Chris Hardie's Weblog

Join us at Live-Richmond.com for a live blog of the Richmond Mayoral Debate.
Update: My transcript of the mayoral debate is now available.

I've generally been content not having a physical phone line at home and using my cell phone instead. I'm not much of a phone person anyway, my back yard looked a lot nicer when Verizon cut down the unsightly cable, and it's certainly a cost savings. But sometimes, I still long to have [...]

Recently, the Summersault staff was eating together at the Golden Corral here in Richmond. They were out of the feed buckets that you just strap onto your head and tilt up, so we ended up having a conversation. We noted that they have pine nuts on their all-you-can-eat salad bar in large quantities.
Pine [...]

There is a strange and unique destination out there in the political blogosphere called The Daily Kos. You may have heard of it - it's been called everything from one of the most defining websites of the modern political debate, to an analog of the Klu Klux Klan. I suspect it's actually somewhere [...]

Having some time to relax also meant lots of time to catch up on reading I've been meaning to do for a while now (though there's plenty more). Here's a quick run-through with my comments:

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. A great, compelling story that is so rich and enjoyable. [...]

Confession: one of my great pleasures/sicknesses when distracted is playing the game of reframing or rewording song lyrics and titles to be more thematically accurate, pseudo-politically correct, and/or appropriate for use in a scientific research paper.
For example:

My Girl by The Temptations becomes: The One Who is My Significant Other, and Also Female
I Believe I Can [...]

This past weekend, we visited the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. I have such fond memories of that building (which I apparently for a long time referred to as "Onion Center", which if you've seen it's shape, isn't entirely unreasonable) - frolicking in the fountain out front, walking around its empty halls that [...]

It was 10 years ago this month that I co-founded Summersault website development with Mark. We're celebrating with some donations to help improve the community, and a look back at our milestones over the years.
It was 20 years ago this month that my father passed away from cancer. I celebrate his life, the [...]

Last fall I took possession of the building at 185 Fort Wayne Avenue here in Richmond. It's a cool old space with a lot of history behind it - folks named Nye, Ezra and Starr had a place that made stoves and tinware there in the 1860s, and since then it's been used for [...]

Doug, Scott, Brandon and I were all sharing a room at Chicago's Drake hotel while on a weekend school field trip early on in high school. I was having a miserable time for various teen-agey angst reasons I won't go into, and I was tired of being cooped up in our room watching JFK [...]