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It has been way too long since I added an article and upgraded my site. On the heels of returning from Drupalcon Chicago, I'm looking forward to trying to keep up with the latest and greatest options in Drupal these days. I have been rapidly building new sites at my new gig over at the University of Maryland.
This year, 2024, marks the 42nd year (should be 43 years in a row since the tournament was canceled in 2020 due to COVID) that I have picked at least one NCAA men’s basketball bracket. I have copies of many of them, including the one from 1981, when I picked my Louisville Cardinals to win the championship. That was the year they lost their first game on a halfcourt shot. Some people might be deterred after that jarring experience, but not me! Then again, I was only 5 when it happened.
It is really remarkable that after writing online stories for 25 years, I have a topic today that I’ve both never written about and something I know more about than almost anything else.
That thing is figs.
How did we get to this point? My uncle had a fig tree in his backyard, and we lived at his house 16 years ago. Coincidentally, my father-in-law also had fig trees, so when we bought a new house 14 years ago, we accepted a gift of a fig cutting and planted it in an auspicious backyard location.
Great book that runs the gamut of synthetic biology
The term "natural" used to be substantially easier to apply to basic items like fruit and animals. It is both exhilarating and frightening to consider "improving" genetic material, but humans have a knack for putting their marks on everything imaginable.
During high school and college, I worked at Kentucky Kingdom amusement park in Louisville, Ky. Besides battling racuous crowds and the blazing heat, one thing that was interesting to me was trying to keep track of the different people I was seeing throughout the day. As a games attendant (a.k.a. carnival barker), I would attempt to personally say things to people that I saw multiple times, whether at different games or at different parts of the park. This was mostly just a sales tactic, and I think the customers likely thought I was training to have my own magic show.
It's getting easier to check out e-books from U.S. libraries, now that Amazon recently announced that Kindle users could download e-books from 11,000 libraries. It's important to note that you don't have to have an actual Kindle to be a Kindle user; you can also use the free Kindle app available on many mobile devices, or the Kindle Cloud Reader from your browser.
If you ever had grandiose ideas about becoming a professional arm wrestler, and defeating numerous arm-wrestling machines in the process, you should probably put your dream on hold.
Since three players recently broke their arms playing Arm Spirit, Japanese game maker Atlas has decided to remove all 150 of its machines from arcades.
If I were tasked with the chore of educating an alien race about earth's culture, it's pretty obvious how I would start. I would create an online slide show of the 2009 Super Bowl commercials. After all, what better way is there to show a foreign species how humankind has evolved into tech-hungry, commercialized beings?
Google is surely near the end of cataloging every book known to man, including those manuals that come with VCRs, because The Developers has finally made the list. Google Print is nice because it allows you to review portions of the book and perform searches throughout. However, not all of it is searchable, so you won't be able to see the ending.
Thanks to everyone who sent along condolences for my grandma. I wanted to post the eulogy I gave at the funeral to show our gratitude for her life.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Ben, and I am Tiny’s oldest grandson. Despite being her oldest grandson, I sort of felt sometimes that she thought of me as her son. But maybe that’s just because she frequently called me Doug or Rusty.