Chris Hardie's Weblog

I was sitting on my back porch, typing up notes from tonight's first orientation session for the Wayne County Time Bank, when I saw a black furry thing approaching fast from the left flank. I thought it was a cat at first because a cat had approached from the same vector just 10 minutes [...]

As you're coming out of the movie 28 Weeks Later, you might be tempted to discuss the horrors of the events in the movie, the acting, the overwhelmingly and unnecessarily bloody gore, or the architecture in the London skyline. But I think we can all agree that the movie was, above all, a [...]

Some initial analysis of the Wayne County primary election results:

Only 4,378 people voted. That's 16% of our registered voter population, 27,290, which is also woefully small. These numbers are pathetic.
Republican mayoral candidates: of the 2,645 people who voted, almost 80% of them picked Rick Thalls over Ron Chappell and Danny Black. Possible [...]

This post is about one way to have a more enjoyable experience in online discussion forums in general, and I'm going to use the forums at the Palladium-Item, a local daily newspaper in Richmond, as an example. I'll show you how to rediscover the pleasures of online discussion by simply blocking out the posts [...]

I'm looking for one of those lamp/appliance timers I could plug my computer into that will do the following during times when I really need to focus:

Block incoming e-mail that isn't related to the specific projects I need to make progress on, but allow others through
Block outgoing web requests that are more than one degree [...]