Picked up from Reuters:
The more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes, a study by California researchers has found.
Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Personal 3 Comments »

The same discussion for ’standardizing’ on MS Office came up yesterday (again).  The big issue is that going between OpenOffice and MS Word will sometimes lose certain formatting.  However, I’ve also heard of (and seen) MS Word losing formatting with itself.  A bit of digging turns up this little nugget:
Printer hardware and configuration can affect [...]

Posted in Microsoft, Personal No Comments »

I noticed Cal Evans had put up a list of goals for the 2008 year.  It got me to thinking about my own, and then I realized pretty much everything on his list is something I’d like to do as well.

Lose 30 pounds (I’d be fine with losing 10 this year, but close enough!)
One blog [...]

Posted in Diet, Personal No Comments »

again this year.  Leaving this afternoon.  It’s about a 9 hour drive, and I think I miscalculated a bit this year.  I was comparing flying to driving.  I’d initially estimated fuel cost at around $100.  I think it’s going to be more like $190 or so.  Flying would have been $240, but then there’s a [...]

Posted in Codemash, Conferences, Personal 2 Comments »

So Magento has the hot buzz in the PHP community right now as the next big ecommerce system.  I’ve not done much with it beyond poke around in the code.  My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has [...]

Posted in Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Personal, Software, Web 6 Comments »

If anyone knows of a process to seamlessly store all incoming and outgoing mail in to an SQL database (preferably mysql, but I’m open to other open source alternatives right now), please let me know.
 Did you like this post? Buy me a hot chocolate!

Posted in Personal 1 Comment »

Seems mostly like a waste to me.  I’ve grocery shopped in 5 states in the past 3 years, and most of them have had the stupid plastic tack-on boards holding pictures of local ‘REALTOR(tm)’s who inevitably freak me out, staring at me while I’m sizing up my bananas.  Does anyone buy anything from these people?  [...]

Posted in Ideas, Personal 13 Comments »

I just picked up Dreaming in Code from the library yesterday (or was it Friday evening?) and I’m about a third of the way through it.  I saw it at digitalguru.com when I was there a couple weeks ago, but didn’t know what it was about.  Then I read a review in the latest “strategy [...]

Posted in Book, Design, Development, Personal, Software, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

Read this: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2224553,00.html
Where is the “USA for Africa/We are the world” outpouring over these atrocities?  Are any churches funding these ‘missionaries’ in Africa?
‘My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn’t know these men. My mother left the house. Left [...]

Posted in Personal 3 Comments »

Been mostly sick as a dog since Friday.  I think the jetlag kicked in, and I probably picked up something on the plane, or in the office Friday, cause from Friday night on, I’ve been very sick.  Saturday morning I was weaker than the writing in an in-flight magazine.  Sunday got a bit better, then [...]

Posted in Family, Personal 1 Comment »