Category: Weekend Rant

Selling Twitter account on eBay boosts its value

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 13

What happens when Andrew Baron auctions his Twitter account on eBay? He gets written up in TechCrunch and elsewhere, and more people will start following his Twitter to see what’s…

Blogging changes: Why Twitter instead?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on February 18

Do I Twitter because I’m lazy? I few times this weekend, I’ve sat down with a laptop and thought ever so briefly about blogging. But then I wonder if the…

Editors and black swans

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 17

I’m reading The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Very engaging and provocative. I’d especially recommend it to journalists and economists, whose work he…

Kitten Mysteries and a Car Talk Question

Posted by: Heather Green on July 13

It was 3:30 in the morning, and I was standing in the knee high grass in the yard of a deserted neighborhood house listening for a kitten. The whole adventure…

Back from Getting Hitched

Posted by: Heather Green on June 17

It seems like Steve and I are reemerging at the same time! I am back, after taking three weeks off to get married and relax after getting married. My computer…

Back from biking

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 16

I’m back from a week of biking, a trip that took me some 460 miles from Ohiopyle, in southwestern Pennsylvania, through the Cumberland Gap and the Gettysburg battlefield, past buggy-driving…

Off biking

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 08

I’m heading out to Western Pennsylvania today for a biking trip. First we’ll see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. Then I’ll start pedaling (alone) back to New Jersey. I…

If silicon won the Cold War, what wins next?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 20

Jeff Jonas notes that if the West won the Cold War through its mastery of intelligence embedded on silicon, terrorists have the upper hand in the next level of the…

Productivity offline

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 18

I drove down to the Jersey shore, checked into a hotel, and wrote for three days. I was twice as productive as usual, and here are the reasons: No family,…

Writing update: crappy first draft

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 04

I spent most of the day yesterday sitting on this blue couch, legs stretched out in front of me, writing a book chapter on medicine. I was going on about…

Cleaning the kitchen and writing

Posted by: Stephen Baker on February 23

My wife complains no end about how I clean the kitchen, because I often stop when the job’s 90% done. I enjoy the beginning of the job. You wash a…

Wait til the fourth quarter to flush

Posted by: Stephen Baker on February 01

Halftime at the Superbowl is the sewage industry’s version of the Y2K crunch. Without dwelling on details, all hell could break loose. Or worse, I guess, not break loose….

Fairly satisfied? Extremely satisfied?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on January 27

Against every instinct, with the exception of procrastination, I clicked open a survey from Hotels.com about my most recent stay (at a Days Inn). But the questions I see…

Business opportunity: Devils wing of the Hall of Fame

Posted by: Stephen Baker on January 19

Here’s an early weekend rant on baseball. Apologies to non-fans. A high school friend and I have a new idea. Build a rival Hall of Fame that celebrates baseball for…

People envy you

Posted by: Stephen Baker on December 29

It’s easy to drive around in these winter days, see the bare branches on the trees, and to dream of being somewhere else. But I think it’s useful in this…

The books we got for Christmas

Posted by: Stephen Baker on December 25

The wrapping paper is still piled up around the tree, and the cat is digging through it. Here are the books we just opened: This is Your Brain on Music:…

Why we interrupt so much

Posted by: Stephen Baker on December 02

Peggy Noonan laments that the cable TV culture is rewards serial interrupters. This is true, and I’ve been puzzling over it since I read her article this morning. Here’s…

How would Babe Ruth fare on blogs?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 24

I did a little trend check to see which area most captures the imagination of bloggers: 1) War and Peace in the Middle East 2) Apple’s place in the digital…

Singing to our emotions

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 17

Did you ever notice when you’re jilted or mourning, or otherwise emotionally vulnerable, all the songs on the radio seem to be written for you? I’m living that phenomenon…

A different kind of work on vacation

Posted by: Stephen Baker on August 27

Why is it that vacations feel like work? Even though I barely turned on this computer in our week on the Jersey shore, each day was filled with challenges and…

Immigration detour: A Mexican tale

Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 30

Long before I’d heard the word Internet, much less blog, I worked as bureau chief in Mexico City for BusinessWeek. Before that I covered the border in El Paso….

Who doesn’t want to know English?

Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 08

The mayor of a nearby New Jersey town called Bogota is pushing for a boycott of McDonald’s because the hamburger giant has —gasp!—put up a few billboards in Spanish. The…

Mining a life for a four-minute eulogy

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 26

What’s one thing about your father or mother that you’d focus on in a eulogy? I write for a living, and I can usually find some nugget in a pile…

Expand to a book, then shrink it

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 10

On this very site I just came across this ad for Executive Book Summaries. Seems a bit strange to me. I wrote a magazine story. Now I’m working for a…

On the menu in Portland: Shredded pig’s spicy

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 04

Talk about the dangers of machine translation. I went to a Chinese restaurant in Portland’s outskirts (on 82nd St. NE, for cognoscenti). Very few nods to the English-language crowd in…

Energy crisis: Why we should study Gen. Grant

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 12

I was walking through the University of Texas campus yesterday, looking at all these students wearing backpacks equipped with a water bottle. I thought of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. His…

Living in a bubble, TiVoing the Final Four

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 02

No TV or papers for me this morning. No MyYahoo or blog-surfing. We had guests over for dinner during the Final Four, and I haven’t seen the (basketball) games yet….

Yahoo’s new e-mail: Too slow

Posted by: Stephen Baker on November 20

Yahoo’s new mail service, still in its beta version, is way too slow.

Selling Maureen Dowd’s writing to a 17-year-old

Posted by: Stephen Baker on October 22

Maureen Dowd’s column is a showcase of great writing

Way down yonder in … N’awlans.

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 03

If we must pronounce New Orleans as N’awlans, should everyone outside the Big Apple learn how to say New Yawk?

Best wishes for the holiday weekend (U.S. readers)

Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 02

(Thanks blinq)…

Out of the darkness came Albus Dumbledore.

Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 16

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006545.html#006545

Finally, a photo

Posted by: Stephen Baker on June 03

A photo by Dave Taylor, featured in Blogspotting, recalls Aztec bas relief.

iPod spells death on the road

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 08

Cyclists wearing iPods are flirting with highway death