An Exercise in Avoiding Boredom

A friend recently challenged me regarding a prior post on honor student bumper stickers. Specifically, he didn’t believe that someone would put an offensive bumper sticker on their car because he thought everyone would worry their car might get scratched. (You can tell my friend is German, as it is a common German neurosis that [...]

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After arriving in Vancouver from San Francisco, I found this greeting from the Transport Security Administration (TSA) in my luggage.

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Alright, I don’t get it. Yesterday, a friend and I had dinner on Hong Kong Island for HK$ 450 (about US$ 60) for two. It was good and plenty. During my last visit I had either been invited or I had grabbed a quick dinner on my way back to the hotel—typically cheaply at a [...]

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Monday morning, 7:23am, a great way to start the week.

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This morning, I discovered rust marks inside a Copco kettle that I had bought less than 6 months ago. I had thought this was a quality brand, but obviously I had been fooled. Yikes!

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I think I haven’t complained about the cost of living in Northern California for a while, so it is about time to do it again. Look at the photo below and make a guess how much these everyday shopping items cost me.

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Today, Markus Völter interviewed me for his Software Engineering Radio podcast show. Thus, a couple of months from now my name will be tied to some piece of audio on the internet. Already today, when you use Google’s image search, you can find a picture of me. With audio search some time in the [...]

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Here another piece of spam, not nearly as funny as the previous one. What’s remarkable is that it was sent to the email address “doostang.com@riehle.org”, which is an address that I handed out exactly once, namely when registering at doostang.com, a recruiting website, back in 2006. Looks like they got cracked or don’t take their [...]

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