Routine Order

Instead of working.

# Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.
# In the memo field of all your checks, write “for sexual favors.”
# Specify that your drive-through order is “TO-GO.”
# If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.
# Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.
# Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions “to keep them tuned up.”

Reading it all the way to the end will be rewarding… there are gems like, “sit in your lawn and point a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down

One of the privileges of blogging anonymously, like I do, is that you can blog about cheap date just before you head out on one over the weekend

So yeah, Cupid has been kind and I have the opportunity to take a lady out this Saturday. So what does a geek do when he’s short of ideas? Search online, of course!

First off, there’s a list of ideas for fun dates here - including going to an arcade, bowling, a casino (now that is something I wouldn’t have thought of myself), museums, the zoo, and playing frisbee. But not all of these are cheap, except maybe the last one.

So here’s a free ideas for dates in general that I find, hmm, interesting:

1. Go to a mall or a good place for people watching and sit and enjoy a coffee/beer
2. Build and/or fly a kite
3. Find a coffee shop with a poetry reading/open-mic free live music and get a coffee or a beer (yes, I love coffee)
4. Rent/Borrow a video at home and watch it with chips n salsa
5. Go window shopping under the pretense of looking for some hard-to-find brand of jeans/shoes - now though no girl will likely turn this down, shopping of any kind exhausts me
6. A hike/bike ride through a scenic trail close to you - there’s only the cost of getting there and back

Ok, that’s it - I am out of ideas now, so God help me! I probably will end up trying #3, #6 or #5 in that order. There’s a blog for the compulsive date-goers the same place I found the list of fun date ideas, but their isn’t too much advice by way of cheap dates available online. Boy, writing a blog regularly, only about dating, must need some resolve and patience!

Perhaps the most famous man to live in a dimunitive house was Thoreau, who famously lived in a wood cabin for a while. I went on a trip today discovering small houses of all shapes and kinds.

No list of small houses will be complete without these exemplary examples….

1. Yurts

You have US yurts and Russian yurts

2. Tumbleweed houses

..Which are smaller than some folks’ bathrooms

3. The Mobile Hermitage

Which seems to owe some of its design and inspiration to the Tumbleweed house dude, Jay Shafer

4. The weehouse

Completed for less than $45K. Cheaper than your car - Hummer Lover!

5. Custom-built Gypsy Caravans
More caravans.

6. The Loftcube

It’s like living in the clouds. Not for the agoraphobic. Also see: glass house, and the house that hovers.

7. Straw Bale Houses

The one pictured above is just 140 sq.ft. Living in it might just be like living in a 2-D world!

8. Free Spirit Spheres

They hang from trees, look like a sphere - what more do you want? I want one, just so I can say, “I live in a ball. Yes, the ball hangs from a tree.”

9. Tear Drop Trailers

Quite in the rage in the 30’s and 40’s I hear.

and of course… the very popular…

10. Igloos

I’ve always wanted to go inside one and see if it is actually warmer.

There’s also this story on the SF Gate about small homes for the homeless:
.

Small homes are environmentally conscious and sustainable as they quite literally reduce your “footprint”.

For more lists of small houses, check out tinyhouses.net - the Tiny Home Page (pun intended, and not original, thank you very much!), and this list of the tiny house hunter who was at least as interested in them as I am.

I wish I could collect small houses and put them all in my backyard, but for now I will have to refer to Home and Living and plan on visiting Home Depot to get more power tools!

“We pride ourselves in offering some of the most comprehensive comparisons between Apple and Microsoft’s operating systems on the Internet.”

Quite a commendable goal - will make deciding between Windows and OSX much easier. Or more difficult, if you are the kind who is confused by your brain, and prefer to decide with your “heart” instead.

This list of features for comparing the GUIs of Windows XP and OSX is interesting - I have often wondered about how best to compare the GUIs of two different OSes/Desktop environments. If there was a scientific, standard way of evaluating GUIs, we’d know for sure which of GNOME and KDE are better!

Oh, here’s the final score of the OSX Vs. XP comparison, by the way. OSX comes out on top.

1st Intern. Collection of Tongue Twisters - English

World Wide Web

Yup, that’s among the tongue twisters listed in the collection. Don’t let that deter you though, go and take a look. There are tongue twisters in many other languages too.

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has been around for a long, long time and yet it stays handy to lookup that number sequence that shows up in your research data. Born from the AT&T research labs, back when they were still the best

In fact, it is handy to look up your phone number, or date of birth. In my case both yielded a list of papers that references the sequences!

Q: What is the purpose of the OEIS?
A: The main purpose is to allow mathematicians or other scientists to find out if some sequence that turns up in their research has ever been seen before.

If it has, they may find that the problem they’re working on has already been solved, or partially solved, by someone else.
Or they may find that the sequence showed up in some other situation,
which may show them an unexpected relationship between their problem and something else.

Another purpose is to have an easily accessible database of important, but difficult to compute, sequences.
For example, if you’re testing some conjecture about Mersenne primes, you can look up the ones that are known (see A000043),
rather than spending years recomputing them.

I stumbled upon Art Garfunkel(of Simon and Garfunkel fame)’s Reading List and Music List.

The Reading List is amazing, containing each and every book he has ever read since 1970!!!

His fourth alltime favorite song is his own song, the Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

There was a time in my life when I wouldn’t sleep without listening to Simon & Garfunkel. Thank you for making life livable, Art.

Jordan’s pink stone city Petra is now a candidate for being declared one of the new seven wonders of the world.

My curiosity stoked, I tracked down the other 20 candidates for the title of the new seven wonders of the world. The winning wonders will be announced on July 7, 2007 (07-07-07) by the New Open World Corporation (NOWC).

Familiar old wonders include the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, the Stonehenge, and the Colosseum.

Did you know that USA Today and Good Morning America came up with a seperate list of the seven modern wonders that included the Internet as a “wonder”. There is also a list of the seven engineering wonders, which includes the Panama Canal and Toronto’s CN Tower.

Enough with the lists already.

If you take Peter Coffee’s word for the 25 Killer Apps of All Time, then you will end up with the astonishing fact that only about 10% of the greatest killer apps of all time have been developed in the last decade.

I call BS! A decade ago, the internet was slower than my dog, and less tentacled than an octopus. The guy must have had enough sense to call it the top 25 innovative, or path-breaking, or first-of-their kind apps. But the list is none of those, either.

And, of course, not one of those apps is a Linux App, though there are a lot of Windows-sepcific apps, and a whole OS - OSX. The last time I checked, an OS was significantly different from an app. This trend of almost anyone turning tech guru and throwing up lists is alarming - I hope the next year will bring with it a few less top-X lists.

The Economist list of the top books of the year 2006 is interesting in itself, but what really got my gut was the following description of Richard Dawkins‘ latest book, “The God Delusion,” — as a wavering agnostic myself, maybe I should grab the book, and give it a half-chance of swaying me either way. Maybe it will just end up as another book on my Amazon wishlist, that stays there forever. Lucky are those that get gifts.

The God Delusion
By Richard Dawkins. Houghton Mifflin; 416 pages; $27. Bantam; £20

Atheists will love Richard Dawkins’s incisive logic and rapier wit and theists will find few better tests of the robustness of their faith. Even agnostics, who claim to have no opinion on God, may be persuaded that their position is untenable waffle.

‘Cause the Beeb says so! Scientists agree that if a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatches, then it would be an ostrich egg and not a kangaroo egg. QED.

If you have some time to spend, read this list of 100 things we humans learnt/realized in the last year. The egg-fact comes from the list, as does the following, very interesting fact:

In Bhutan government policy is based on Gross National Happiness; thus most street advertising is banned, as are tobacco and plastic bags.

A youtube playlist with all the James Bond movie titles (shown at the start of the movie). I have loved each of the ones I have seen at the theater. The latest one was too gorgeous for words, though I must say I missed the Bond Music Theme sorely this time.

Martin Klasch: Video: The James Bond title sequences

A list and explanation of some of the more famous paradoxes. Of course, most of these are also on wikipedia, but this is a site you can spend a couple of hours on, if you so desire.

Logical Paradoxes .info

This site explains many of the classic paradoxes, including Achilles and the Tortoise, The Paradox of the Heap, and The Liar Paradox, along with some less familiar paradoxes such as The Problem of the Specious Present.I hope that you’ll leave the site perplexed and confused.

Highest-Paying Jobs in the US : Career Advice Article at CareerBuilder.com
Top Paying Jobs Overall

The message is clear, don’t waste time blogging - go get working at the flight simulator game instead

# Physicians and surgeons — $147,000
# Aircraft pilots — $133,500
# Chief executives — $116,000
# Electrical and electronic engineers — $112,000
# Lawyers and judges — $99,800
# Dentists — $90,000
# Pharmacists — $85,500
# Management analysts — $84,700
# Computer and information system managers — $83,000
# Financial analysts, managers and advisors — $84,000
# Marketing and sales managers — $80,000
# Education administrators — $80,000

Trying to find that elusive book to gift someone or treat yourself? Pick one that is new, released this past year. The following link also has links to notable books from each of the pst 4-5 years.

100 Notable Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times

The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 4, 2005.