Matt's Blog

My check engine light came on today. (A couple weeks after I had it serviced…) I happened to be right near the dealership where I always have my car serviced, so I stopped in to see if my car was about to blow up, or if I could safely drive to Boston and back. She [...]

I just went to the bank to talk about loans, primarily to see if I had any chance at all of getting a mortgage, or if I’d have to rent a substantially more expensive, less-nice apartment. The guy spent about 10 minutes trying to remember his password to access mortgage information, before finally giving up [...]

Have you ever noticed a common thread with all the UFO sightings? No, no, not crazy people. The ones that seem at least a little credible. They’re all near Air Force bases or other military research facilities. Edit: This is why you don’t whip out a quick post on the spur of the moment. My [...]

Santa must know that I’m both obsessive-compulsive and a photographer, having brought me an ExpoDisc. It can almost be thought of as a filter that you hold over your lens. You use it to take a sample of incident light, which you then use to set your camera’s custom white balance. Most modern digital SLRs [...]

I worked from home today, because we were supposed to get snow and ice all morning. In actuality I’m not sure there was ever any precipitation, but I guess it saved me a bad commute. Rather than listening to music, I had the police scanner on today, since there were no coworkers to bother in [...]

I’m almost radically anti-spam. Not only is it annoying, but most spam is now sent by (tech) gangs that have either hacked computers or written viruses. Probably 99% of spam is sent by illegal, fraudulent means. There are lots and lots of ways to prevent spam. But this is about one way of prevnting spam [...]

It seems odd to post this on Christmas eve, but it just came up elsewhere, so I thought I’d post it here. There seems to be a group of people convinced that the government has banned praying in school, and that’s outraged that displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses isn’t legal. The first point I’d [...]

A really good writer could probably tie these diverse topics together, but I’m going to instead present a few different thoughts that are only related in that they’re aboutthe President. I initially laughed when I heard about the guy showing his shoe at President Bush. While I truly believe that we did a good thing [...]

Yet again, I find myself linking to Smashing Magazine. This time, it’s their 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials. I’m usually a bit of a purist when it comes to digital photography, but I’ve been slowly—very, very slowly—coming around to appreciating the art of Photoshop enhancements. Most of the tutorials Smashing Magazine links to, though, [...]

Kind of like duct-taping a giant butcher’s knife to a Roomba, sometimes an awful idea pops into your head, and it’s just so ridiculous that you can’t let it go. Unlike the Roomba deathtrap, though, I actually went ahead with this one: Markov Chains meet some delicious holiday recipes. To make it clear where one [...]