I first heard about NaNoWriMo from Kristin in July. After looking into it, reading some of the experiences (themselves novel-worthy) by previous participants, and floating the idea by my spouse without incurring a veto, I’ve signed up. The challenge is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel from scratch between November 1 – November 30, 2004. […]
Anyone else signed up for NaNoWriMo? Read More »
Sunday morning, I was looking up the football game score for my alma mata on Yahoo. Go ahead, take a look. That’s not a basketball score, nor was it against football powerhouse Texas. (In that game, the week before, Rice gave up only half as many points.) It was San Jose State Spartans. Still, you
Why Does Rice (still) Play Texas? Read More »
The Wall Street Journal had another writeup about A9.com, Amazon’s search subsidiary, so I checked it out again yesterday. Today, when I popped over to Amazon.com to look for some books. I’ve long since tuned out any iconery on the top right and left corners, but the change in logo caught my eye after a
A9, pi, and the integral of e to the x Read More »
I had a weird dream last night. In the dream, I made a gazillion dollars because I wrote a program that automatically generated wholly truthful and accurate status reports. (This is especially funny if you ponder the irony of designing software pointing out software ironies.) It was based on MadLibs, rendered in a template like
Whomever writes the Sunday’s Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer careers section has a sense of humor, taking advantage of the slow Labor Day weekend. The “What This Job Pays” column for the week of September 5, 2004 featured the job of … a Rodeo Clown. Qualifications: Called the unsung heroes of the rodeo, clowns
Rodeo Clown/Product Bullfighter Read More »
My Sunday paper will arrive in five hours. Using my psychic powers, I will predict its contents. The Sunday paper will contain 60% advertisements, 10% comics, 3% “Parade” and local weekly magazine, 5% TV section, and 22% news content. The ads Aaron Brothers is having a 1-cent frame sale. For unexplained reasons, I will receive
When asked for birthday gift hints, my sister-in-law’s husband said he wanted an MP3 player to replace the outdated Walkman he runs with, and even suggested a specific model that we could all chip in on. That should have made things pretty easy. However, because this is an electronic item, with computers involved, there was
Engineers and a birthday gift… Read More »
I used to think applying for a mortgage was invasive… until I applied for a term life insurance policy. The process is essentially like applying for a mortgage, and having your last 10 years’ medical history of you and your immediate family audited, then you get a physical and lab tests. The concept of life