At Halloween, Google sponsors a costume contest for engineers who dress up as their favorite line of code. To help relieve the stress of being tied to their computers for such long hours, Google provides employees with free online-based massage therapy. Google employees who are about to become mothers receive 12 weeks of maternity leave; aging female engineers now coming to terms with the fact they...

Acai (more properly açai) products, generally targeted at health or weight loss, have been a hot spam item in the last year or two. One slipped through SpamAssassin today with a link to www.permanent-honorable-fruit.cn. Fitting that such a domain is in China, because "perfect honorable fruit" sounds exactly like the sort of phrase that's beautiful and insightful in Chinese and completely befuddling...

I'd forgotten how fun it is to ride around in circles. (Apparently I also forgot how to get into the mood for blogging.) I got back from Guanduras two months ago (wow!). Since then, I've had some fun out-of-town adventures, but the time I've spent at home has consisted mostly of recovering from being somewhere, preparing to be somewhere, and dicking around on the Internet. While I enjoy all of those...

First: Anybody got any cool plans for the 4th (i.e. the next 24 hours)? Second: I'll be volunteering for a week to set up Dreamtime , a festival that's equal parts new age workshops, tribal electro music and dance, and Burner-minded people. I'll be hoisting shade structures and unfolding yurts after the 8th; the festival runs from the 16th through 20th. Third: mollybzz are talking about...

Last week was my favorite week in Boulder: Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado. I missed several interesting panels due to sleeping in until 10 AM and because I had to finish moving out of my apartment, but I managed to make it to a dozen or so. I took notes at some panels, at others I just listened. The latter were often more enjoyable, but correlation is not causation. Questioning...

My last day of work was April 3rd. I spent most of it answering last minute questions and helping my manager prepare a presentation on the progress made on my project. Several people sent me a "Thanks and goodbye" email, but by the time I had a chance to read them, my domain account had been disabled and I couldn't see what they'd said. I picked up mollybzz as she arrived from Sam Clam's...

My goal for the evening: cancel phone service, power service, and change my address, all on the web. Verdict: Xcel (power): Very easy. Picked my state, clicked "Cancel service," logged in, picked a date, got a confirmation email. Qwest (phone): Bewildering. Couldn't find a link for canceling service, so I tried Move Service instead. It asked me to log in again, then gave a DHTML popup to pick my...

A lot of people are down on 2008, but I had a great time last year. To recap: At the end of 2007, I helped tamheals move to Cañon City, the most significant event in our breakup process . At the beginning of January, I learned that DHL lost my passport en route to the Chinese embassy . Fortunately, Denver has an expedited passport office, so for $150, four gallons of gas, and a few hours...

Even though I've been on the Internet for more than half my life and on the web for three quarters of its, I have some significant new tech and Web 2.0 luddite streaks. I don't have a cell phone, for instance, though that's as much because I don't want to pay lots of money to deal with the phone company's shenanigans as it is because I don't want to use the phone when I'm taking a hike. I'm not on...