a crank’s progress

So when people talk about the relative advantages of home schooling vs farming their kid out to The System, I bet they never talk about the frightening illnesses their kids will never bring home.
This is by way of mentioning that I have been waiting out an attack of Scarlet Fever this week.
You thought it was [...]

So this tea arrived today: some days ago, I made a link to their site in exchange for a sample.

Pretty impressive stuff. With the 4 oz package, you get this little tin and some teabags (in case you want to roll your own), all extremely well packaged. Hey, I was expecting a cardboard box and [...]

Chris at Crooked Timber takes the GlobalRichList test (202) and realizes the real need for diversity in the world of weblogs isn’t white or black, male or female:
Crooked Timber >> On being super-rich (7):
[O]ur place in the local distribution makes us radically misperceive our position in relation to the vast majority of humanity (my [...]

The library has showered me with granted book requests this week. My reading table groans under the strain of

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” (Jared Diamond)

“The Scar” (CHINA MIEVILLE)

“The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” (Richard Florida)
Obviously, Collapse needs to be dealt with first, [...]

Still not sure what I think of this . . . apparently, all those links to WordPress.org (as seen on most WP-driven sites) create such a tempting PageRank value that the WP developers were approached by someone to host some articles (17) that could leverage that PageRank.
So on the one hand, we have a community [...]

Return of the Mac (20):
If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good.
And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have [...]

ongoing; Unswitch? (5):
This morning, I switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox. Next, I think I’ll look at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird. Maybe I’ll go back, but I’m increasingly starting to feel uncomfortable in Apple-land.
Hmm, I just switched back to Safari after getting hosed up by Firefox (my fault: I was using the [...]

Just in time to help me with my solo parenting struggle:
The Care and Feeding of Children by L. Emmett Holt

This is my first night of an extended run of solo parenting opportunities. The other half of our parenting duo is in out of state training for her new gig as a government agent, and will be home just 4 of the next 19 nights. We’re not down to candy for breakfast and cereal for [...]

I just disabled trackbacks: comment spam is a thing of the past but trackback spam is harder to deal with. The ratio of bad to good is ∞ to 0.