Tag Archives: Links/News

Shout out to a store at Bricklink

I buy most of my Legos these days second-hand from a huge online market called BrickLink. People post their inventories for sale, and you can order from all of these people. BrickLink manages all of it.

Well, one store (so far) is a generous donor in the Buy Me a Lego campaign, and I wish to mention them specifically.

Front Range Lego, has chipped in with a great donation of $5.00.

Not an insignificant donations. If you need to get some Lego bricks on the cheap, go check them out.

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Announcing Buy Me a Lego

So I’ve resorted to desperate measures. 🙂

I’ve started a small experiment/campaign to raise the cash for a Lego Millenium Falcon. But I am making it worth people’s while. Whoever donates gets a link from the page to their own site.

The way it works is:

* for 65 cents, I put a link to their blog on the site.

* for $2 I ALSO mention them on this blog.

* for $10 I will put up a banner ad.

Will it work? I think so. Links to sites are worth it. It can help boost traffic. This blog isn’t super-popular, but it’s growing larger and has quite a bit of traffic every day. I think the site I just setup will get dugg or slashdotted one of these days.

So head over to http://www.BuyMeALego.com and contribute! Thanks!

 

Watkins Apothecary

I just wanted to say thank you to Valerie and Don for their contribution to my Buy Me a Lego campaign. Their generous donation deserves a link to the web-site of a very interesting store. As an aspiring gourmet, I particularly enjoy the pantry section of the store. I’ve been meaning to look into some high-quality spice and herb sources on the Internet, since what we can find around here in DC is sadly lacking in quality.

My grandfather would have loved this store. He was an excellent amateur chef and had a nice collection of spices, oils, and other ingredients that came from stores like this.

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Getting Green Off the Grid

Going green is something I am slowly becoming more interested in. I’m not really sure what steps exactly we need to take–I don’t think we have an inordinate impact on the environment, and to be honest, right my pocketbook is far more important. That said, I do drive a Honda Civic that I’ve been able to get more than 42mpg out of. We try to use everything we buy, and dispose, give away, recycle, sell, etc. everything we don’t need. We try to walk places where we can.

Thank you to Eric for his contribution to BuyMeALego. He has a genuinely interesting site. Getting Green Off the Grid is a blog about both more sustainable living and living independently.

About the site:

This is a journal of my research into becoming more independent, away from the power grid. My goal one day is to live out in the middle of nowhere, dependent upon none but myself and my family. That dream is a long way away, but every little step counts.

I think that is a very enviable position to be in–completely independent. Independent power utility in particular fascinates me. Or better, being able to sell your power back to the power company.

I don’t think it’s possible to turn off our dirty technologies or habits all at once, but having people like this who do the research, who advocate, who publicize the next big clean technology is absolutely vital. We need to start down the path and have smart people working on it hard. We’ll get there, eventually.

Anyway, I think I will subscribe to his blog for a while and check it out–the posts I’ve read are interesting and he links to some good stuff.

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A Visual Studio that’s easier on the eyes

After you’ve looked at Visual Studio all day for a few days in a row, the brightness of the white background can really start to bother you, especially as LCD monitors get brighter and brighter. That’s why I’ve become a big fan of Dave Reed’s Dark Side theme for Visual Studio 2005. It took me a few hours to get used to it, but now I’m hooked.

The only thing I changed was the font. I really like Consolas, size 13. Courier New is Courier-Old-and-No-Longer-Used.

At work, I still have to use VS2003 for a project, and keeping it in the older, white background really helps me distinguish which environment I’m in.

Deep Computing Philosophy from Steve Yegge

If you haven’t read Steve Yegge, you owe it to yourself to do so. He only writes about once a month, but every single article is worth reading, whether you agree with him on everything or not. His latest is fascinating and incites some interesting pondering about the future of software…I’m going to have to think about a lot of it…