The Sunshine State is a huge peninsula that juts out from the southeast United States into both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

I live a few minutes from the coast, in an area that’s filled with picturesque ponds, lakes and streams.

So I’m used to being surrounded by water. [more...]

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has gotten very rich from his brand of observational humor.

Observational humor is when someone finds humor in the mundane things that they observe around them.

Stereotypical Seinfeld jokes often start with the phrases, [more...]

I’ve seen the old black-and-white photos — I wasn’t a particularly cute baby.

Chances are, you weren’t either.

I think most of us are born with shriveled faces and/or misshapen heads.

But, every once in awhile, [more...]

These days, everybody and their brother — and their sister — has medical advice that they want to sell you.

Yes — sell you.

That’s almost always what’s really happening when you see celebrities dispensing medical advice on TV talk shows. [more...]

oo-ee oo-ee ooooh — wa-wah-waa.

I’m sure that fans of classic films instantly recognized that as the opening notes of the theme song from the iconic 1967 Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.

Good luck trying to get it out of your head. It’s still in mine as I write this.

Anyway, here’s some good news about [more...]

I’ve told you about several of my Craigslist deals, but it’s been almost 4 months since I found my last one — a network laser printer that I’m still really happy about.

Since then, I’ve looked for a third computer to add to my network, to serve as an NFS file server for my wife’s and my computers.

Judging by the normal prices I’ve seen on Craigslist for the past several weeks, I figured that it was going to cost me around [more...]

What comes to mind when you see the name, “Milli Vanilli?”

What do you think of when you read the phrase, “Florida State University?”

How about “Bill Gates?”

And “Thomas Edison?” [more...]

It’s been over 15 months since I confessed that my baby boy, Max, often ghost writes these Journal posts.

I was pleasantly surprised a few years ago, when he caught on to using Linux right away. And since then, he’s been very happy that [more...]

Regular readers of this Journal know that I update it every single day of every year — for the past several years.

But only extremely perceptive regular readers — who also have punctuation fetishes — may have noticed that I use a lot of semicolons in my writing; I’d love to be able to use full colons, but they cost almost twice as much. [more...]

If you live with another person, your bathroom’s roll of toilet paper is like one of those ancient African or Chinese strategy games, in which two players alternately take turns removing between one and three tiles (or sticks or rocks or whatevers) from a pile of them, and the winner is the one who leaves the very last one for their opponent to take. [more...]