Rambles at starchamber.com

I own a Zire, the low-end PDA from Palm. I’m very happy with it, but my last PDA (a Visor Edge from Handspring) had a synching cradle for my work computer and my home computer. I found this very convenient for managing my data at home in the evening as well at work. So I [...]

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My sister-in-law went on a trip to England a few years ago, and her favorite stop on the whole trip was not the Tower of London, or the British Museum, or the Houses of Parliament. It was Mr. Potter’s Museum of Curiosities in Bolventor, Cornwall. Keep in mind that my sister-in-law took her hamster Frederick [...]

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I’m being sorely tempted to make the jump from Blogger as my blog service provider to Movable Type. Blogger is a great service, but there are a few features that I am pining for over on the other side of the fence. For example, look at Steven Johnson’s site or Matt Simoneau’s site. After every [...]

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Here’s a nice short essay from Salon that talks, in a general sense, about how you can meet your husband at the hospital or your wife at the war. Mixing is the magic thing, and events we call good and bad all lead to mixing. You just never know which mixing is the magic mixing. [...]

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The New York Times Magazine, came out with its 2nd Annual Ideas of the Year issue. There’s lots of good stuff here, from botox parties (originally blogged here way back last April) to haunting more-real-than-real flower/scanner art. One item that jumped out at me was
News That Glows, about a simple ornamental desktop orb that changes [...]

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Today is my birthday. Every year around this time I like to link back to an essay I wrote several years ago about the hazards of having a December birthday. Is your birthday in December? If so, I embrace you in solidarity, my brother.

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MikeyO, the Mad Scientist and Super Genius behind Industry! pointed me to AlbinoBlackSheep, a bizarre and badly organized mess of various (mostly silly) animations. Some of the are very good though. I found this clever spoof of left-wing politics gone astray: Anthrax, The Invisible Victim. As the anthrax ambassador says, “Anthrax not responsible for death [...]

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Salon has a good piece about ReplayTV by Farhad Manjoo: Replay it again, Sam. In it, the author points out that every episode of Seinfeld (there are 180 in all) would fit on a $100 disk. The market for syndicated television programming is kept scarce by carefully managed distribution rights, thereby making cash cows out [...]

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If you could peel back your skull and peek at the synaptic fireworks inside, it would probably resemble the view from a search voyeur page. Search voyeur pages, like the one at Metaspy, show in real time the phrases that people are typing into search engines. At Metaspy, you can choose the censored version or [...]

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Every month I get a site traffic analysis report for starchamber.com so I can see and better understand what you, the hard-working web surfer (or tireless Google index bot) enjoy reading. In general there are few surprises, but every now and then I see something that is a little puzzling to work out. A piece [...]

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