The Fire Pit

I saw this out-of-office vacation email on Shine (Yahoo), which they apparently picked up from Gizmodo. Both sites fawned over how awesome this automated vacation response supposedly is, but I don’t see it. The guy comes off more as a smug jerk than the “psychological mastermind” the Shine author labels him as. Furthermore, like a [...]

I haven’t been doing much blog promotion lately, and it’s starting to show in my traffic stats. I definitely want to get more people coming to the site, but paying for SEO services or something like that is just not an option. Nor do I have the time right now to visit other blogs and [...]

I’ve been trying to resist the urge to join Twitter because the last thing I need right now is another social media platform sucking out every ounce of productivity I have to offer. I’ve checked the site out before, of course, but didn’t really see the point of it. Recently, however, there have been so [...]

Everyone knows that you can go to YouTube to find user-uploaded videos on just about anything. From stupid pet tricks to rock band demo tapes and political commentary, you can pretty much find anything you can think of. While I don’t have much use for the amateur stuff, I do like “shopping” for different products [...]

As an avid reader, I would love nothing more than to have a home library to retreat to whenever I want to lose myself in a novel. It’s one thing to read on the couch or in bed, but reading in my own library surrounded by built-in bookshelves would be an entirely different experience. I [...]

I use a lot of free stuff that other people have put tremendous time and effort into making available to the general public. In particular, I’m talking about Project Gutenberg e-texts and Librivox audio recordings of public domain books. I feel kind of guilty always being on the receiving end, so I’m going to do [...]