The Cleveland Plain Dealer had a story about three men who started a business hosting different kinds of networking events for people. They called their venture “3 Guys”. [Read more…]

Some of them are quite clever.

(Via Gawker.)

Computer problems are keeping me busy and preventing me from accessing the files where I keep my blog notes.

Blogging should resume later today.

A new book by Ken Segall titled Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success describes the introduction in 1998 of the iMac, the computer that anchored Apple’s comeback. Here is a passage from an excerpt of the book. [Read more…]

Some interesting reflections from a professional safecracker who works on the right side of the law, helping people and companies that have inadvertently locked themselves out of their own safes. It turns out that some vaults in banks have a ‘time lock’ that once set and the door locked, only unlocks the vault once the required time has elapsed. Such a device caused a panic when a bank executive locked her own child inside the vault. [Read more…]

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my inability to understand the appeal of the Spelling Bee competition. It seemed to me to be not worth the enormous amount of time that people expend on it. A recent NPR report examines the extraordinary success of the ethnic South Asian community in this contest. [Read more…]

Here is a rather tragic story about a school nurse who would not let a student having an asthma arrack use his inhaler because he did not have an updated medical release form in his file. The school called the mother to come but by the time she did the student had collapsed on the floor. [Read more…]

I am often taken aback by what children’s requests parents seem willing to indulge. Take this one. [Read more…]

A man pickets a restaurant when they tell him to stop eating so much at their ‘all you can eat’ fish fry. [Read more…]

I read the works of psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) voraciously when I was younger. His wrote about how humans suffered from a sense of alienation due to their estrangement with nature and with other people, and that this was a source of many mental problems and destructive behavior because they sought to fill that need by various means that did not address the fundamental problem of alienation. In his writings he suggested alternative ways of achieving fulfillment by connecting people with one another in deep and meaningful ways. [Read more…]