon. The content on this site is my own and doesn’t necessarily represent Amazon’s position.