How to Button Your Pants and Other Covenants of Urban Living

Today, I will share three observed examples of people doing absolutely the wrong thing in public and how these bad behaviors adversely affect others.

First on the list is knowing how to properly button your pants.  I saw a rather large fellow on the street the other day struggling to zip up his pants so he could button them.  He was doing it all in the wrong order.  First, you have to button the pants, then you pull up the zipper.  If you zip first and button second, you risk breaking the zipper.  Sure, it may be a little harder to suck in the gut first before the buttoning, but zipping and then sucking in only delays the real moment of truth.

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Posted in Humanity | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Dropping Dropbox: Hello Google Drive and SkyDrive!

Goodbye Dropbox!  I’ve hated you ever since I ceased my yearly paid subscription and you kept putting “canceled account” everywhere.  I didn’t like that threat then, and I don’t like it now.  I’m not “canceled” until my actual subscription expires.  I don’t like giving my money over to a threat, and so I’ve been anticipating the advent of Google Drive for a long while now.   Yesterday, Google Drive arrived, and I have been in Cloud Storage Glory ever since!

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Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

The Possibilities of a Driverless Car

In movies and television shows depicting the future, there are flying cars and cars that drive themselves — and sometimes a combination of the two. In the movie Total Recall, for example, there are taxi services that are entirely driven by robots. The promise of the future is that people will no longer have to drive if they don’t wish to do so, and that driving can be a more passive activity to be watched as though it were a form of entertainment of its own.

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Posted in Cities, Environment | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Ord, Nebraska and the 1940 Census Online

If you haven’t visited the National Archives online yet and subsequently clicked-through their fascinating “1940 Census” project — then you need to make some space in your day for that feral education of human proclamation in an agrarian society.  The 1940 Census project was so popular when it debuted last week, the servers repeatedly crashed.  You should be able to get on that site and do some searching now, though.  I decided to peel back a now-living history to Ord, Nebraska to see if I could find some of my ancestors alive in that historic marking and recording of prairie lives.

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Posted in Cities | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments