Category: Uncategorized

My Book is Out in Paperback!

If you’ve been dying to read my short story collection, Unsanctioned Experiments, but you just aren’t into the ebook thing, then it’s your lucky day. It took me a year, but my book is finally available in paperback here! Who knew formatting a print book for the first time would be time-consuming? Thanks to everyone …

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The power of positive Powerball

Like a lot of people, I joined in an office pool for the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot last week. Spoiler alert: we won $4. And like a lot of people, during the days leading up to the drawing, I spent a few idle moments going on a mental spending spree with all my potential winnings. When I was …

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We Ate Bugs… and Lived!

Back in September, we took the family to the Insectival at the Athens Botanical Gardens. If your kids like bugs (and ours do), it’s a fun event. There were lots of cool educational displays, crafts and a big butterfly release. This was all fairly standard fun kid stuff. The thing I didn’t expect to see was a …

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Make Your Own Slime

A while ago, I was watching the kids on a rainy Saturday. There were so many fun things we wanted to do outside, but there we were, stuck indoors. Fortunately, the kids had found videos on how to make slime a few weeks before. This seemed like the perfect time to try some out. Choosing a …

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Speed Reading: Does it Work, and Do You Want it to?

I had heard of speed reading, just like you have. I’ve seen people making crazy claims about how fast they could get through a book, and I always thought of it as a bit of a parlor trick, like hypnosis. Yes, I believe it exists, but so what? I guess, more exactly, I was suspicious …

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Fun with Dry Ice

  Or: How to Entertain Little Kids for Hours for $5 A few weeks ago, I was grocery shopping with the kids. As we wheeled out of the frozen foods section, I noticed a big cooler full of dry ice for sale. I had seen it before, and thought it might be fun to do some …

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DIY Backlash and Internet Naysayers

The internet is the greatest tool for sharing information in the history of humanity. I particularly love it for finding out how to do new things, or how to do old things better. I’ve done a huge amount of work on my cars that I never would have accomplished without electronic help. And in that spirit, …

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My Planet Express luggage tag

Or: Making a luggage tag that actually stands out from the crowd I’ve done a quite a bit of travelling for business, but for a long time I managed to avoid buying specific luggage to do it. My grandparents gave me a set of LL Bean soft-sided luggage in the 80’s, and it has been well used and …

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Making a Google Cardboard headset for my iPhone

Growing up in the 80’s, I heard a lot of promises that Virtual Reality was right around the corner, the same way my parents had been promised flying cars. Any day now, I was going to be plunged right into a William Gibson novel, a virtual cowboy avoiding ICE. When the Oculus Rift came out in 2012, …

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Silver cube

When the Rubik’s Cube originally came out in the 1980s I was 10ish. I played with one, and could solve a side and the next level. But I could never do the full cube without laboriously paging through a solution book my Dad bought. Once the furor died down, I moved on to other things. Then, last year, …

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