Output Stream of Consciousness

I enter all kinds of contests. As a Canadian, my two favourite sites for contest listings are Contest Canada with its good listings and amusing taglines, and Contestgirl, with some good tools to keep track of contests. My wins are fairly sparse, but… more »

No heavy duty topic today. This is about taking my 3-year-old for his first transit trip of more than one stop. He's been on a bus before, but always for a single stop, back in the days when his growth outpaced my parental muscle development. This… more »

In a wonderful (cough) thread talking about cancer prevention and why-is-there-so-little-focus-on-that which turned into a thread of big paranoid ranters versus skeptical rebutters, there was a comment that caught my eye that just gave me a chuckle:… more »

I have been very happy about the collective realization of e-mail software that automatically loading images puts you at risk for more spam simply by having tailored image tags expose to the spammer the fact that you read the e-mail. Online web mail… more »

We have been looking around for a more comfortable bed for a long time. We also stay up really late on occasions, so we are often drawn in by late-night infomercials. You can hardly flip a channel in the wee hours without happening across bed… more »

Russian [1 - see footnote]: Alphabet Difficulty: Medium Much of the issue with the Russian alphabet is that there are distracting similarities to the English alphabet. The letter that looks like a C (с) is pronounced like an S. The 'P'… more »

What I want to know is... how do they get their ingredients so cheaply? more »

There are people out there who can out-kitsch Thomas Kinkade. When they do, I dearly hope that they will be as lovingly annotated as this lovely picture of Jesus holding the Constitution, surrounded by a plethora of faces, many familiar. Mousing over… more »

One thing I have noticed about our toddler - your toddler may vary - is that if he is ever up to anything bad - say, for example opening DVD cases and ripping the inserts out of them, and we STOP him - he will proceed onto things of "equivalent… more »

I have a small passel of graphology books. They were fun, especially when I was younger and wanted to see whether my peculiarities of handwriting were "good" or "bad", and was indeed happy with the bevy of "good" signs. Revisiting the craft, though,… more »

On a website registered to Lehigh Valley Baptist Church, the "Good Person Test" is a textbook example of that particular kind of monochromatic religious reasoning that just falls down under light dissection. It aims to gently but firmly pinch you by the… more »

Our new place has a much bigger garden than our previous townhouse. It did not sink in how much more so until we brought some of our precious plants from the townhouse to the new garden. The chunk of garden at the top of the yard held what was already… more »

There is a nifty site called VisCheck, a particularly interesting feature of which is the feature they have to show a web page as it appears to the colour-blind. It simulates three kinds of colour-blindness: Deuteranope, Protanope and Tritanope.… more »

Adam was wondering about my 17.4 kHz comment... What it relates to is that there's a device in Britain which uses high frequencies to annoy teenagers away from the premises: A controversial weapon in the war against antisocial behaviour should be… more »

I like the little story behind the Hulk Out List, that Kevin Koster, assistant director of JAG, just passed Kenneth Johnson a list of all the reasons that made Bill Bixby's skin turn green and destroy yet another shirt, but not the pants. As detailed… more »