Picture from taken during our ride from Seward to Anchorage on the Alaska Railroad. The service was on the AR was great.
Reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower again
Somewhere along the line I started this series…and then lost track of it. Since the movie is coming out in early August I thought I would read the first book again and then pick up the rest of the series. I seem to at least have gotten through the second book as well since I remember the ‘lobstrosities’.
Anyway, check out the first book in the series here.
Nice quote about Design from Steve Jobs
Great quote
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
The Wirecutter and ‘Inner Vision’
One of my favorite web sites is ‘The Wirecutter’ over at thewirecutter.com.
Anytime I’m going to purchase something I run over to The Wirecutter (or thesweethome.com) and look for a review. If I find something there I use their link to purchase the item.
Anyway, they’ve got a great feature called ‘Inner Vision’ which is an assortment of interesting articles regarding a variety of topics.
Check out the latest iteration here. My favorite item from this week’s list of items is this article. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
You can find a complete list of their blog posts here.
An old EP waterski
Here we have a picture of an old EP water ski that was my brother and that I used A LOT back in the day. My Dad dragged it out to so the nephew’s could take a spin on it.
“The train that saved Denver”
Excellent article about the new(-ish) train based transit system that Denver has been building. More impressive is the idea that the region as a whole has been working together.
I’ve always been impressed by the European model of bike, car, train and plane transportation systems working as an integrated whole. Efficient and easy to use.
See the article from Politico here.
Building a Steinway Piano – Chris Payne
Got this link via Kottke. Really enjoyed seeing the process of building a piano, in this case a Steinway piano.
Last fall my wife and I purchased a used Piano after doing a bunch of shopping. Easy to see why new piano’s have such a cost attached to them. Anyway, we bought a used Baldwin to see how much it would get played. Good decision on our part.
Here’s the link.
Portugal runs on renewables for 107 hours
This is pretty cool.
Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run that lasted from 6.45am on Saturday 7 May until 5.45pm the following Wednesday, the analysis says.
See the article here.
British Museum provides 300 years of copyright free image via Flickr
Pretty cool stuff in here.
NASCAR Stats – winning percentage by team
Poor man’s stat mechanism (see here if you’re a stat nut)
I like to do this every now and then to see what the percentages are. Obviously Win percentage is a pretty hard number. Overall race wins is probably a better statistic and adding in top 5 and 10 positions would be good.
Championships are the true measure and Stewart-Haas seems to be doing pretty well with 2 in the last couple of years and of course, Penske’s first.
