Something Random

Nice people are jerks. Their behavior tends to be inconsiderate or even selfish. They're shallow and make poor friends. They lie to your face and abandon you when it will do the most harm. Yes, I'm talking about nice people here, those smiling faces you see at the grocery store and religious or social functions. One of those smiles may even be yours.

To explain, I'll tell you about a guy named Joe. Joe thinks he has lots of friends because he knows so many nice people. Joe is completely clueless about what jerks nice people are. In fact, Joe may not have a friend in the world.

Kid's aren't cogs and education isn't an assembly line. The key point that I took away from this short speech is that we've misapplied the lessons of the Industrial Revolution to education. We've come to treat kids as identical, mass produced cogs to be inserted into the machine of society.

In English, the word free most often means without cost, but it can also mean without limitation. How interesting then that my introduction to the former would ultimately lead me to the latter.

Growing up in a climate where -20 degree temperatures are a normal (though generally unwelcomed) occurrence and -40 degree temperatures aren't unheard of, I'd always heard that if throw boiling water into the air on a cold enough day it will freeze or evaporate before it hits the ground. Somehow, I'd never tried it before. This video was made both for my own amusement and to document for my friends in less hostile climates that I'm not just crazy. I woke up early and discovered that it was -30 degrees, but by the time I headed outside with my pot of boiling water the temperature had dipped to -35 degrees.

I made a new friend recently and in seeing a lot of myself in him, I learned some things about myself. I realized that some of the things that make me who I am, including some of the things I struggle with, are typical traits of what I call geeks. The following is a generalization, based my knowledge of many geeks, not a confession based solely on my own geeky quirks and flaws. This includes the fact that all of the geeks I remember from my life have been male.

This is a test post to see if the Ping.fm module for Drupal works the way I think it should.

Check out this 3d printer from the Fab@Home project. I want one! Did he say you could "print" in chocolate? Mmm...I wonder what some hobbyist confectioner could think to do with that?

When I first heard of companies rebranding their name brand products as generics to selling them at a discount, I thought it was pure greed. "Why not just sell it at the lower price? Why charge more for the illusion of superiority?" I wondered. Then, I heard a hot tub salesman explain why he might charge a wealthy customer more than the usual price. He wasn't gouging the customer, he was managing the customer's expectations of the product.

Have you heart the saying, "If you want something to get done, give it to the busiest person you know."? Lately I've been realizing just how true that really is. I used to think busy people were uptight and, in the case of at least one couple I knew, driven by a preoccupation with possessions. But now I'm beginning to think that most of the busy people in my life are just more productive and happier because they work harder. I've been noticing that time slips away from me easily even though I'm not very busy and my best sense is that my problem comes from poor time management.

Blogging sounds so easy, but I'm finding it way too hard. It's even harder when you can't quick mucking with the code long enough to post.