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	<title>Garth Shoemaker</title>
	<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:46:51 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The Lottery</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There are some things that stick in my head forever. Some of these are situations where I had a particularly grating interaction with one person or another, and remain irritated by their ignorance and insistence that they are correct.
One such situation occured in grade 11, where we read Shirley Jackson&#8217;s &#8220;The Lottery&#8221; and had a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2010/03/04/the-lottery/</link>
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		<title>Dairy Queen Has Lost Its Way</title>
		<description><![CDATA[When I was a kid Dairy Queen was special. In the summer we would go for Mister Misty floats (now renamed something gender non-specific), and one time I even braved a banana split, minus the bananas of course. Then, when they invented the Blizzard in 1985, I felt my eyes had been opened to magical [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/11/02/dairy-queen-has-lost-its-way/</link>
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		<title>Mad Men</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some TV shows make you feel smart. &#8220;Everybody Loves Raymond&#8221; makes me feel smart because every joke is both telegraphed and juvenile. &#8220;Stargate: Atlantis&#8221; makes me feel smart because I typically only need to watch the first 5 minutes in order to predict the plot of the remainder of the episode. So, while these shows [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/10/18/mad-men/</link>
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		<title>Dying Newspapers</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Much has been written about the impending death of newspapers. The wealth of information on the Internet is of course threatening the existence of newspapers, where what you are reading is filtered by editors that you may not agree with, can lag actual events by up to 24 hours (!), and costs money.
I actually like [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/10/15/dying-newspapers/</link>
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		<title>Mechanic Car Interaction</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For the last several months the driver-side power window in my car has been sluggish going up and down. So, yesterday I spent 4 hours replacing two plastic guide bushings hidden in the innards of the door. The bushings are really simple tiny things, and cost about 50c each, but in order to put them [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/08/24/mechanic-car-interaction/</link>
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		<title>I, For One, Welcome Our New Machine Overlords</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been slowly making my way through Iain M. Banks&#8217; &#8220;Culture&#8221; series of novels. If you haven&#8217;t heard about them, they are a fairly new series of SF books dealing with a sprawling galactic society where almost all problems (e.g. war, poverty, mortality) have been solved. The members of the Culture spend their time hanging [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/07/29/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-machine-overlords/</link>
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		<title>Google Lied to Me</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I use Google Analytics to keep track of performance on a number of web projects I have going. Recently they sent me an email, offering me $50 worth of free advertising. Yay, I thought! I don&#8217;t really feel the need to advertise, but if it&#8217;s free I might give it a shot.
I didn&#8217;t notice it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/06/12/google-lied-to-me/</link>
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		<title>My Million Dollar Mistake</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I always derived some perverse kind of pleasure from doing my taxes. For years I insisted on doing them by hand, and always felt some satisfaction when I made everything add up nicely. This was until, two years in a row, I made an error early on in the process, which forced me to redo [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/05/12/my-million-dollar-mistake/</link>
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		<title>Malcolm Gladwell is an Untalented Hack</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In case you aren&#8217;t current on pseudo-scientific clap-trap, Malcolm Gladwell has written a series of books that start with very simple and intuitive assumptions, and then build sweeping and generally unsupported conclusions. His latest book is &#8220;Outliers&#8221;, where he investigates very unusual (generally highly skilled or accomplished) people, and tries to figure out how they [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/04/27/malcolm-gladwell-is-an-untalented-hack/</link>
			</item>
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		<title>Also Spracht Zarathustra</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve written before about some of my experimentations in popular music forms, but until now haven&#8217;t said much about my supposed history as a serious musician. In fact, based on the material available online, some might question the assertion that I was (am?) fairly accomplished in the musical realm.
Luckily I&#8217;ve now managed to work around [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.garthshoemaker.com/2009/04/15/also-spracht-zarathustra/</link>
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