First off while, I was writing this article, I had Robot Parade by They Might be Giants stuck in my head the whole time. I’ve been reading a lot of economists deriding a higher minimum wage and they’ve got me a bit riled up (here’s a very small selection). An Open Letter to Arindrajit Dube If Government Can Work Miracles… Alex Tabarrok on Price Floors and the Minimum Wage Where I live in Minneapolis there is an annual May Day Parade.

At this point I’ve bought lots of things on-line with Bitcoin, but I have not been able to buy anything locally (in Minneapolis MN) until now. I was surprised to find one of my “go to” Thai restaurants Krungthep got a new (to me) website, that accepts Bitcoin. It looks like they use Menufy and it looks like there are several restaurants in the area I can also order from using Bitcoin.

How to Setup a Soundboard This article will show you how to map a set of sound effects (I’ll show you how to do 10) to keyboard shortcuts that will be ready any time you need a rim shot, or sad horns or whatever else. You need to be running OS X. I’ve set this up on a 10.10 and 10.11. I do not know how far back into older versions of OS X this will work (or how far forward).

The bad news is I only read 17 books in 2015. However I feel pretty good about that because I read all 10 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, which are all massive. All 10 averaged well over 40 hours a piece. It’s kinda scary to think I spent so much time listening to those books. Recording them must have been a massive undertaking. The Malazan books were good books, an absolutely massive world with lots of interesting stuff going on, however I may have over done it.

After 8+ years of faithful-ish service I’m ditching WordPress for the great static site generator Pelican, written in my very favorite language, Python. If you’re a “feed subscriber” sort of a person, you will probably need to updated/re-subscribe to this site, I think the feed’s URL is different now. The migration has been rocky and still is not done yet. If you are reading this shortly after I’ve published it, and you were to go back through my archives you would find a lot of broken images.

Getting this together happened a little later this year. Lots going on, but as always I enjoyed putting this together and after listening to a bunch of not so great Christmas music we managed to a CDs worth that was pretty good. If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists. (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010). 6 years of these, my my how the time does fly.

It’s been a few years since one of my personal projects has been ready for prime time, but the Como Barber Shop site finally is, at least, I hope it is, it’s live at least. Craig’s Como Barber Shop has been my favorite place to get my hair cut for many years (it used to be Pete’s Barber Shop, Pete’s still there, but Craig is running the show now). I’ve always enjoyed going there but there’s been one minor issue.

The number of titles of books I read this year seems a little light, 30 books in 2013, only 18 in 2014. Looking over the list though, I feel a little better about my reading last year, there were some big books on the list. Non-Fiction Politics and Theology (always a dangerous combination): A Farewell to Mars - An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace by Brian Zahnd.

Time for this year’s Christmas Playlist. If this isn’t enough Christmas Music, you can always go back to previous years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010). Most of the music is available on Amazon. A lot of it you can listen to for free if you have Amazon Prime. I’ve also made a GrooveShark playlist of most of the songs. Ho Ho Ho - Liz Phair - Ho Ho Ho Carry Me Home - Hey Rosetta!

When I tell people about bitcoin and I want to give an example of something bitcoins are good for today I usually use the example of international money transfers. Recently I successfully transferred some money to my sister (about $50), who is currently living in South Korea. It was not exactly the smoothest experience ever but I think it demonstrates a real opportunity. Here’s how we did it. About a month and half ago I asked my sister if she’d be willing to give this a try.