Ted, Ted, Ted

Check Snopes

ted — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:49:16 +0000

before getting too excited. I don’t think they really have these cool floating cities yet.

How-To Guide

ted — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:25:50 +0000

I try not to be surprised when an amateur comes up with a better how-to guide than I’ve done in a while.

Drew makes the nationals

ted — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:03:04 +0000

Drew is a very nice guy who makes a mean espresso. He works at Ritual Coffee Roasters, about 10 blocks from our house. I spend way too much time there. Here is Drew at the national barista championship in Minneapolis a few minutes ago. Chris Baca, another Ritual great, was on earlier in the day.

Lilly in the house

ted — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:23:44 +0000

Lilly is a pretty good shot. Every picture in this set was done by her, except the first one.

It’s cool to be reminded of what a place looks like from a view four feet off the ground.

The W3C’s new SEX 1.0 specification - O’Reilly XML Blog

ted — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:26:34 +0000

I usually don’t go in for April Fool’s kind of stuff, but this is moderately funny, in a mildly geeky way.

Matt Gonzalez does my homework for me

ted — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:33:43 +0000

The difference between Matt Gonzalez and me is that Matt isn’t too lazy to document exactly why the Obama thing is such a scam. I just take it for granted, but Matt magnanimously takes on the burden of proof.

Go immediately to this site

ted — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:02:42 +0000

This is currently the best site on the web. (It acceded to the position after this one abdicated recently.)

Ian flies through

ted — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:42:48 +0000

My cousin Ian, on his way from Austin to Osaka for some super-brainiac post-doctoral type thing, was stuck on a plane for six hours at San Francisco last Friday night, courtesy of a storm we were having. We brought him home and made him eat some of Mary’s chicken pot pie. The weather cleared the next morning and he was gone before we woke up.

The Golden Compass

ted — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 07:32:22 +0000

…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie had on the way I watch movies. The bears, which loom large in the physical world of the book, are even more impressive on screen. They are an animation slam-dunk. The animators let a little fuzzy-and-cute slip into the bear characters and if anything it adds to the overall towering monsters effect. The screenwriters mostly dropped the author’s anti-church broadsides, but the usual suspects are getting upset about it, which is all to the good.

Opa’s funeral

ted — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:29:00 +0000

My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at the church where Opa had served his longest tenure. It was good to see everybody, and it was good to know Opa went out a pretty satisfied guy. He was a connoisseur of church music — he booked the organist for his funeral himself, a couple of years ago, and the man was indeed the best organist I’ve ever heard live. I was picturing Opa lying there listening with that sly little smile he used to get when he heard something he really liked.