Casa Jonsson

Nils & Araceli’s home on the web, est. 2003

A jingle fit for a King

We have a good friend—I won’t “out” her here—who’s writing a romance novel just because she can. Having the published work on their coffee table will certainly be a conversation starter. (She’s already had some explaining to do when friends and family saw examples of the genre lying around their house half-read.) I have to […]

MP3 roulette

Howard suggested this idea. Pass it on.

Open your MP3 player.
Shuffle all the tracks in your library.
Leave me a comment reporting the first 10 tracks that show up.
Do not skip over that embarrassing song that came up. You must list the first 10 tracks. The only exception is if there’s a repeated artist or album.
Post the […]

Swearing off personality tests

Howard’s blogging!
He linked to What Famous Leader Are You? Last night I took this personality test along with another one from the same site, and the results continued a distressing trend.

What Famous Leader Is Nils?

What Classic Movie Is Nils?
I’m quitting the personality test habit. 

No disguise for authenticity

We had a great time Friday night at Judy’s record release party held at The Vintage Bar. Her CD, Fiction in Disguise, is a really good piece of work. Friday’s performances were unplugged—her home turf, and she sounded great. By contrast, Fiction’s production has shades of U2, and it rocks!
My buddy Howard opened for Judy, […]

New Code Project article on argument exceptions

If you compose in the key of C#, you may want to check out my new article at The Code Project.
Achieve greater consistency in raising argument exceptions with very little effort. This utility class (which is covered by nearly 600 included NUnit test cases!) makes it possible to evaluate and raise exceptions on passed-in parameters, […]

A household name nobody knows

I just heard ADM’s new tag line this morning in an NPR ad. I don’t think it’s bad marcomm per se. The problem is that this is ADM’s third tag line in as many years.
The company used to call itself “Supermarket to the World.” This slogan is presumably what gave rise to the domain name […]

What do your parents want for Christmas?

At our middle son’s preschool this morning a small poster was hanging outside the door. Apparently the children had been asked to report what their parents wanted for Christmas. The list of responses was excruciatingly funny. Our little guy responded that “Mommy wants a new pink dress. Daddy wants a new light saber.”
Merry Christmas, everyone! 

Masculine poetry

Men and poetry don’t mix. Never mind that this is historically untrue, as Douglas Jones pointed out several years ago in his “Poetics” column in Credenda/Agenda.
In previous millennia, poetry was overwhelmingly a male passion. Your manhood would have been questioned if you did not share in the longing for a metrical weave of words. But […]

Photoshop Album and external hard drives

I manage Casa Jonsson’s digital photos using a great little software product called Photoshop Album. It’s a good thing, but I do have one major gripe about the program: the way it deals with pictures stored on volumes that may not be connected to the computer all the time, such as external hard disks. If […]