The only thing nicer than vacationing in Hawai'i is getting on a plane and realizing that you're going back home... to Hawai'i.

Tina and I spent the Summer in Milwaukee, where her parents live. Unfortunately, the Summer for me was dominated by rotten work developments.

I had planned on doing …

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="More images from Machu Picchu"][/caption]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/84827625\@N00/sets/72157622397361314/

Machu Picchu Selects (31 Photos)

One of the many things that I haven't had time to pursue this year is a determination to do some hardware hacking. One aspect that's been a challenge is moving between the joy of "stick a wire in a breadboard and see what happens" and schematics (I'm sure for the …

Well, the day has finally arrived. We're off to hike the Inca Trail and visit Machu Picchu. Extended forecast for Cuzco: rain, rain, thunderstorms, rain, rain, rain.

Saw the latest Quentin Tarentino movie last night. I actually quite liked "Death Proof" so I didn't see this as any kind of "comeback," as the critics seem to be labeling it.

For 7/8ths of the movie, I was queasy about the trivialization of the Holocaust: a movie about …

"Bokeh" is a term used by photographers to praise the out-of-focus areas of a photograph.

Researchers at MIT have figured out how to exploit bokeh so that they can read 3mm barcodes with 2.5 micron elements at a distance of 4 meters with an off-the-shelf camera!

The "bokode" dot …

Did a final training hike around Lake Geneva the other day. Five hours in the rain with full packs, 14 miles or so. Felt fairly good about it until realizing: "So instead of around a lake, it's 4000' of vertical. Take a break, put your pack on and do it …

Researchers say that tone-deafness has a physiological basis: few neural connections between ... uh ... the frammitz and whatzitz lobes.

I think I may be tone-deaf. On the other hand, I may just have been lazy in music classes (I was lazy in all my other classes). I absolutely love music but …

[Update: The first time I read the post, my take was that Jeff Atwood took at face value]{style="color: #ff0000;"} the claim that COBOL is by far the most common programming language in the world. [Subsequently, comments have pointed out he was skeptical. But I still read the post …