http://www.theshtat.com/blog Astonishingly sparse remarks for you and me. Sun, 25 Feb 2007 03:33:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens's polemic against Mother Teresa, is a worthwhile one-sitting read. An excerpt that typifies the feel of the book: The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. [Mother Teresa] described a ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/62 Everyone deserves a personal Macromedia Flash intro. If you're not familiar with this underrated form of ego-stroking, here's a representative example (caution, Mom: rap music). Tell me you wouldn't want to have a montage of yourself wearing expensive suits, getting water dumped on your head (?), and holding an ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/61 Four months ago, I bought myself a souped up MacBook Pro. I had always been dismissive of Macs - the hermetically sealed hardware, the One True Mouse Button ("mash the keypad with your palm now"), the alleged dearth of good software. But the allure of the MacBook was ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/60 The Genetic Science Research Center at the University of Utah runs a site called Mouse Party that features some really creative Flash work and an odd, overdesigned UI - all in the name of drug awareness. It isn't very informative beyond what you learned in high school health class, ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/59 Warren Buffett pledged the lion's share of his recent philanthropy to the Gates Foundation, which mainly caters to immunization, AIDS prevention, and minority scholarship. These are noble causes, to be sure, but they are only a few of the many that are targeted by millions of conscientious people ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/58 While directing a friend to a paper on Sawzall, I discovered a blog post that casts engineers who create such broadly applicable tools as "major force multipliers". This reminded me of my own everyday-life reuse of military planning lingo: "force projection", which I take to mean, one's ability to ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/57 Most families pass around certain lore about their longest lived or longest departed members. I've always been fascinated by these stories: how the chronology of a life becomes entertaining narrative, how some details are recalled and others forgotten, how apocryphal flourishes are injected here and there. And of ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/53 Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is well done. The pages flew by, owing more to a slowly building feeling of discomfort than to the sheer strangeness of the plot. I hadn't read fiction in a while, and this was a nice way to break the fast. Plus, according to Amazon, you ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/52 I've just returned from a week-long stay in beautiful Maui. When you think of a Hawaiian vacation, you might imagine carefree days spent sipping mai tais on the beach. However, given how sedentary the rest of my life is, I decided to go a different route: hiking. We trekked ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/51 Thanks to Dealnews, I snagged a Dell 2001FP monitor for $564 plus shipping. This was a no brainer. It took me a while to realize that Dell's hardware prices are highly dependent on the coupon code you dig up, the current phase of the moon, and your general ... http://www.theshtat.com/blog/archives/50