This is addressed to those who routinely mispronounce the name of my home state. Some of you, inexplicably, are from this state and you still don’t know how to pronounce it. Since you somehow managed to escape any proper instruction in its pronunciation, allow me to enlighten you. It is […]
Author: snewpy
How To Hide Your Gold
On one of my recent journeys down the Wikipedia rabbit hole — you know what I’m talking about, when you look up something in Wikipedia and one of the links on the page draws your attention, and you click on it, and then repeat until you are seventeen pages and […]
Electric Cars Still Coming
A year ago I wrote about the electric car from Zenn Motors that was on the verge of becoming a reality. A year later, it doesn’t appear to be any closer to real, unfortunately. I’m pretty bummed about that, but I can’t say I’m surprised. The promise of an electric […]
Disappointed With LOST
I was disappointed with the Lost finale. There, I said it. It wasn’t very good. Actually, it was good — just like every other episode of the show, it was well acted and well made — it just wasn’t very satisfying. But there are a ton of people who are […]
Killers
Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl make a pretty good team in the new romantic comedy Killers (whose plot seems strikingly similar to the Cruise-Diaz vehicle Knight and Day that opens later this month — just sayin’), although I will say that the on-screen chemistry seemed to be lacking, when compared […]
Memory Foam Mattress
It’s been about six months since we bought this memory foam mattress at Sam’s. At the time, I read every single comment on the page, left by dozens (if not hundreds) of people who had purchased the same mattress. They all expressed the same apprehension about buying a mattress online, […]
Bye Bye DirecTV!
Earlier this year, I documented my Home Theater PC project. My primary motivation for this endeavor was to find a viable alternative, preferably less expensive, to my subscription to DirecTV. I had been a customer of theirs for over 10 years, and in that time I watched my monthly fee […]
Here We Go Again
Welcome to the third annual Running of the Blogs! We’ve called it 30 Days of Blog in years past, but that title isn’t terrible catchy, so I thought we could use a new name for it. In fact, I might even register the domain name and turn it into a […]
First Harvest
We had our first salad the other night from our garden and it was great. I can’t wait for all of the other crops — peas, carrots, and even cantaloupe! Yum!
Happy Earth Day!
Yeah, I know I’m a week late, but I had to post an update on our square foot garden. My wife did a great job getting all of our crops planted and now we are only a few weeks away from having some delicious home-grown salads with dinner. Yum! Stay […]
Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me
My favorite show on NPR is Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and we attended the live taping of Saturday’s show. The panelists were Charlie Pierce, Roxanne Roberts, and Mo Rocca. I think Mo is tied with Paula Poundstone as my favorite panelist. The show was very good, and it was […]
Square Foot Gardening
We picked up Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening book last year with the intent of planting a small vegetable garden, but never got around to doing it. But this year, we are off and running! Only a couple more days and we will have our seedlings in the ground, and […]
HTPC Results
[This is the final part in a series on building your own HTPC] The primary reason I set out to build a Home Theater PC was so I could get rid of DirecTV. I’ve been a subscriber since 1999, and I’ve never had any complaints about their service, apart from […]
HTPC Install
[This is Part IV of a series on building your own HTPC] Once you’ve assembled the hardware, and collected the software, it is time to begin your install. You can expect this entire process to take between one and two hours to complete. Please follow these instructions: Install Windows It […]
HTPC Software
[This is Part III of a series on building your own HTPC] I started out thinking this would be a Linux-based PC, but two things changed my mind. First, I’ve written before about my travails with Linux. I want to like Linux, I really do. But I can’t. Mabye I’m […]
HTPC Hardware
[This is Part II of a series on building your own HTPC] Let me start by saying that I did not compile this entire list of hardware through trial and error. Most of it came from Jay Taylor’s excellent blog over at AMD, and a big thanks to him for […]
Home Theater PC
When you start the research, like I did, on building your own Home Theater PC, you inevitably come across a page or two that claims to give you all the information you need to build the “ultimate” rig for yourself. Some of these pages do provide a wealth of valuable […]
The Big Box Office Bamboozle
It looks like my prediction about Avatar is on track to come true, but the box office reports today reminded me just how pointless box office reports are. I already know the answer to this question, but why do these reports still use dollars instead of gross tickets sold? Hey […]
Great Holiday Theater
I’ve been lucky enough to take in a couple of great Christmas-time shows this season and I wanted to pass along my reviews. First, a couple of weeks ago, I went to see A Christmas Story at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis. If you’re a fan of this iconic […]
An Inconvenient Purpose
A few years ago some folks started asking the question, What Would Jesus Drive? I’m not sure how seriously the question was supposed to be taken, as it was part of a campaign to demonize SUVs and the gas-guzzling ways of the people who drive them, but author Richard Gasaway […]
Tunes To Go
I’m lucky to work at a place that doesn’t mind its employees listening to music (on headphones) while they work. Years ago, I carried an actual MP3 Player to work everyday, but I quickly outgrew the limited storage capacity, so I ultimately transitioned to carrying a simple USB drive. The […]