... that at least on Android, you can turn a website like this into a launcher icon, and thus remember to check in more often than twice a year?
(Also, that the phrase "Did You Know?" was trademarked.)
Hi!

Y'all are making me feel provincial.

Somerville, MA
Rochester, NY
Mountain View, CA
Minneapolis, MN
Greenfield, MA
Lincoln, VA

"Cream of government soup"

When last I wrote about this, over two years ago, I was looking to replace a failing phone with something interesting. I didn't find anything interesting, and instead switched to an older but functional Motorola flip. That somewhat crappy phone may have just crapped it's last (makes calls and connects, but audio doesn't work at all), so I should really get something else. Suggestions? I no longer consider laptop tethering a critical application, and I'm willing to switch carriers.

The iPhone, something Android, N900, Pre, or just another $50 GSM flip phone and living contract-free? Sell me on something, people.

Sometimes I think that there are too many things in my life, or at least, that I should pay more attention to the things that I have. Other times I notice I'm missing something that is subtly different from all the other things I have, and yet somehow essential.

[Poll #1464753]

Found this afternoon on the back cover of a book at Mcintyre & Moore's annex:

This is a story of how work gets done. It is also a study of of how field service technicians talk about their work and how that talk is instrumental in their success. In his innovative ethnography, Julian E. Orr studies the people who repair photocopiers and shares vignettes from their daily lives. He characterizes their work as a continuous highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine.

The work technicans do encompasses elements not contained in the official description of the job yet vital to its success. Orr's analysis of the way repair people talk about their work reveals that talk is, in fact, a crucial dimension of their practics. Diagnosis happens through a narrative process, the creation of a coherent description of the troubled machine. The description becomes the basis for technicians' discourse about their experience, and the circulation of stories among the technicians is the principal means by which they stay informed of the developing subtleties of machine behavior. Orr demonstrates that technical knowledge is a socially distributed resource stored and diffused primarily through an oral culture.

Based on participant observation with copier repair technicians in the field and strengthened by Orr's own years as a technician, this book explodes numerous myths about technicians and suggests how technical work differs from other kinds of employment.

Talking About Machines: Ethnography of a Modern Job.
Even for $0.53, I couldn't bring myself to buy it.

I like to track a bunch of things about my life for future reference. Sometimes irregular diary entries or notes; more often, regular things like when I got to work or what I had for lunch or dinner or what T car I rode on (I gave up on that one after I had collected the entire set of Red Line cars and was no longer riding the Green Line daily). Most of these end up as text files, or occasionally palmpilot memos, with date-stamped and sometimes time-stamped entries. I've got enough of these floating around that it's starting to seem like I should consolidate them. I think what I want is a little database with timestamps, tags ("food,lunch", "food,dinner", "work,arrival", "diary"), and free-form text.

This sounds a bit like blogging software (entries, tags, etc), except I don't particularly want to publish this or have someone else host it, and many of the entries are going to be quite short.

Any suggestions for software or tools to use for this? Plain text is always an option, though keeping the formatting sensible so that it's easy to extract by tag later is a pain.

from Kung Fu Monkey

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Attention brewers - the Boston Homebrew Competition is approaching, and the entry deadline is Saturday. Get your beers in there! You can drop them off at Modern Brewer if you're in the city. This is the competition that got me my first ribbon, and it's always educational and entertaining to get judge's feedback on your product.

3M Duct Tape for Nuclear Plant Applications. The Amazon reviews are wonderful.

(dealnews, via consumerist)