Dear People Who Sell Me Stuff:

It’s okay for you to send me email about new products, sales, promotions, etc., particularly if I asked to be on your mailing list. However, once you send me one announcement of a sale or discount, it’s not okay to send me three to five more messages referencing the first announcement with Subject: lines like “In case you missed this!” I read it the first time, I promise. If I didn’t want to read your email I’d take myself off your list. I don’t need to be told again and again about the same thing, and I don’t need to be “reminded” about the impending cessation of the sale, discount, whatever. It’s annoying and, frankly, somewhat insulting. read more

We just returned from a long weekend in Wyoming. Tracie’s parents live in Ranchester, which is just slightly north of the middle of nowhere and about a six- or seven-hour drive from Boulder, depending on how much you press your luck while pressing the accelerator. We buzzed up and spent a leisurely few days taking in some of the local scenery and eating slightly too much. I put up a set of photos on my flickr site here.

Yes, we saw a moose. He was grazing not far from the road, up on one of the mountain passes near town. We also saw a number of deer, a few antelope (while en route), a beautiful sunset, and one owl. read more

Fatboy Slim may have overstated the situation. For instance, it’s hard to imagine either of my parents having much use for a TB-303 despite their above-average interest in music. I’m not even sure that I need one, having never used the real thing. However, shortly after finding out that a couple of new sources for x0xb0x kits I happened to listen to a few 303-heavy tracks by The Crystal Method and decided that I might as well grab a kit while they’re available. I mean, eventually the world is going to run out of those discontinued transistors, right? It seemed like a reasonable rationalization anyway. read more

Scenario: I have a local network which is part wired and part wireless. Depending on what’s going on, connected to this network are as many as eight desktop computers (six PCs, two Macs), four laptop computers (three PCs, one Mac), one iPad, one PDA, and/or two NAS devices. Usually it works. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out whether the wireless router is somewhat dodgy (because the laptops occasionally lose their connection and the iPad doesn’t make a connection about half the times I turn it on) and/or whether the new NAS is a POS, in short. Answering these questions partly involves figuring out how fast data is moving from one place to another. read more

It’s been a year since our cat Madeline had to have nasty lumps removed from her neck, as I described here and here. Maddy recovered from that unhappy incident and grew into a rather lovely cat. Here are a couple of photos of her in celebration of her ongoing good health:

Lately she’s taken an interest in origami, as you can see.

I just posted a few photos of flowers in our yard here on my Flickr site. There will be more in the not-too-distant future; the senior clematis, for instance, started blooming just yesterday and I have not yet photographed it.

One of the beautiful things about mathematical notation is that it can be used (and misused) to express complex concepts succinctly:

(Yeah, this is not new but I saw it for the first time today, taped to the cash register of the local electronics shop.)

…or are Mother’s Taffy sandwich cookies in their new Kellog’s incarnation different than they used to be, back before the unfortunate demise of their original maker? They smell a bit more like coconut than I remember, and it seems unfamiliar that the cookie isn’t a uniform color throughout. They’re still pretty good, though.