Good Riddance
Welp, it’s almost over. The worst year ever has but a few hours left. And then everything will magically get better at midnight, right? If only… 2021 has to be better. Vaccines are being administered and research continues to find more ways to fight Covid–19. It may take months, but the tide is turning. While Covid is our biggest issue,…
Excellence in Journalism
This is just incredible. Not just the story, but also how it was reported. This is A+++ journalism of a style that, sadly, just doesn’t exist anymore. I have no memory of this, but apparently this story was a bit of a sensation in the 1990s, one of the first viral events on the Internet. It must not have trickled…
Wrapping Up 2018
Here we are, another calendar year about to end. 2018 was a wacky, wild year for us. There were a ton of kid sports: volleyball, basketball, kickball, cross country, soccer, cheer. There was our first family trip beyond the US borders for spring break in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. There was our first family visit to the ER, when C…
How Overnight Shipping Works
I love stuff like this: deep explanations into everyday things that are amazingly complex. We all know that it’s a logistical miracle how fast products can get shipped from one side of the globe to the other. Or even, say, some warehouse in Utah to your front door. This video breaks down how the major shipping companies in the US…
Nordic Skating
This is has nothing to do with the Olympics but is a must-watch. It is equally amazing and creepy. The best parts are about halfway through this piece, when you see the ice surface flexing and then cracking after Marten Ajne skates across it. I can’t ice skate, so I’ve never been tempting to go out on our lake when…
Friday Time Waster
Here is one of the greatest things I saw over the holidays. “Euverus” used the game Cities: Skylines to test how traffic would flow at a 4-way intersection using 30 different road configurations. I love the examples with no controls, especially the little software glitches that allow vehicles to pass through each other. And some of the higher-end examples are…
I Will Never Understand People
They’re the worst. Two stories of awful people I’ve encountered recently. A couple weeks back I was at the grocery store. I rounded one aisle and turned into the next. A woman – probably 45–50ish – was looking at some items on the shelf. She had her cart parked so that the entire aisle was blocked. The way she was…
Fun At The Grocery
Spring is nigh. Sure, it snowed here today, and is expected to again on Saturday. But it is also supposed to jump into the 70s next week. Mornings and evenings are getting a little brighter each day as our daylight stretches out. Spring training baseball has begun. My anticipation of warmer days is like a little kid’s on December 10…
Clearing Out The Notebook
A few quick, random thoughts to share. Why do you have to verify that you are at least 21 years old before you access the website of a brewery? It’s not like you can pour a free sample out of your monitor once you put in your birthdate. And there’s no age requirement to watch the 8000 beer commercials that…
Fin de Año
Last day of the year. As is my routine, this morning I paged back through the site’s archives for the last 12 months and jotted down some highlights. In January we kicked off the Worst Winter Ever[1] with nearly 20” of snow in three days, followed by the first Polar Vortex. Of a possible 35 hours of school the first…