Dog bites man, indeed

Some things should be, on the contrary, celebrated for their very groundedness and averageness and relatability. Human interest stories—when they’re of true human interest (rather than the products of cable’s attempts to sensationalize the serious …

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Serious play

This has to be one of my favorite TED talks:

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How we identify

Matt Bors points out that political cartoons are frequently described, maybe attributed to a paper, but rarely to an author.

It may seem like a small gripe, but this is routinely how cartoons are referenced in the media. You would never quote a brilliant …

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Doorbell question

If you're over 30, you'll probably press a doorbell with your index finger, while anyone under 30 may well use their thumb.

Read more at iht.com

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"What We Didn’t Know Has Hurt Us"

There's a fascinating article at CJR, "What We Didn't Know Has Hurt Us", about the explosion of classified documents under the Bush administration.

I found this bit mind-boggling:

Far more troubling was the revelation in 2006 that more than twenty-five …

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Geek stampede

So, the original story goes something like this: girl buys laptop, laptop comes with (gasp!) Linux, Linux isn’t compatible with her High-Speed Internet or her college classes. Girl drops out of the college.

The original article isn’t great …

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Using iText to generate PDFs in Rails; JRuby vs. Ruby Java Bridge

So I need to generate a PDF, using data coming out of a Rails-based app. I started looking at Prawn and Prawnto, but I need to prepend the PDF with some boilerplate material, ideally another PDF. In other words, I’d like to programmatically generate …

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Bush's Economy

So, you think things are bad? The Washington Post can tell you just how bad, in glorious, sickening detail:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists …

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2008 wrap-up

I had a pretty amazingly good 2008, all things considered. I traveled a lot: this was the first year of my life where I can say that I spoke four languages — even if my Dutch is still consistently horrible.

I finally made it to Spain (a long unfulfilled …

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"Dark Knight" sucked

The American media got all hyperventilated when “The Dark Knight” came out there back in July, but there was comparatively less enthusiasm when it was finally released in the Netherlands around September or so. Still, when I saw it was scheduled …

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