To all my friends, family, co-workers, assorted acquaintances and good people of earth – I hope you are having a lovely and fulfilling Christmas! (You know, if you’re into that kinda thing.)
Some Christmas Day advice: if you’re hungry, Sonic is open. However, they will forget your $4 popcorn chicken. And your fries. And you’ll be too distracted by holiday cheer to check the bag before driving home. And it’s a bit too nasty out to go back for it. And you’ll be left with mediocre burgers (but tasty tater tots…). …

Last week, under a serious short-term deadline, I produced another digital catalog for St. Louis retail store Hustler Hollywood, in conjunction with a promotion on 105.7 the Point. You can view the Flash catalog here (pretty SFW, unless your workplace is really prudish).
This was definitely a “so many irons” project – I contacted models, arranged the shoot, did all the photography, performed all post-production on the photos, designed the catalog and set up the Flash interface.
Because of the aggressive schedule from client sign-off to launch deadline, I wasn’t able to …

It’s been a rainy Fall here in the midwest, and when the St. Louis metro gets saturated, basements start flooding. Ours is no exception. Friday night, we returned from work to find the unfinished portion of our basement with standing water, and our bedroom (which is the finished portion of the downstairs) a humid, carpety-bog.
The last time this happened, some 18 months back during a particularly nasty Spring, the rising tide destroyed our carpet and stained some baseboards. But, through fortunate timing and an hours long struggle to contain the …

This afternoon, my wife (@wendybuske) and I were dining with my sister, Cathy, and her husband, Jack, at the Red Robin restaurant in Edwardsville, IL. We don’t often get a chance to see Jack and Cathy outside of holiday gatherings, and they don’t get a chance to escape from our hometown very often.
We were celebrating Jack’s 25th year of living with a kidney transplant (he is the longest living kidney transplant survivor in America). They don’t dine out often, so we thought a burger place with a fun twist would …

This article was originally published a few years ago as a guest column in the Edwardsville Intelligencer’s “Edge” weekend insert.
What’s the big deal with spam?
I’m referring to the unwanted email, mind you, not the highly dubious canned meat product (it deserves an entire column to itself).
Sure, spam clogs up our inboxes. Yes, we waste many minutes of precious surfing time deleting undesired messages and appending mail filters. And, technically speaking, this electronic junk mail absorbs precious bandwidth and slows the entire internet down. But what about the positive side of …