Reader Appreciation Week: Day Two

  • Q. Butter, margarine, or Brummel & Brown? — Ted, Seattle, WA
    Butter. The philosophy here is simple: if you’re going to put butter on bread, put butter on bread. If you want to put yogurt on bread, put yogurt on bread. Don’t delude yourself into thinking frankenfoods like margarine are inherently better for you.
    As for the Brummel and Brown®, I submit that their willingness to change the name to “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter with Yogurt®!
    suggests their marketing staff is caked out on something unholy. Why didn’t they just name it “Look, Just Because You Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Doesn’t Mean Butter Isn’t Better. Or Yogurt. You Know?” (Yes, I know why. That was a rhetorical question.)
  • Q. I see you have “GIS for Everyone” in your currently reading list. What’s the “free software” that comes bundled on the CD-ROM? Steve, Macquarie, ACT, Australia
    ArcExplorer I haven’t yet started playing with the software, so I don’t know if it’s time-limited. However I did attend an ArcGIS 9 seminar last week and found it was extremely cool. I would be very happy if ESRI hired me to build demos. 🙂
  • Q. Which aspect of the salmon life cycle best corresponds with your current state in life? — Paul, CA
    Well, let’s first review the salmon lifecycle:

      a) fry eating in the stream where you were born.
      b) smolt moving on to life in the big ocean.
      c) adult fully developed, living in salt water.
      d) spawner with young, dead.

    A counter question is which part of my state of life are you referring to? For example, my non-work interests keep swimming back and forth between [b] and [c], laughing mischieviously.

  • Q. Should Ronald Reagan’s image replace that of Franklin Roosevelt on the dime? – Bill, Atlanta, GA
    No.
  • Q. What’s the frequency, Kenneth? — Bud, Cleveland, OH
    It depends on what kind of tin foil you’re wearing on your head.
  • Q. How many techno-savvy relatives does it take to buy Britt an MP3 player for his birthday? — anonymous, IL
    All of us. 🙂