My lovely coworker Shawn took a detour from his usual goofiness to send HP a message today. Since rating is what I do here, and everybody else is reposting it, I figure I’d better get in on the game too.

I don’t know if anyone else descends to the same level of egotism that I do or not, but one of my guilty pleasures is a Google Blog Search feed for “Justin Ryan” — if people are talking about me, I want to know about it! (And be able to print it out and put it on my refrigerator.)

Of course, Google is only so clever, and they don’t seem to have figured out how to filter out all the stuff that isn’t actually about me, meaning that about 85% of what comes down the pipe is just fluff. I’ve learned some things from this fluff, however; one is that Justin Ryan is a very common first & middle name combo. Another is that there are an amazing amount of Justin’s under 15 out there who have best friends or brothers named Ryan; I know this because Google can’t tell the difference between Justin Ryan and Justin, Ryan. Read the rest of this entry »

Change can be a really good thing. If I give someone a $20 bill for a $5 purchase, there had better be change or the exchange that follows will be decidedly unpleasant. If the FDA suddenly discovers that one of the meds I take every day causes a third arm to sprout out the back of your head, there won’t be any argument from me about changing it.

There are some things, however, that just shouldn’t change. A good example is the flavor of Coke; if switching up your soda formula results in a torch-wielding mob breaking down the doors at corporate HQ, that’s a pretty good sign that the decision won’t be winning a Nobel prize.

I found myself faced with just such a situation this morning when I opened up my daily comic email from Comics.com to find that one of the strips I read religiously suddenly looks like it was drawn by a third grader. Read the rest of this entry »

For about the last week, I’ve been teasing my esteemed colleague Marcel Gagné — Linux Journal’s celebrated Chef Français — after he posted a video of himself on Cooking With Linux speaking perfect English and dressed like an ordinary geek. Given that Marcel is French Canadian and can’t really be expected to wander around wearing a 2′ white hat all the time, it’s not surprising that he speaks perfect English and dresses like a normal person.

However, we all imagine how people we’ve not met will look, act, and sound, and Marcel’s video didn’t match my — somewhat twisted, I’ll admit — mental creation. So, he’s had to suffer through being picked on for not being “a real mad French chef.”

Since I’ve given him so much heck about his video, I thought it was only right for me to provide video demonstrating what my overactive imagination had cooked up. It took me a while to find what I was looking for, but here it is: A Real Mad French Chef. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a big fan of politics at all — my general opinion on primary elections and the resulting general contest is that it’s a matter of selecting the lesser of the lesser of two evils. I have absolutely no opinion on the coming election at all — I’m an independent, so I didn’t have a primary to vote in — and I haven’t (and am not sure I will) make up my mind about the general election. (One bit that does interest me, though, is that unless something changes dramatically, the Democratic nominee is going to have less than four years of national political experience. I’m thinking that’s probably somewhat unusual.)

For whatever reason, I was pondering on the two “presumptive” candidates today, and a disturbing realization hit me: there is a frightening possibility that whomever wins in November will die in office. Read the rest of this entry »