So I go away for a couple days, come back, and see two withering cactus flowers and three brand new flowers open towards the heavens! They’ve started appearing a month later this year than last. They’re still just as beautiful as ever. I’ll have to keep an eye out for future flowers [...]

Today is the second birthday of this blog. When I went back to look at my first post just now, I noticed the link to my previous blog. It was broken, of course, but I’ve repaired it temporarily for those that are curious. It was done in iBlog, which is disgusting next [...]

This morning my wife and I are going to Dublin for two days. Santander–Dublin is one of the cheap routes provided by one of the leading “budget” airlines in Europe, Ryanair. Their web designer should be shot. What is it about selling things at a discount price that requires having a wacky [...]

My wife works in an anchovy processing plant. They do the entire process: freshly caught fish go in and cans come out. Last Friday, she came home very stressed.

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with sleep apnea a couple years ago and uses one of those machines that blows air into your nose when she sleeps. Several of my parents’ friends have similar diagnoses and machines. Recently, my wife has started telling me that she notices that sometimes, as she listens to me [...]

Well, we’ve made it through the first quarter of 2008. So far, I have kept to my plan to play 5€ in the ONCE lottery every Friday. Statistically, I would expect to lose that 5€ on 18 of the first 20 weeks. Since, as every card player knows, there are 13 weeks [...]

Last September, a distant cousin of mine, Mark, found my blog and left a comment explaining who he was. Mark’s mother and my grandfather were cousins, both the grandchildren of Rasmus Rasmussen, a sailor, author and Lutheran reverend that sailed from Norway to the United States on a viking ship for the 1893 Chicago [...]

My absentee ballot for the May 6, 2008, North Carolina Democratic Primary arrived finally. Like a good voter, I spent a couple hours putting each candidate’s name into Google and learning about their opinions on various issues. Some of them, like the humorously named Duskin Lassiter, lost my vote for simple reasons of [...]

Two disasters befell me yesterday. Both times, I was saved by the foresight of my friends. The largest disaster, by far, was that I accidentally deleted my entire blog database. All those 198,919 words in 522 posts, and 93,656 words in 1,730 comments, everything was gone! I had no backups!

This happens time and time again.
Back in 1995, when I got in trouble for connecting my computer to the computer of my hallmate with an arcnet cable because we were “breaking curfew” at the boarding school, we thought, “What we really need is a radio transmitter and receiver to connect our network cards to. [...]