There's a commercial on TV. It's using a dang AIR SUPPLY song in the background. Would somebody please tell me what product that commercial is for, so I can make sure I never buy it?

Last night my wife and I watched Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a Steve Martin movie from 1982. It's a parody of film noir movies from the 1940s and 1950s.

I just got back from Chicago. I used to go there a lot, but hadn't been since high school. Consider this my travel diary. I don't expect it to be interesting to most people, but maybe someone else will find it useful.

I run this website on a shoestring budget, using a PC in my office strung off my home broadband connection. I've been doing it this way for something like 7 years.

That was all fine and good, but it stopped being reliable recently.

Sometimes a real gem turns up on Digg. Like the Calvin and Hobbes search engine. Remember the punch line from a priceless strip, but don't remember much else? Key it in, and it'll find the strip for you and tell you when it was published.

I found most of my favorites by searching for "aiee!"

I sure hope bringing attention to it doesn't make it go away...

There are people on eBay who buy up old DIY magazines and books, cut out the individual articles that tell you how to make stuff, and flog them for $3 or $4 apiece. It seems like those magazine articles told you how to make just about anything.

But what if you get outbid? What if you don't want to pay $4 to read a 4-page article? And what if you can't find the article at the library? (Conveniently they don't tell you where the article came from.)

I've got a web site for you.

I heard about this on the radio yesterday: A Baltimore man was arrested when he was spotted driving with a 30-foot light pole belonging to Baltimore Gas and Electric sticking out of the front and rear windows of his station wagon.

"You don't have to know how to program in PERL, you just have to know how to use PERL."

PERL, in case you don't know, is a programming language. If you're not going to program in PERL, what are you going to do with it?

Here's the best tidbit from the article I found:

"The Indian automobile market offers significant growth potential in the long term. With our increased presence there, we will be well positioned to fully tap into this potential," Chief Executive Helmut Panke said in a statement.

It never occurred to me to type print.google.com into a web browser and see what happens. I've known for months that Google was digitizing books but I had no idea the service was out where you could get to it.

Visit and search for something. You'll be amazed.