Annie Choi, long time friend of Doug and I, has written a hilarious memoir about growing up Korean in the San Fernando Valley. Annie and I grew up several blocks apart and now she’s a published author living in New York.

She’s got some readings coming up in Los Angeles (I’ll be at this one so say hi if you see me), New York, and Boston. See Annie’s blog for more about the book and tour.

I wanted a sleeve for my new 15″ MacBookPro . Incase makes good neoprene sleeves, but I didn’t want to spend $30. Sam’s guide to making your own laptop sleeve out of corduroy looked promising, but I don’t have a sewing machine.

The super budget solution was to tap into that other Force that binds the universe together - duct tape. All you do is take the paper fiber sleeve that the MacBookPro ships with and liberally apply duct tape. You could go the extra mile and follow the isoglossia guide to doing the same thing except with an extra layer of foam padding.

Before and after:

Step one: Wear a Longhorns hat.

There is no step two.

Whenever I wear this hat strangers always talk to me. Sometimes they are USC fans, but more often they are expatriates from the Republic of Texas. I got the hat during my last trip to visit my girlfriend’s family in Texas in order to blend in. Of course, instead of camouflage, the hat served as a beacon saying “Fellow Texan! Please talk to me about football!”

Tired of being embarrassed about not knowing anything about the college football schedule, I was shocked to find no RSS feeds of game schedules. I did find some football schedule OS X widgets, so I thought there must be a feed somewhere. Nope, it turns out that the widget developers scrape the HTML of ESPN pages.

Maybe there are copyright issues at work here (though how anyone could claim a copyright on the schedule of public events is beyond me), or maybe the people at the NCAA and ESPN need to find a clue.