A sign at a nearby farm read "cheese making beef eggs". I think it used to have dots/dividers between some of the words, but they'd faded. My wife saw it and said, "What are beef eggs? And how do you make cheese with them?"

I did the same thing as a child with coffee cake. The thing of it is, it took years before someone bothered to correct me and let me know there's no actual coffee in it. What a waste of a bunch of dessert.

I realize this analysis is about "popular" music, so this may not entirely fit. But last year I listened to one of those Great Courses sets on "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" and really changed what I've been listening to, which now includes quite a bit of concert music (baroque, classical, etc.) that I never really appreciated before. Am I an outlier that I'm picking up something new just as I turn 40, or does this not count because it's not pop music, and old fogies are supposed to drift into listening to this ancient stuff anyway?

I'd say I've also picked up a lot of new material recently because of Pandora, but I'll admit most of that is older music, where it's a genre/style I liked, but I somehow missed some of the artists from that era who are similar to ones I already liked.

While I'm dumbfounded by repeated arguments that there can't be any business model other than "selling a hammer" I also don't agree that 70 years is a reasonable span for royalties. A decade or two? Sure. That's a pretty good span for getting your money back from a creation. But by the time a work of art has spanned a generation, let alone two or three, it really ought to be open to the public to make use of it. Without getting too specific about where to draw the line, it seems to me like a decent rule of thumb that if something existed before you were born, by the time you're a fully grown adult it ought to be available for use in your own art without continuing to pay royalties.

Well, it certainly won't happen in the reverse order.

I believe the process is supposed to begin with a telephone call.

That runs slightly counter to an experience I had, which was similar but not quite the same. Someone opened an eBay account using my name and address and a fake credit card, but it wasn't my card. They bought just a couple of things, totaling less than $200. I've had collection agencies contact me a couple of times about it on behalf of eBay, who was clearly looking to recoup that relatively small loss. Not sure if they've got different policies in England as opposed to the US, or what else might have caused them to pursue my case but not yours.

The office had a router go down once because of a literal bug that got caught in the blades of a fan and jammed it.

I've seen forced promotions. Without any salary change, even. Literally a case of the president pointing to one guy and saying, 'I'm sick of talking to you." Then pointing to that guy's co-worker and saying, "You. You're his boss. You talk to me in his place now." End of story.

This always surprises me. I know how contentious the physical sciences are, and from what I understand the soft sciences are even worse. I'd expect lots of people with differing opinions would be out to refute studies contradicting their assumptions. Maybe the flow of income makes this less possible?

My small-town library has some, but not many, and most were checked out, and the pool consisted of primarily pop new releases. I found literally zero ebooks there that I was interested in when I tried to use the system the first time.

The downtown Portland Apple store had heavily decorated employees. Of the ones I noticed, more had ink, piercings, and hair dye than did not. But that's downtown Portland, so probably not the best example, just happens to be the only one I've been in lately.

I've been thinking it ties in to other parts of their naming scheme, like Surface. "Use Edge on Surface." All they need is a Microsoft Corner or maybe Internet Bevel and they can capture the lucrative carpenters market.

Well, you guys have convinced me to dig it out and give it another shot. If a Windows reinstall doesn't work, maybe I'll try Ubuntu, just to play around.

It did work okay for a few months. I wasn't using it that hard, just some word processing and light games (I'm talking NES emulator, maybe as advanced as the original Torchlight) and I was initially happy with it.

Hmm. I experienced frequent crashes that eventually drove me away. Like every 5-10 minutes if trying to download anything, and maybe "only" once an hour if not using the network. I tried a lot of basic tech support (drivers, patches) but I admit I got frustrated before trying a complete reinstall, which might have been called for.