Matt's Blog

I was really pretty worried when I saw people quoting what they referred to as a comedian on the subject of the attacks in Boston. I wasn’t ready for someone to joke about it. But I took a look anyway, and I realized — comedians don’t just tell jokes. Sometimes they are absolutely fucking brilliant. [...]

I’ve used Gmail for ages, but have historically been less than impressed with its appearance. I’m all for a simple interface, but simple and ugly don’t have to go together. I’ve changed through their themes over time, never quite happy with the options. But more recently, I discovered that they allow “custom” themes. (Quotes around [...]

I’ve noticed this interesting tendency of people to evaluate things based on all the wrong metrics. A new Android phone came out the other day, and one of the reviews I read was praising its hardware specs. It had a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, or something like that. Its battery life was expressed [...]

Over Door Cervical Traction Kit This is apparently a legitimate medical thing, although they said that about trepanning in the past, too. But the fact that it’s a real medical thing will not stop me from having nightmares tonight about being tortured with this thing. Cold Steel Gunstock War Club The picture sort of makes [...]

I usually get my hair cut every 4 weeks. And while I don’t want to sound like a crazy person who measures time by haircuts, I’ve noticed that my haircuts are feeling more and more frequent. For whatever reason, it just seems like time is flying by with incredible speed, and the fact that I [...]

Those of you who know me well will probably know that I kind of have a thing for graphs. More generally, I find monitoring, trending, and logging to be invaluable. No sane sysadmin would ever set up a server without those things. But why doesn’t my house support this? Over the winter, I noticed that [...]

Two great quotes from recent news, providing a much-needed infusion of common sense and sanity: “When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of [...]

Although it was quite orthogonal to what I was looking at, Flip Your Classroom just came up as a related item on Amazon. It’s one of those rare Amazon items with a solid 5-star rating, and, despite not being a teacher and having absolutely no intention of becoming one, I’m so intrigued by this bit [...]

This was surprisingly hard to find — here is the definitive list of stores going into the Merrimack Premium Outlets, slated to open June 14.

Every now and then I start reading something on Wikipedia, and end up getting pulled into a long series of digressions wholly removed from what I set out to read about. But it’s invariably fascinating. Take, for instance, solar power. I’ve read before that solar panels are really quite inefficient. At its peak, the energy [...]