Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

Another Way Geeks Are Cool

My friend and colleague Jeff Duntemann has been kind enough to make Over The Edge one of three blogs linked from his own long-running weblog. One of the others is written by Jim Mischel. I have no idea who Jim Mischel is, but I’ve had a ton of fun reading his stuff. Jim’s major contribution to […]

Public Education

My friend Paul Schindler (whose blog is cited below) has left the technology publishing business to do what he’s long threatened: get his California teaching ticket and become a high-school math teacher. He’ll be terrific at it. The current issue of his weblog contains, down at the bottom, a long-ish e-mail from a friend regarding […]

Schindler’s Blog

My long-time colleague, erstwhile boss, and good friend Paul Schindler has, for the last four years, been writing a weekly weblog. It touches most parts of his life, and is therefore as wide-ranging and interesting as the author himself. He hand-coded he thing, so it’s not on any of the major blogging communities or aggregators. Pity […]

Plainly, No One Remembers the XFL.

Video Game League on the Verge. The Cyberathlete Professional League receives a much-needed $45 million cash infusion, a commitment from Intel and exposure from ESPN. But will anybody watch? We have digital cable. I live in the city where they invented the televised Yule Log. Apparently, some people will watch anything. I understand that the […]

Next, They’ll Tell Us That Men Won’t Ask For Directions

Stop the Frickin’ Presses Dept: Washington Post: Why Won’t We Read the Manual? And so it has come to this: Americans buy the most sophisticated computers, the coolest digital cameras, the most advanced automobiles, the most versatile cell phones and handheld organizers, and then . . . and then we forget, or decline, or flat […]

Echelon Lives After All

Back in the day at winmag.com, I wrote a few times about Echelon, a supposedly top-secret project by the NSA to monitor all international communications to and from the U.S. Echelon, it was said, could pick out key words from among the flood of information traversing the American border. I expressed my doubts about whether […]

The Lighter Side Dept.

From [bOing bOing]: Roger Kaputnik: kaput at age 81. Here’s an obit for Dave Berg, the pipe-smoking guy with the Reed Richards-style two tone hair who wrote and drew “The Lighter Side of…” cartoons for Mad. His sense of humor was quite a bit different from the rest of the usual gang of idiots, and […]

You Take Your Rapture, I’ll Take Mine

You know those fish magnets you sometimes see on the backs of cars? You’ve seen them — cars driven by Christians who feel the need for some kind of identifier in case the Rapture comes and the archangels look for a tag as if they were cosmic AAA towtruck drivers? Anyway. Some of you might […]

One of These Things Is Just Like the Other One…

The Shifted Librarian also finds a luscious piece in Darwin Magazine. Prepare to rethink your analogies: it turns out that apples and oranges are actually pretty similar. Scott Sandford gives the impression he wishes he never did the damn apples and oranges paper. He admits to having nightmares about his own obituary: He has devoted […]