Plutor.org

Submitted for your approval, a thread from the non-work mailing list at Wayfair, replete with bread puns:

• This thread is now about bread. How about a NAANwork thread.
• It was already PAIN-ful.
• I hope they don’t banh mi for this.
• This thread is fal-awful
• Alright, I think you guys have taken this farl enough.
• You’re probably rye.
• We’re on a roll!
• Injera glad I didn’t say bread!?
• I’m at my wheat’s end!
• You guys got muffin left?
• Maybe everyone injera-ed themselves trying to come up with more puns. (..later..) Oh, man, someone already did injera. Boy do I feel like a sconehead.
• At yeast its finally over
• A toast to the end of this thread
• Best WRAP this one up
• I agree. It’s time to leave it a-scone and get back to work.
• You all knead to wrap this up, quit loaf’n and get back to work

This morning you may notice some changes to plutor.org (unless you’re reading this in an RSS reader, in which case I invite you to check out what I’m talking about). For the past few years, my Twitter posts, photos, links I’ve found interesting, and occasionally music that I’m listening to have all been intermingled here as a life stream. I will no longer be featuring those things so prominently on this blog. Oh, they still exist, on Pinboard and Twitter and Flickr and elsewhere (you can find links to all of them on the bottom of the homepage).

But I’ve decided that this website should be more focused on my nerdly projects. You know, the visit all MLB parks and expected value of a Powerball ticket things. I’ve heard that people like those posts, and I like those posts, and I’d like to encourage myself to make more of them. And rearranging my online life is the best way I know to do that.

It is now March, and I have somehow never posted my reading log for 2011. Last year was a light one for my reading, and I’m not entirely sure why. The books below represent a thousand pages less than in 2010 (4794, or an average of ~13 pages a day).

• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
• Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game by Dan Barry
• How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown – This is a great book about the discovery of bodies roughly the same size as (and larger than!) Pluto, leading to its demotion to dwarf planet. I’m of the opinion that we might as well have some standard of planet-ness, and one that gives us 8 planets instead of dozens is preferable.
• Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving – John Irving’s books are always emotionally intense, and this one is no exception. M got it for me for my birthday, but it took me nearly six months to get through. I had to interleave it with some lighter non-fiction.
• Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
• Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood – Great universe, seriously boring story. Fills in some of the gaps in Oryx and Crake, and apparently she’s writing a third book.
• 1984 by George Orwell
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini by Ruth Brandon
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• The Robot Novels: The Caves of Steel / The Naked Sun / The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov – Asimov’s voice and habits are completely internalized at this point. I don’t need him to recite the Three Laws in every novel. I don’t need reminders of who Susan Calvin is. Reading this was good (I had met Daneel Olivaw in the Foundation series when I red them a decade ago, but didn’t appreciate his origins) but I enjoyed Fforde’s unique books much more.
• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde – Excellent storywriter with some really unique ideas. This is the first of six planned books starring Thursday Next, and I plan to read through all of them, slowly.

See also 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.