http://www.robertblum.com Robert Blum on Software, Games And The Rest Of Life Tue, 06 May 2008 21:01:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This morning I stumbled over a tweet announcing Purina's site LongLiveYourDog.com. Really, Purina? You dare make that your motto? After being repeatedly involved in poisoned pet food recalls? How about you fire your marketing guys who cooked that up and invest in quality control instead? Maybe the next time when you ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/05/06/thats-chutzpah-purina Since we decided to buy a place, Petra and I obviously spent quite a bit of time thinking about our budget. After all, how would we know how much we could actually afford? The "natural" schedule for a budget is a month - many of the major expenses you pay are ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/05/01/making-income-more-regular For a long time, I have resisted buying a house in Los Angeles - the pricing was simply insane. But lately, thanks to the subprime mortgage disaster, things are actually moving into an affordable direction. As a result, I am now considering acquiring some property - any advice is appreciated. In ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/04/24/my-place-in-la-starting-the-search For Earth Day, my company organized an outing - we were going out on the streets of Westwood, picking up trash. (Well, OK, and we had a picnic after that). There are a couple of things I learned from this: The famed hypodermic needles lying around - urban myth, at least in ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/04/22/happy-belated-earth-day Turns out almost a week has passed since my last post. What did happen to all that time? Well, actually quite a lot. First of all, Petra and I took a dolphin watching trip to Dana Point. Which was especially fun considering we've just been whale watching in Mexico - I ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/04/16/where-did-the-time-go For a long time, I've been a member of the ACM. They over a ton of really invaluable services, not the least of them the ACM Portal - a giant resource of pretty much every important computing-related paper. And, since they're a big organization, it's inevitable they wanted to give ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/04/08/customer-support-gone-wrong Told you there'd be some changes this year. One of them: I'll become a citizen of the United States (the INS willing). I've just filed my N-400 application - have a read if you want to have some fun. It's a ton of paperwork, and it's expensive. $695 filing fee. ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/04/04/on-my-way-to-citizenship If you're running a blog and you actually want people to look at your archives, please don't have the stupid "Previous" and "Next" entries at the bottom of each page. Nobody seems to be able to agree on what they mean. So, how about instead using "Older Entries" and "Newer ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/03/10/favorite-blog-pet-peeve This is mostly here as a note to myself (Google is my outboard brain), but if you maintain a website, it might be helpful... Should you dare to specify inline CSS style in a <span> tag, be sure you separate the property name and the value with a colon, not an ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/03/10/firefoxs-anal-css-handling This Christmas, Petra and I had some time to ourselves, and started sorting through old pictures and clothes. As we did that, we realized that we're carrying around a ton of stuff that has no real use for us. In an effort to get some space in our apartment, we ... http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2008/03/10/letting-go-of-the-past