Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

<h1>The Holy Grail</h1>

I stopped using Microsoft Word about a year ago, partly because of an instinctive loathing for anything with the word “Microsoft” in it, and partly because of what it has become: a bloated and baroque wannabe desktop publishing tool. It wasn’t always this way. Office made Microsoft an obscene amount of money as it slithered [...]

Tomorrow Is Here

Jose Padilla was imprisoned in 2002, and for about a month you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about dirty bombs, a specimen of which Padilla, according to the government, was planning to plant in some major American city. The media, an organism which ingests bullshit then spews hyperbole, sketched out scenarios of an [...]

Note to DVD User Interfaces: You Are Horrible and I Hate You

Is it just me, or do DVDs have the most annoying user interfaces on the planet? I have yet to pop in a DVD, any DVD, that doesn’t annoy, bewilder, enrage, or sadden me, and scandalize my effete and finely-tuned UI sensibilities.

The problems are myriad, and endemic. First and foremost, there’s no standardization: although every [...]

Epiglottis

Epiglottis epiglottis Epiglottis Epiglottis epiglottis Epiglottis Epiglottis epiglottis Epiglottis Ooo rock me epiglottis!

The Write Muscle

I joined an online writer’s workshop called Critters a couple of months ago, and the critiques I’ve been getting back so far have been fantastic: insightful and smart and immensely helpful. To my surprise, though, I’m finding my reaction to other people’s work to be just as valuable as their reaction to mine.

I’ve been attending [...]

Why We Die

I heard a report the other day about the toll that malaria is taking on the third world: sub-Saharan Africa, in particular. It kills a million people a year, and sickens around four hundred million more.

I had no idea malaria was still such a huge issue. It’s not a first-world disease, so the big drug [...]

The Patriot Act is Watching You

The thing that we need to understand about Big Brother is that he isn’t fictional: he’s not a villain from our past or a bogeyman in our future. He’s here and now: he’s a constant and burgeoning possibility. Every government has within it the makings of a police state. Just add a dab of magic [...]