Remind me not to stay at a Hyatt. Can't remember the last time I stayed at a hotel that didn't offer free wifi and/or wired connectivity in the building. Hard pressed to name brands though - I don't travel often and when I do I just snag whatever gives me the best price/review balance at the moment.

Great article, lots of stuff I'll need to work on myself. But eMonitor.. Holy crap is that expensive (and yes, I just noticed you acknowledge that). I've been looking at the Brultech monitors. They look pretty flexible, and inexpensive (caveat - the link shows you just the monitoring portion - you'll need to go under…

Facial recognition is probably the worst biometric "security." Consider this — If there's physical access, nothing is secure. Best you can do is keep your phone with you at all times, and have some light protection to prevent casual abuse (ie turn your back for a second in the wrong company). A PIN or pattern is…

I'm not familiar with this particular benchmark, but I do know it's nearly impossible to test just a single component - there's always going to be something else influencing it, such as RAM, disk, chipset, etc.

I had that exact vacuum. Great idea, worthless execution - dirt cup was minuscule, and the NiMH batteries were junk.

When the bottleneck on the benchmark is somewhere besides the CPU. Memory or disk speed, for instance.

It's an essay on observed behavior, not a scientific study. And there's some sense behind it, too - you'd have to be living in a cave to miss the massive increase in risk aversion these days. It's partly driven by news media - padding out programs with whatever heinous crime they can dig up, even though crime is down…

I Am Not A Lawyer

There were convincing arguments in the comments the last time this came up that those types of works had a human author because someone choose where to set the automatic mechanism and the manner in which it would be set off. The distinguishing factor here is the author had no intent to have the monkeys take pictures,…

Western MD. You guys? Best of luck with going retail at any rate.

I wish I never had to go to Wally World, but it's one of our few shopping options. They don't stock anything but processed briquettes. Maybe I'll check into site-to-store or talking them into ordering some stuff.

I should know better by now. :)

Well damn. Sure, Amazon sells some lump charcoal, but it's all $25-$30 shipped. Back to Cowboy and carefully watching the contents, I guess. Next time I'm in town I'll try and snag a bag of better stuff to sample.

Yeah, that's definitely it. Sounds like they would have given it a positive rating (barely) other than the strange items found in the bags. I haven't seen anything that didn't look like some sort of hardwood scrap, but I'm still thinking I'll go through Naked Whiz a bit to find an alternative. I think Cowboy is the…

Tempting. I've been using bags of lump charcoal from Lowes. It's generally good, but the inconsistency drives me nuts sometimes — It clearly comes from many sources, and often I'll run into massive pieces that need broken up, which gets pretty dirty quick. It is interesting pulling out the occasional piece of charcoal…

If I had to, I could probably scrape up $300 to buy a standing desk. But I'm not sure if I'm going to be pleased with using one in the long run, and even if I knew I would, there are things I really *should* spend the money on instead. $30 sounds like a great idea. Or even cheaper, since a single Vika Amon and 4 Ekby…

You mean the very top of the first tower section to fall? It looks to me like the bottom of that chunk hits the ground, and the top snaps down on top of the thick part of the tower, on the opposite side from the camera. Few seconds later, it slides off the back and calls back into view.

My experiences were similar to yours - my parents fed me healthy as a child. I have vague memories of slipping out to the garden ~5 or so to eat peas off the vine. Later there was candy around, but it was a treat.

Yeah, I thought that was funny - didn't realize until the sci-fi car chases article, I bet we discovered it the same day.