The Specialists

For those too young to remember, there used to be commercials for Life cereal featuring a finicky boy named Mikey. Mikey would be offered a bowl of Life and his brother would say “He won’t eat it; he hates everything!” Then, when Mikey silently dug into the cereal, his brother exclaimed “He likes it! Hey, Mikey!” (You can watch the drama unfold here.)

I’m afraid that with all of my grousing and negativity, I’m coming across like a Mikey. I’m really not a joyless curmudgeon, and I don’t want to give that impression, so I’m going to attempt to inject some positivity in the form of these “Hey, Mikey!” posts. There will still be vitriol (I have two fairly negative posts in the works even now), but I’m trying to dilute it.

This first installment will be my take on the new Coen brothers movie, True Grit, which lies outside the normally geeky territory that this site usually concerns itself with, but it’s the last movie I’ve seen, so… ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

We’re trying out this new toolbar at the bottom of the screen. It has some nifty features that our readers might like, and a few that we’re hoping are useful for us. But we were very hesitant to install it, because the last thing we want to do is annoy people.

So if you like the toolbar or if you hate it, please leave a comment here, or on our Facebook page. Before you do, though, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

You can minimize the toolbar with the button on the far right. As long as you don’t clear your browser’s cookies, it will stay minimized — even if you leave the site and come back — until you restore it.

The little pop-up message should only appear once for each reader, each time we publish a new message. We will probably only use this feature occasionally, so you shouldn’t be bothered by these messages very often (though, again, if you clear your cookies, you will probably see it again).

I’m eager to hear what you think.

Shawn