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  • The Dungeon Adventure: An RPG for Pre-Schoolers

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    A while back Sasha and I were playing with some toys and I built a maze out of blocks. With the blocks we had, you couldn’t make a decent maze but it occured to me that our maze would make a decent D&D style dungeon. We had some of her figures walk through the maze…

  • Everything Bad is Good For You

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    Parents can sometimes be appalled at the hypnotic effect that television has on toddlers; they see their otherwise active and vibrant children gazing silently, mouth agape at the screen, and they assume the worst: that television is turning their child into a zombie. The same feeling arises a few years later when they see their…

  • Some Stuff Might be Broken Here for a While

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    Doing a full reinstall of everything here following some problems I had. Wish me luck! Update: Ok, everything should be back up. There were a few things I didn’t put back, but they were mostly leftover files from my previous CMS. If you see any broken links or images, let me know.

  • New Adventures in HTML5

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    In the last year I started hearing a lot of hype about html5. So far I’ve been impressed. They’ve clearly expanded it to become more of a platform for rich graphics. Here are some cool projects I’ve worked (or am working) on. Sparklines in HTML5 HTML5 Ball Bouncing HTML5 Gravity Ball Rock the Animals (Beta)

  • Why the Arsenic Aliens were Disappointing

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    Some bacteria learned to survive and thrive in an environment rich in Arsenic, a normally poisonous element to life. It’s poisonous because chemically it’s almost interchangeable with Phosphorus (note their same column position in the Periodic Table). It’s usually not interchangeable enough and ends up causing problems and interrupting all sorts of necessary biochemical reactions…

  • Sasha and the Phillie Phanatic

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    This is one of my all time favorite photos now. The Phillie Phanatic came by during the Collingswood Christmas parade.

  • Rob Kolstad is an Asshole

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    This month’s Wired has a great article (not online yet, so no link) by Jason Fagone about the International Olympiad in Informatics where high school students from all over the world compete to solve problems through software. It’s fiercely competitive and has its own sub culture of super stars, namely Gennady Korotkevich of Belarus, who…

  • Scariest thing I’ve read all year: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

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    When Will Ferrel describes his George W Bush impression, he says he just imagines having a lot of “unearned confidence.” How would you know if you were one of these people? I first heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect in a comment on Hacker News and it immediately made me question a lot of things. The…

  • Am I Achieving My 2010 Goals?

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    Ouch. I just looked up my goals for 2010 and I am NOT doing well. Here’s my progress so far. 1. Read 12 Books – Easily completed this already. A few I listened to using Audible.com and I read the Purple Cow on my iPhone with the Kindle app. So far I’ve read The Visual…

  • 5K Results for Collingswood Book Festival

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    They posted the results for the Collingswood Book Festival 5K. I wasn’t thrilled with my time of 25:14, and I’m hoping to hit around 24:30 in a 5K next month.

  • Increasing Data Density in Web Design

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    I changed the layout on this site in response to what I took away from my session with Ed Tufte. Here’s an applicable quote from Tufte: Whatever reasonably serves the content, avoids non-content pixels (including navigation and designer pixels) as much as possible, favors user scanning over substantial amounts of material rather than premature linking,…

  • Sparklines in HTML5

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    I wrote some code to make Sparklines in HTML5, but it was too tied to what I was working on. Tonight I broke it out on its own as a generic javascript function. Check it out. Read more about Sparklines.

  • Tufte Course Review and Notes

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    Yesterday I attended Ed Tufte’s one day course on Presenting Data and Information. His book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, completely changed the way I think about data. If you love his book, I highly recommend his course. He doesn’t cover a lot of new ground, but he puts emphasis on a few things…

  • Running Mix for Tomorrow’s Race

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    Chuck Berry – Maybellene The Blow – Eat Your Heart Up Ween – It’s Gonna Be A Long Night The National – Abel Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood The Bloodhound Gang – Ralph Wiggum Beck – Mattress Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland, 1945 White Stripes – Blue…

  • Chart Junk

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    I started yet another Tumblr that eventually I will link into this site. I post example of crappy charts and graphs. Check it out: Chart Junk

  • Net Neutrality and the Railroad Business

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    Here’s a perfect explanation of why Net Neutrality matters, why it should be enforced by the FCC, and how it’s been done in the past. I wish I could link directly to the comment, but Wired offered no way to do that. A comment on Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey: posted…

  • Active vs Passive Interruptions

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    In all work environments people have to communicate. Sometimes they are across the hall and sometimes they are across the world, but in every case someone initiates the contact and the other must decide what to do. The Initiator must first choose the method, whether it’s a phone call, text message, email, etc. What makes…

  • Yard Sale Tips

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    I was quote in this article about yard sales. Thanks Jen!: Garvey advises that you clean and dust everything before you put it out. Interacting with your shoppers helps, too. “Be friendly! Say hello, chat them up, and they’re far more likely to buy something from you.”

  • People Wearing My Sunglasses

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    My new awesome Tumblr blog: http://peoplewearingmysunglasses.tumblr.com/

  • Log Contest Theme Song

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    Here’s a video of me playing the theme song at our annual family reunion log contest.