I’m happy to report that today I launched a new design for ReligiousResources.org. I’m pleased with the design, but visitors to the site will not see the biggest improvements: I’ve completely reprogrammed the admin functionality (managing listings, etc.). But that change should make life much better for Susan, and will hopefully make the site more useful.
This is the funniest Ask MetaFilter thread ever.
A while back, Norman started making pre-gacking noises while we were sitting in the living room with guests. He was on the carpet, of course. Katie was a little late on grabbing him to move him onto the kitchen floor. He completed the job right as Katie was turning around with him, projecting cat vomit across the room and down my mother’s leg.
When I was reading this ask.metafilter.com thread the other day, something I’ve been thinking about for a while finally clicked. What caught my eye was that a few respondents mentioned the volume of music, in gigabytes, that they had downloaded from emusic.com back when it offered unlimited downloads.
Researchers examined whether bilingual individuals showed different personality traits when communicating in each language. The short answer: yes. Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the entire paper.
As a bilingual person, that result doesn’t surprise me. I know I behave differently when speaking German than I do when speaking my native language, English. But upon reflection, I’d say the reasons for that are complex: relative insecurity with my mastery of German, different cultural conversational conventions and expectations, etc. I’d like to know how the researchers controlled for various influencing factors.
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If this story is true, it is a case of astoundingly poor application development.
This is why you need testing, people!
When I was growing up, our house was located at the very top of the Guadalupe river valley. We had a spectacular view to the southeast all the way across Canyon Lake to the other side of the county.
When I played trombone in middle school and high school, my parents made me practice outside (not a problem, since we had few neighbors). I remember the awesome echoes that I got with that. I would blast a loud short sound and just listen to the echoes.
Also, at one point we had a religious cult living in the old ranch house a couple of miles away. My friends and I would get on the garage with a telescope and spy on them, though we never saw anything extraordinarily weird take place.
Samuel has recently become a big Ben Folds fan. It started when Samuel discovered that Ben has a song with ‘Stan’ in the title. So, now when he listens to my iPod, he asks for ‘the Stan song.’ I carefully excluded this song from the playlist that Samuel listens to, but this past weekend, Samuel pointed out that I’d missed one song with objectionable lyrics. So, if Samuel starts using the F word, I guess I can just blame it on Ben Folds.
I just completed the public domain audiobook of The Secret Garden. The plot was blindingly obvious, but the book was still a fun read.
This MSNBC news article about cold-war era civil defense supplies having been found at the Brooklyn Bridge dredged up a childhood memory. I remember eating lemon hard candies that I thought were from civil defense caches. A quick Googling confirmed that they probably were indeed from a fallout shelter. The ones I remember were just like the yellow candies shown on this page.
The candies that I remember probably came from the grain elevator in Wichita, Kansas, that my maternal grandfather managed, which was a fallout shelter–though I’m not sure how the candies got from the shelter to my grubby little mouth.
I’m no great technology predictor, but I’ve been saying for some time that flash-based drives will be replacing traditional hard drives in portable computers soon. Well, Samsung has introduced a 32 GB flash drive that’s being positioned as a challenger to traditional hard drives. I can’t wait for a laptop with one of these things!
