I find the development of the C8 more interesting than the reveal or final product.

There is a lot of hype and high expectations riding on the Cosmic Crisp. I’ve been reading about the development of this apple for a couple of years now. The promise of an apple sweeter and crispier than a Honeycrisp has got to deliver.

This is great.

I want to do this to my Ford Probe. Not joking.

A graveyard/memorial of all of the products introduced and then killed by Google.

My favorite Google product that was killed too soon was Reader. It was THE BEST RSS aggregrator and reader. I’ve been using Feedly since Reader was pulled (2013) and while it’s good, it’s not Reader.

Another favorite was Google Listen. It was the first podcast app I downloaded in 2011 and it was so simple and great.

I’ve never really paid attention to the manufacturer of the flights I’ve taken, but this Reddit thread and the Imgur thread will probably make me reconsider taking a Boeing aircraft. There’s a documented history of Boeing trying to re-assign the blame for the failure of its aircraft.

The crashes also highlighted the vulnerability of the NTSB to corporate meddling. In 1996, According to the Seattle Times, the safety board had only 90 employees and relied on manufacturers to provide technical expertise in cases like the United 585 and USAir 427 crashes, which made it much harder to investigate cases where the manufacturer knew that it was responsible. Boeing’s obfuscation at every turn was pure corporate expediency: fixing the problem would require a massive recall costing hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention millions more in compensation that would have to be paid out if Boeing admitted responsibility. Even when the flaw began to result in deadly crashes, Boeing stuck by this policy. Had the failure been easier to detect and prove, they might not have been able to get away with it, but—thanks in part to Boeing’s muddying of the waters—they never faced the massive backlash that they should have received.

I often take my parents, my sister, and my in-laws for granted, who have all at some point provided free child care and babysitting for me and my wife. My mother-in-law, God bless her, has helped raise all three of our boys. For the last ten years, she has watched our boys two to three days each week. Some Friday’s, she takes the boys home with her and brings them back the following Monday, giving my wife and I a weekend alone to go on a date night, sleep-in, and catch-up on errands or chores around the house without a child nagging for a snack or complaining that their brother has ‘the’ toy they want to play with right at that moment.

Without my mother-in-law, I don’t know if we would have had three boys. Our lives might be totally different without her.

Last night at dinner, we were talking about our favorite vegetables1 and when my daughter said tomatoes might be her pick, my 11-year-old son, who is at that annoying know-it-all stage of his life and loves to shut down his sister on any minor quibble, said “tomatoes are a fruit”. I argued back that while a tomato might technically be a fruit, it is culturally considered a vegetable and that he was just being a pedantic dick in order to dunk on his sister (but not in those exact words).

Pedantic Dick. That’s me!

This was a really excellent article.

The history of the electric guitar never gets old with me. I’ve read similar and varying accounts of its history and each time new details emerge. In this account, I especially liked the photo of The Log.

See also The ’59 Les Paul Standard entry in the Omnibus.