“Be warned that being an expert is more than understanding how a system is supposed to work. Expertise is gained by investigating why a system doesn’t work.”

— Brian Redman

Ranking the modern Doctors


  1. Eccleston
  2. Tennant
  3. Hurt
  4. Smith
  5. Morrissey
  6. Capaldi

Dear Amazon,


I can find a very faint trace of relevance in the first recommendation, but not in the second one. Please enlighten me.

From from kindle to kinder, from music to mattresses?

(and the reason this image is so large is that I took the screenshot on my Surface Pro 2, which has a high-density 1080p display, and Photoshop refuses to make the fonts readable if I shrink it any further)

Dear Former President Obama,


When Jimmy Carter calls you a sissy, you have failed utterly at foreign policy.

Hawk, by Steven Brust


The new Vlad Taltos novel arrived. Drat that horrible evil Amazon! It’s not bad enough that they work hard to sell me the things I want at prices I like, but they had to go and deliver it a day early. The fiends!

I haven’t even read the blurb on this one yet, since I’ll pretty much buy anything Brust writes, the moment it’s available. He may be an unrepentant communist, but the man can write.

There's a perfectly good reason for this...


9-element Shigeuchi layout

…and here it is:

more...

Stylish, Well-Engineered, Reliable


Pick two. Or, if you’re feeling less charitable toward Apple, one.

"Just today: My iPhone 6 rebooted after I changed the home screen wallpaper. Tapped a new image in the wallpaper settings, and poof, it rebooted. Worse, it never stopped rebooting. Endless reboot cycle. Now I’m doing a full restore with iTunes. After changing my wallpaper to a different image."

(of course, anyone who buys brand-new Apple designs on launch day is playing with fire in a fireworks factory…)

(not that anyone else’s first shipment of new stuff is necessarily glitch-free, but Apple does seem to be particularly bad at it sometimes)

Update: I followed the link from the article I linked, and while reading it… Safari crashed.

Dear Amazon recommendation system,


Never change.

Tongs, because USB3

Boom and Bust


Y’know, I was just thinking that there isn’t enough terrible anime on the shelves any more…

(direct link for those whose ad-blockers won’t show Amazon iframes)

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”