Term.ly defines “obnoxious” as:

obnoxious adjective causing disapproval or protest; “a vulgar and objectionable person”

Around our house we’ve taken to defining it for the kids as “annoying, on purpose”. Everyone knows what that means.

My 8 year-old son is left-handed in a family of right-handers, and I’m looking for tips to help him make the most of it without feeling like the odd-man-out. Neither of his siblings care, so I’m not worried about him taking flak at home, but he’s picked up a variety of techniques for doing things and I want to know how to best help him. He writes and eats left-handed, but kicks right-footed. He throws a frisbee ambidextrously (though throws stronger left-handed, but prefers right-handed). He plays violin right-handed. It’s very strange.

For Christmas, we’re getting him a 36” student guitar that I could get strung left or right handed. I’ll teach him to play, but I’m not sure whether to encourage him to play leftie or rightie. Thoughts?

Derek Powazek remembers, and offers a strange, beautiful explanation for, one of my favorite R.E.M. songs, Swan Swan H. (It’s listed as ‘Swan Swan H’ on the album tracklist, but everyone calls it ‘Swan Swan Hummingbird’ after the first three lyrics.) I too learned to play the song, and while I don’t have the same associations Derek does with the tune (it can only be described as haunting), it is one that has always touched me deeply.

And damn, Derek:

I jumped out of bed and drew this on the whiteboard in the hallway,

Whiteboard in the hallway: what a nerd. *jealous*

I’ll leave you with a teaser for Derek’s theory on the meaning of the song title:

Enjoying this track quite a bit, and the dancing is incredible.

Erik Kastner was kind enough to fork my blog and help me fix the layout of this site at iPhone sizes (thanks Erik!). Behold the power of the open-source weblog.

‘Cause this site looks like crap at less than 700px wide.

After procrastinating for many months, I’ve finally moved this site off of Typepad and into Octopress the fancy-pants Jekyll variant. This is no means any kind of indictment of Typepad — it’s a great platform that has served me well for a few years. But it was time for a change: the hacker, poker, and pusher-of-buttons in me needed a new platform to hack, poke, and push on.

The site is now hosted on Linode, who are awesome, the blog is simple to update and snappy to serve. There are some differences, visual and otherwise. The design is more responsive now (through the small sizes are not perfect yet). I’m also not linking to the monthly archives any more in the sidebar, though you can access them through the Archives link in the main nav. I’m also including recent tweets and a list of some of my github repositories, since they came standard with Octopress and they’re kinda neat, in a nerdy way.

This is also a bit of a life-hack: by switching platforms I’m hoping to get back to the heart of why I started blogging. It was simply about having a platform for sharing my life and interests, regardless of what everyone else was doing, and that’s where I want to get back to.

For Christmas this year, the “office” will be buying me a new coffee maker. I love my coffee. Like any nerd, caffeine is a staple of my pre-2:30pm routine. However, I do not:

• Feel the need to either “simplify” or “purify” my coffee-making “experience” – IE, spend 25 minutes making a contemplatively pure cup of slow-dripped, organically-grown, fertilized-by-unicorns, hand-ground coffee.
• Need a $600 espresso machine with its own water supply, 14-stage carbon filter, and included barista named Pablo.
• Want a machine that requires individually-packaged, multi-flavored “capsules” of coffee to do its job. I have an excellent coffee shop that imports and roasts their own beans – daily – a mere 2 miles away.

So, while the Aeropress may be the stuff of coffee purists’ dreams, I just want a good-quality automatic coffee maker that can take a reusable filter, and preferably (better yet, optionally) can dispense straight into a cup (I’m sick of coffee pots).

Any recommendations? Ping me on Twitter or steveivy at google’s email service dot com.

Step one, ask Imathis to clone your blog and convert it for you. :–)

If you’re an OS X Lion user and have found that Google Chrome popup windows send your Desktop/Spaces into conniptions when switching between Chrome windows (I always have Chrome windows in multiple Spaces and the popup wreaks havoc with window switching, while remaining invisible), here’s how to fix it:

• Activate Mission Control (3-finger swipe up)
• find the popup in the window groups
• click on it and drag it to a Desktop with no other Chrome windows

Now, switch to that desktop and you can close the popup.

Better solution: Google, FIX CHROME.

Update:

Chrome windows jumping to another desktop in Mac OS X Lion says that if you select “Options > Desktop > None” in the contextual menu for Chrome in the Dock, it fixes it.

Good to know.