The Column

Motto: Just Cause I love a good notebook. If you have a notebook, you can do anything! Your only limit is your imagination! ...and ability ...and available real-estate per page ...and available number of pages ...and level of education ...and level inspiration ...and the properties of your writing utensil ...and free time with which to fill a notebook ...and the 2-dimensional nature of the format ...and the static nature of the medium Other than that, you can do anything! ...so long as it's either writing or drawing ...the parts of writing or drawing existing within the subset of the parameters defined above Then there's this: Then there's this: The optimist sees the glass half full The pessimist sees the glass half empty The engineer sees the glass is twice as large as is required and/or operating at near 50% its capacity The homeless person sees the glass on the street in front of them, with not much change in it The artist sees the glass as a fascinating su...

Motto: Guess I'm Going to Have to Learn Football I got invited to play fantasy football. That means I have to name my team. Here are the choices I've come up with thus far: The Finicky Hobos The Demonstrably Goods Pure Vanilla Cake Rastafarian Pasta Draft Junk Perl Jam Dirty Mike and the Boys (suggested by Jon and myself at the exact same time) Holy Ducks Unicorn Territory Ball Handles Tubbawamba Chumpthumping Mr. Bo Jangles The Kansas City Chafes Cleft Leapord Queens of the Bronze Age This Team Goes Up to Eleven Dibs on Not Dre The Swiss Kababobs Baaaallooooooooga! Steve Harvey Danger Untitled Team That Wins The Rereplacements Half-Dollarback Fight Club Reference Jim Carrey, James Pass Archimedes Garfunkel Buffalo Bill Dauterives The Pathetic Attempts GODZILLA! Spock and McCoy are Drunk The White Keys, The Black Stripes Mitch Risky Biddness I Don't Know What a Touchback is, But... Holiday Win Express Training Bros Dr. Jan Itor ...

Motto: a Day Late and Still Free Today is Wednesday. Most of this column was written yesterday, but I wasn't able to post it yesterday. I'm still going to try to do the whole Sunday/Wednesday thing, but I guess this may happen from time to time. No big deal. I wanted to show pictures I've taken of every car I've owned - that was my plan. When I set off to find pictures of these cars on my computer I thought to myself "I might not have any pictures of my oldest car." If my plan was going to fail, that's where it would have gone wrong.  Turns out I didn't have pictures of any of my three previous vehicles. That's how much I car about cars. So, utilizing Google, here's a brief visual tour of my automotive history: 2002-2003: The "Weezer Wagon". A hand-me-down from my sisters. Had a big Weezer logo in the back windshield. 2003-2007: The "Man Car". My dad had a policy of buying each of his kids one car. I...

Motto: If You're Going to Go, GoPro Last week was a rare week.  Actually, expand that out to last month. Actually, expand that out to the whole last year. I'm going to work my way forward in time and tell you what I mean. As of the moment I'm writing this, exactly 365 days ago I was waiting outside of KU's dining hall for a shuttle bus to take my floor to showing of "The Avengers" on its opening night. It was the weekend before finals and it was the last hurrah for Templin 3. After we finally got on the shuttle and got our tickets in-hand - I had one of the most memorable nights of my life.  Fast forward exactly 364 days into the future (yesterday) and you'd find me sitting in a restaurant on Mass Street with many of those same floor residents, waiting to go to Iron Man 3. We went to the same theater as we did the year before. We sat a couple rows up from where we did the year before. It was all very nostalgia-ey and fun. [I wrote the colum...

Motto: Google Plus is better It was just pointed out to me that I should make a column comparing Google+ to Facebook, so when people ask me why Google+ is better than Facebook I can just refer them to this. So I'm doing a very very short version of that right now: There are three 3 social networks - Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Twitter is full of short, random tweets about anything. When you tweet, we pretty much tweet to the entire world. When you go to Twitter, you'll see 140 character snippets from celebrities, people that don't actually exist, people you've never met, and rarely, people know and care about talking about stuff you know and care about. Facebook is full. Facebook is full of pictures of the kids of and news about people you kinda sorta used to know. When you post on Facebook, you are sharing not with everyone in the world, just basically everyone you've ever met. Google+ is less full. What is  there, though, is way more directed for you. ...

Motto: For your treatment I prescribe several highly concentrated doses of life. I did an experiment concerning confirmation bias. As it turns out, everything I expected was true. #jokesthatsuck. That joke about confirmation bias comes to you from when I was driving earlier. There was an overly aggressive vehicle weaving in and out of traffic, doing his best to go as fast as humanly possible. when he passed me, he had a bumper sticker for a musical artist from a genre I despise (who it was isn't relevant). I thought to myself "that person WOULD drive like a jerk, he listens to that crap." Then I thought, if that person hadn't had that bumper sticker, would I have noticed how jerkishly he was driving? Then, in the middle of traffic, I realized confirmation bias was back-seat driving me towards false conclusions. On a possibly related note: If you listen to Tech N9ne, there's a good chance you suck at driving like a normal person. Since my last update, I have be...

Motto: Labeled, Segregated, Categorized, Classified, Sorted, Filed, Tabulated, and Designated This column has been a couple of days in the making... it may be on the long side. You can glance down to get a peak of what you're in for and decide for yourself if it's worth it or not. You know it's worth it. This first bit bounces around some. I had a lot of small things I wanted to say that don't gel so well. I went through and retroactively applied labels to ALL the previous columns. To celebrate, I'm going to add everything to this column that I need in order to give it ever label I plan on using. You can click on any of the labels and see all the columns that are tagged with it. Cool? Cool. As an electrical engineer, I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate my 100,000th column! I want to see a game of Scrabble played between two people who make crosswords for a living. That would be intense. Pandora, the internet radio station that everyone ha...