Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

City of Sacramento Parking Ticket Nonsense

When was the last time you put a coin into a parking meter and had to turn a knob in order to complete the transaction? I can’t remember when I last watched the red or yellow metal plates rise and fall, checked to see if the arrow indicated I had been credited the appropriate amount […]

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

The Other 99% of Halloween Candy Distributors

Here’s another 1% vs. 99% that I believe has been overlooked in the media; I posit each year 1% of the population gets to give out over 20% of the candy (and 10% of the population gets to give out more than 70% of the candy) on Halloween. In cities across America, there has been […]

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Scamazon Credit Card

Amazon.com has a no annual fee rewards Visa card with a simple points earning structure: 3 Points: For every $1 spent on Amazon.com 2 Points: For every eligible $1 spent at gas stations, restaurants, drug stores, and office supply stores 1 Point: For every other $1 spent On the plus side the card doesn’t charge […]

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Bench Building

Sometimes my DIY ethos gets the best of me, case in point being the need for a bench so we could host 7 guests at a BBQ in our back yard last month. For less than $50, and probably an hour of my time I could have built one with a bench kit and a […]

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Big Double Cheddar Mac Beef Down

Every now and then it’s useful to challenge oneself, to grow, to stretch. A couple of months ago, a friend of mine noticed a McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Arby’s within spitting distance of each other, a trifecta of sorts. Then came the eureka moment, where he envisioned combining a Big Mac, Double Down and […]

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

BMW M Coupe

In college, I got by without a car. Whether it was going to the grocery store, a punk rock show, the airport etc. I walked, skateboarded, took public transportation or bummed a ride from a friend. Cars were an unnecessary expense and parking was a pain in the ass. When I got a job, I […]

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

Losing Six Years of Photos and Recovering Them Five Years Later

In 1999 I acquired my first digital camera, an Epson PhotoPC 700. Looking back at the tech specs (1.3 megapixels, 4 megabytes of internal storage, no optical zoom) makes me wonder why I took photos with this camera at all. At its maximum resolution (1280×960) it could store 5 photos at “super fine” resolution, 11 […]

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

Halloween

I enjoyed Halloween as a kid, walking all over the neighborhood filling pillowcases upon pillowcases with the good (candy and coins) and the bad (fruit or toothbrush, which prompted retaliation as I grew older). In college, the holiday lost its allure as going to gatherings of costumed drunk people whether it be in the student […]

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Famous Board Games Photo

My wife works at Kids In Motion and a few years ago I threw together their website including some photos she had taken. One of them was a cropped version of this image: The site doesn’t get much traffic, but I recently started experimenting with Google AdWords and Analytics for my own site and wondered […]

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

A2Google

Perhaps this has been going on forever and I’ve only been attuned to it for the last few years. When a high profile public change occurs e.g. new President of the United States takes office, the media likes to make a big deal about what happens during the first 100 days. While it certainly is […]