Useful Things I Learned This Weekend

1. World of Goo is a very cool game.

2. An hour playing with World of Goo will give you a better intuitive feel for stress analysis and the effects of resonance in a structure than ten hours reading a textbook will.

3. The ramshackle buildings you wind up with in World of Goo remind me of a lot of some source code I've seen.

4. The Wii Internet Channel's a pretty good browser (being Opera and all), but it doesn't have the horsepower to play an NPR podcast.

5. An electric crock pot turned on "high" can crack a Corian countertop.

6. You can make an effective trivet using a 12" piece of ceramic tile and five of those sticky-back felt tabs you put on chair legs. You really only need four tabs, at the corners, but the fifth in the middle is belt-and-suspenders.

7. If important work e-mail's going to arrive, the most likely time is right after you've mixed the catalyst with the self-etching primer and started spraying.

8. Just a hunch, but I'm guessing the "answer e-mail while wearing latex gloves half covered with catalyzed primer" scenario didn't figure prominently in Blackberry usability testing.