Don't get me wrong, I love to see high traffic numbers. They are supposed to mean that you guys are reading what I have to say, which is flattering. However, analysis of site traffic shows that about 3/4 of it is coming from Russia's Yandex web spider. How many times does it have to crawl the site? I get an extra 3-5k hits per day when it hits. WTF?

3,000 hits per day in exchange for 2 referers is just not a fair trade.

First of all, lets get one thing straight: if you intend to enjoy your coffee, don't put it through a drip coffee maker. If you bought good beans, it is worth the trouble to brew them properly. If you didn't buy good beans, then you don't care what it tastes like anyway and you can go brew drip coffee till your heart is content.

Me, I like to taste it, not withstanding the addition of cream and sugar. Good coffee just tastes better.

And good coffee brewed correctly tastes great!

What constitutes good coffee and how are you supposed to brew it properly?

Simple questions deserve simple answers.

Paper thin walls do not make for good neighbor relations. Of course, neither does keeping odd hours... like when you habitually sleep from dawn until noon. What gets me, however, is how people simply assumes that everyone else keeps normal hours. I don't care if 90% of the population is awake at 7am, that doesn't mean that it is OK to ride your car horn when you are too lazy to go knock on a door. It also means that it isn't OK to watch TV really loud on the other side of the wall from where I'm sleeping. Throughout the tenure of my current residence, I have had to cope with mid-morning mariachi music, extended catholic familiy gatherings, and obese people with no capacity to walk without shaking the floor above me.

The final capstone, however, is when, after all that I've endured, one of those responsible sees fit to pound on my wall at night while I'm conducting a business call.

Well, I have a bass solution for noise pollution.

Ever since Plato kindled our excitement with his retelling of ancient stories about a mighty sea people whose home was destroyed in a single day and night as it sank beneath the waves. I cannot recall where I first heard mention of it, but the wonderous images that it conjures have been with me for most of my life. Having been given the time to research and study the literature that has been published on the subject, I've grown steadily more and more certain that a single source is the originator of pre-history for every civilization on the globe.

When considering a portable internet device, it is important to consult someone with a bit more experience with a wider range of devices. I have owned a Nokia 770 for a few years now and it is great for what it does: which is give me access to the internet and allow me to update the site.

Over the years, however, I've begun to notice some aspects of the experience that could be improved upon. When the Nokia 770 first came out, I was more eager than I've been for anything that didn't come from under a christmas tree. All I wanted was convenient portable access to the internet, and that's exactly what it gave me.

Of course, the general reaction to it was "what else does it do?"

Well, all it needed to do at the time was connect me to the internet. Now that time has passed, my needs have been refined and my priorities re-evaluated. It's time to shop for a new WiFi tablet!

Who better to ask for advice than Engadget?

Thanks to Chris from over at CrispCreations.co.uk, I found out that site registration was broken. Thanks to having resolved the exact same issue on a client site in development, it was a quick matter to resolve the problem.

So that everyone has a fair chance to put their two cents in on Ivory Tower, I've fixed registration. Keep reading to hear the details...

With all of the pseudo-blog sites that are out there, it seems redundant to maintain each of them independently. Fortunately, several of them provide API's that can be used to submit updates from your own site (or MY own, in this case). If you set up an API connection for each service that you make use of, you could then publish a single article on your site and have a summary automatically posted to each of them, including links back to your primary site. Can you say "convenient"?

For now, I'll focus on the easiest one that I've found: Twitter.

Twitter runs on a continuous stream of user-submitted "status" updates. With their API, we can find a way to publish local updates on our own site and have them be replicated on Twitter. Then, you never have to go to Twitter for anything except to read the status updates of your friends. Of course, we could quickly establish a block on the site that pulled your Twitter friend updates and displayed them, but today we are only going to rig update replication...

Best known as the six-degrees zero-point and for his extensive collaboration on scientific papers, Paul Erdős is a cultural icon for the information generation. If you were a scientist, physicist or mathematician, there was a chance that Paul would show up on your doorstep, ready to spend a few days helping you complete a few theories you might have been working on.

He was quite eccentric, but incredibly intelligent too. Despite his propensity, in later years, to operate under the almost continuous influence of methamphetamines, he was an invaluable asset to the scientific community. His contributions must have been responsible for dozens, if not hundreds, of scientific papers to be completed which might otherwise have stagnated in the hands of their originating authors.

In honor of his achievements and reputation, I posthumously declare him St.Erdős!

Often, in conversation, I will take the liberty of informing someone that one of the points that they are trying to make is arbitrary. People spend much of the time that they are trying to communicate simply overloading their intended audience with too much information... most of which is arbitrary.

If you want to prove a point, simply state the non-arbitrary aspect of it for consideration; the rest is virtually worthless.

Of course, what you are trying to say isn't arbitrary to YOU; you see your points as being important... which they might be. But it doesn't matter unless they are non-arbitrary.