Dec 11
If you’ve been dying to read my short story collection, Unsanctioned Experiments, but you just aren’t into the ebook thing, then it’s your lucky day. It took me a year, but my book is finally available in paperback here! Who knew formatting a print book for the first time would be time-consuming? Thanks to everyone …
Jan 18
Like a lot of people, I joined in an office pool for the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot last week. Spoiler alert: we won $4. And like a lot of people, during the days leading up to the drawing, I spent a few idle moments going on a mental spending spree with all my potential winnings. When I was …
Nov 02
Back in September, we took the family to the Insectival at the Athens Botanical Gardens. If your kids like bugs (and ours do), it’s a fun event. There were lots of cool educational displays, crafts and a big butterfly release. This was all fairly standard fun kid stuff. The thing I didn’t expect to see was a …
Oct 12
A while ago, I was watching the kids on a rainy Saturday. There were so many fun things we wanted to do outside, but there we were, stuck indoors. Fortunately, the kids had found videos on how to make slime a few weeks before. This seemed like the perfect time to try some out. Choosing a …
Jul 08
I had heard of speed reading, just like you have. I’ve seen people making crazy claims about how fast they could get through a book, and I always thought of it as a bit of a parlor trick, like hypnosis. Yes, I believe it exists, but so what? I guess, more exactly, I was suspicious …
May 01
Or: How to Entertain Little Kids for Hours for $5 A few weeks ago, I was grocery shopping with the kids. As we wheeled out of the frozen foods section, I noticed a big cooler full of dry ice for sale. I had seen it before, and thought it might be fun to do some …
Apr 20
The internet is the greatest tool for sharing information in the history of humanity. I particularly love it for finding out how to do new things, or how to do old things better. I’ve done a huge amount of work on my cars that I never would have accomplished without electronic help. And in that spirit, …
Mar 06
Or: Making a luggage tag that actually stands out from the crowd I’ve done a quite a bit of travelling for business, but for a long time I managed to avoid buying specific luggage to do it. My grandparents gave me a set of LL Bean soft-sided luggage in the 80’s, and it has been well used and …
Feb 16
Growing up in the 80’s, I heard a lot of promises that Virtual Reality was right around the corner, the same way my parents had been promised flying cars. Any day now, I was going to be plunged right into a William Gibson novel, a virtual cowboy avoiding ICE. When the Oculus Rift came out in 2012, …
Aug 14
When the Rubik’s Cube originally came out in the 1980s I was 10ish. I played with one, and could solve a side and the next level. But I could never do the full cube without laboriously paging through a solution book my Dad bought. Once the furor died down, I moved on to other things. Then, last year, …