Archive for the ‘Life in General’ Category

These days, it seems like everybody wants to save/protect the environment. We aren’t allowed to get disposable grocery bags anymore (at least not here), people are driving like passive maniacs in the name of “hypermiling,” buses are over-crowded, and my office has installed composting bins everywhere and switched to Play-Doh silverware. With all of this [...]

For about a year and a half now, I’ve been listening to music in my car through an FM transmitter hooked up to my i Pod. It’s worked pretty well, especially since I’ve managed to stick with the same radio station the whole time, which made things easy. Somebody was broadcasting something on that station; [...]

I’ve complained here before (twice, actually) about how hot my apartment gets over the summer, and I’ve even vowed multiple times to find a new place before summer. But it turns out that I’m pretty lazy, so I came up with a different plan: to get an air conditioner. That part was pretty easy; I [...]

When I got my current car, I subscribed to Sirius satellite radio. I’d never tried it before, and it seemed pretty cool at first, so I bought one of their 1-year subscriptions. I kept it for two full years, but it steadily got worse as time went on, and I decided to cancel about six [...]

For some reason, I seem to have the strange ability to pick out random appliances with broken or missing features that most people take for granted. I bought a brand new microwave a couple of years ago (in 2005), and it didn’t have a kitchen timer. I never even thought to check that before buying [...]

Last year at about this time, I took the bus to work almost all the time. Then one day it started snowing in the afternoon, and covered the streets pretty quickly. Not having a window office, I was a little late finding out about the snow, and left too late to get on the bus [...]

After a summer of just barely keeping my coffee addiction going, I’m now heading full-steam into the winter caffeine binge. The air is getting cooler, and the rain is starting to drizzle down. And every time I see how gray the sky is these days, I immediately get some kind of pavlovian craving for espresso. [...]

Several months ago, I decided to switch all of my bills to electronic delivery. For years now, I’ve paid them all through my bank’s online bill paying service, where they’ll send a check or electronically pay whoever I want them to pay whenever I tell them to, and it seemed like the next logical step [...]

Yeah that’s right – an entire month after my Transformers review that no one agreed with, I’m back with another post. Since then, I’ve been fairly busy with work, and also had lots of things happening on the weekends. The work stuff is pretty boring, so let’s get straight to the fun.
About a month ago, [...]

The thermometer is telling me that, while it’s only 87° on my balcony, it’s actually 95° inside at my desk. For those of you reading this in Europe, that’s 30.5° outside and 35° inside. Oddly enough, I just did a quick search of my site, and it turns out that I also encountered some heat [...]