which cell phone manufacturers could solve tomorrow with an over-the-air update restricting drivers to emergency calls and music apps when driving

I don’t think that can be completely fair. I was thinking about this just yesterday. When I turned right just past a large parked delivery truck, I went slowly and carefully, because my vision was blocked by the truck. But I thought at the time that if someone had been barreling down the sidewalk on a bike (not legal…

When I was a freshman in high school, I was on a group trip on which we took along stuff to make sandwiches for lunch. A friend and I were put in charge of the sandwich making. We decided it would be funny to leave the plastic on the cheese. It turned out, it was funny! This just seemed like a good place to tell the…

The PO of our house hung a bunch of wallpaper. Really, really badly. In the master bath I took down the mirror over the sinks, and behind it were two holes where medicine cabinets had been, but they wallpapered *over* the holes! Elsewhere, they cut around everything on the walls, like towel hangers, etc. It had to…

I don’t remember the exact date, but sometime in the next two weeks it will be 20 years (!) since I bought my SRT-4. It had 2 miles on it when I took it for a test drive, and it has 243K on it now. Such a fun car.

So that’s *your* Neon we saw in last week’s post. Very nice-looking car! I love that color. It’s like a saturated version of the color of chicory flowers.

Is that a Neon? That was my first thought, but then I thought something didn’t look right about it. I’m a lot more familiar with second gen than first, though.

Here’s an alternative perspective. I’m beginning to get old, but I’m a software developer and extremely tech savvy. It seems to me that the way I see my 20-something kids consume media adds a lot of stress. It’s well known from research that choices cause stress. I see my daughter or son-in-law scrolling through…

It does have a huge amount of rear leg room and an incredible amount of space. But it can be pretty uncomfortable, especially for a road trip. I was on a media team one year that followed One Lap of America on the whole almost 3000-mile route. We were in an Element, and it was a long, rough, 10-day experience. A…

Yikes. I feel like I’ve been very lucky. One time a rear wheel came off a van that was approaching me from the opposite direction. It bounced across the road and into the ditch instead of hitting me. The van, of course, dropped and showered sparks like crazy. Amazingly the driver kept it going straight and stopped it,…

My wife and I discovered that some kind of spicy potato chips are great on a wide variety of sandwiches. Most recently I grabbed a bag of some limited-edition honey habanero Ruffles. I found them a little too spicy to eat on their own, but they were spectacular on a sandwich.

For the same reason stainless steel works, there are some other chemical reactions you can take advantage of. Rubbing a penny or other copper or copper-plated item should also work. The nickel ions in stainless steel and copper ions on the penny have the same +2 charge. Table salt with its +1 sodium ions, or something…

The factory that made Payday candy bars was in my little hometown when I was in highschool. The father of one of my classmates came to talk to our chemistry class one day about his job. He said he was a “microanalytical entomologist,” so his job was determining if the candy contained more than the allowed about of…

Easy! Have Llama write a response for you.

Counterpoint: Kia and Hyundai. The same arguments could have been made about them, and probably were, but they are now huge brands in the U.S.

Well, ya know, I’m going to say buying a minivan. Like a lot of people, we got one in the early 90's after our first child was born. Later traded it for a newer, nicer one. There’s nothing as generally useful as a minivan. You can haul a bunch of people, a bunch of things, and even fit a stack of plywood in it and…

The base 2.2L naturally aspirated engine in them made about that same 90hp number. The intercooled turbo version made 175hp.

Well, um, I have two of them currently, ‘87 and ‘89 CSXes, both production number 321 in their respective years (see user name :) ). I’ve owned 5 Shadows/Sundances/CSXes at different times over the years.

He’s Gen X, and younger than me. Don’t forget that we nerdy Gen Xers invented the internet in its modern form. We invented internet memes, too, but they weren’t really accessible to non-tech types until after the advent of the web in the 90s, and I don’t think Ted is a tech type.

Well, this hits very close to home. My dad has been increasingly affected by this for the past couple of years. In a sense I’ve already let him go, because he hasn’t been *himself* for a while. I’m sitting here in the hospital with my mom, waiting for him to come out of surgery. He had a major stroke last week. This…