This is similar to the canned responses available on Android Wear (and I’m guessing the development was related). Especially for the simple response messages, this makes life faster and easier.

I’m on my third non-carrier-specific phone and I wouldn’t ever go back. Knowing that if my carrier stops being the best option I can just switch, makes me feel more comfortable with my bill and options (plus using Google Voice means that my friends and family never see a phone number change). In addition to all that,…

There’s just so much good beer — and cider — in the PNW that I have a hard time caring about anywhere else. One of my favorite breweries is within walking distance (which is a real plus).

FYI, Elysian in Seattle is now an ABInbev property (as is 10 Barrel in Bend, OR).

Skip the trip and just come to Portland. We’ve got more breweries than any other city in the world.

Another useful tip is finding a good. cloth-covered chair with decent foam underneath. In college our choir’s tour bus had the perfect seats. As long as you were able to form a good seal with your cheeks (through pants!) the cloth and foam would magically absorb the smell. The trick is to hold the seal for a minute or…

We’ve gone as Jack and Jill. We grab grungy clothes, a couple of old, white t-shirts, and then roll around on the ground for a bit to get some dirt and grass stains. Then we do some bruising makeup (my wife does that with her eye shadow and whatnot). Then we stenciled the names onto our shirts. For extra points you…

I had a whiskey themed party over the summer and my brilliant wife came up with a cocktail that almost perfectly matched the taste of an aged bourbon or scotch.

She used lapsang souchong tea (it’s a smoked tea) with vanilla vodka and some cheap bourbon. We called it the poor man’s scotch.

As relatively healthy, relatively young people who have decided to not have children (and taken the medical steps necessary to ensure that), what insurance can we get that covers our needs (basic checkups, some chiropractic care, and emergency care), without wasting a bunch of money on maternity care and child care?

“Assess your progress for at least two weeks before making another call.” <— this might be the most important sentence in the article.

“Your Stubbornness Is the Real Reason You Aren’t Losing Weight”

Perhaps the best way to address people with a predilection to stubbornness isn’t to blame their fitness struggles on their stubbornness.

I had to force myself to read the entire text of this article, even though I found it poorly argued, because there is truth in it. Stubbornness can negatively affect not only…

I would also be interested in seeing the time it takes to learn new languages after the second. Usually for a monoglot the first language learned is most difficult with additional languages coming more easily.

One of the most notable applications of this is when one partner communicates love through service and the other doesn’t. The service person works hard to show love through serving (often working long hours away from the home to provide) while the other partner just wants some quality time or meaningful touch.

Evernote lost me when they started harassing me to upgrade. I was using the app to organize notes for a presentation (which I’d been doing for months) and the app popped up an upgrade nag-box in the middle of my presentation. That, along with their attempts to lock your data into their format, convinced me that I…

In learning the rhythms of other people I will, sometimes, ask permission to tell a story or change the subject.

“... and that’s how Mr. Whiskers stopped a nuclear holocaust.”
“Wow! Mr. Whiskers is a hero! That reminds me, I have a story about pet-related war-aversion, do you mind if I tell it?”

OR

I prefer stress — as long as I can have adequate time to rest when I’m not at work. Deadlines and events help to motivate me to get things done, but when I have too many things without enough down-time between them, the stress begins to erode my creativity.

Which is precisely why I’m about to head out on a…

I’m talking as someone who taught high school and failed students (for plagiarism). The response from the students and parents was... intense.

It is entirely possible that the reasons for our current grading system encompass both financial and emotional motivations.

There is, to be sure, a strong financial incentive for inflated grades and aversion to failing. However, that financial incentive would not exist if failing grades were not considered as signs of…

It is difficult to teach this because our school system says that failure is reserved only for the ones worthy of being publicly shamed. We don’t use a dunce cap anymore, but the emotional effects are the same.