It’s a fairly short piece about the joys of induction cooking. If you’re at all a food or cooking geek, you should check it out.

“Given that everyone in your school is going to be wearing Patriots gear today, what is the probability that you’re going to want to be wearing your Patriots sweatshirt when you get there?”

I’ve got to lay off the statistics work for a while.

In a couple of months, she’ll probably be solving them before we’ve finished the last sentence…

You can follow along if you like, by going to Jason Butler’s recipes. I have six up now, and I’ll add a dozen or so a week.

Of course, being a geek, I ended up writing my own custom recipe publishing engine. Of course!

This is a much faster read than the last one. Give it a click!

Best tracks:

Ziggy Marley: Blowin’ in the Wind.
My Chemical Romance: Desolation Row
Miley Cyrus: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.

Seriously, the Miley Cyrus track is really much better than you’d expect.

This is one of the longest single pieces I’ve ever written. I’m working on improving at this whole writer thing.

Let me know what you think!

How Google and Bing are working against website owners. This is a ton of inside baseball, but it’s an interesting deconstruction of the market dynamics.

How the Navy freed Iranians from Somali Pirates. A great sea tale from the New York Times.

The air in Beijing is like standing downwind from a forest fire. It certainly was when I was there. The air had texture, density and smell. Not a great feeling. I can only imagine it’s worse 11 years on.

Vince Wilfork’s swimming routine. Big Vince has been a monster this year. Turns out that his offseason swimming routine might be the reason.

Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users. If you ever wanted to understand the economics of newspapers and their awkward transitions online, you must read this new article by Clay Shirky.

Congratulations to XKCD for making it to 1,000 comics. If you want to happily pass a few minutes, click on the “random” button under each comic. Or, if you prefer hard copies, do what I did and buy his book.

Good Whiteboard Friday from SEOMoz yesterday, discussing the basics of anchor text optimization. Their Whiteboard Friday series is brilliant; I’ve been telling every content site I’ve worked with for the past couple of years to emulate it.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a leader, and they launched their nonbank supervision program. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Read all about it in my first post, Introduction and Throat Clearing.

Top 10 “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” Repeal Lies that Never Came True. It’s amazing how the world hasn’t ended from allowing gay Americans to serve their country.

When Massholes park, they stay parked. Some pretty incredible pictures here. I love the totally deadpan Wellesley cop talking about how it happened and trying not to laugh.

For longer form video, I really enjoy ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, especially the Nostalgia Critic and his counterpart, the Nostalgia Chick. The bits are hit or miss, but they’re usually a pleasant way to spend fifteen minutes or so. I think that this is a pretty good model for pro-am video production.

Bad Cumbies. Cumberland Farms fires the cashier who got robbed because he had too much cash in the drawer. I’m glad that some of the loyal customers are now boycotting.

How Doctors Die. Doctors tend to eschew extreme end-of-life care. I agree with them. This is a tough conversation to contemplate, but a useful one to have.

Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin. I was little too young to appreciate Steve Martin when he was a full-time comic, and I’m never really loved any of his movies, except maybe for Father of the Bride. But, this book is less about his material and much more about how he went about the creative process, how he was able to learn, practice and keep up the slog until 10 years later he turned into an overnight success. It’s a really good dissertation on the creative process.

By the way, I recommend you get this as the audio book instead of the printed book. The material obviously works better when it’s in his own voice.

TV Tropes is the best use of the next several hours of clicking around time. It deconstructs all the standard plot elements in modern entertainment. Addicting as hell.

Robert X. Cringely and John Battelle are doing their 2012 predictions. These guys are usually pretty good, so I’m paying attention.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) writes a really interesting blog, including a lot of thought experiments. It’s worth checking in on every day or two. Right now, he’s quasi-seriously exploring what a presidential campaign from someone who just wants to make things work would look like.

For all your non-comic election needs, FiveThirtyEight is back in high gear, at its new home on the New York Times on the Web.

If you haven’t already, you should follow me on Twitter. If we’ve met in real life, feel free to connect with me on Facebook or LinkedIn, whichever seems more appropriate.

Or, as I far more geekily say, she has achieved product/market fit.

I’ve finally updated my WordPress installation from 2.2 up to 3.3. I’m recommending WordPress to several clients, so I might as well make sure that I’m up to date on all the different ways it’s useful. I plan on experimenting with more of the plugins to test out different ideas. Should be interesting!

It’s been a lot less fun around here dealing with the continual onslaught of comment spammers. So, I’ve turned off WordPress commenting entirely, and I’m going to solely have commenting through Facebook’s plugin. While it’s powered by Facebook, you can still comment using your Facebook, Hotmail or Yahoo credentials, so I hope it’s not too much of a burden. I’ll watch this for a while and see if it ends up making life better for everyone.

And, hey, I’ve caught up to 2008. You can now like, share, tweet, fold, spindle and mutilate these posts however you like. Woo Hoo! You can start by liking JPButler.com itself, by pressing the button right above my picture over in the sidebar. Thanks!

So, those were the quick tweaks. I’m going to do some work around design over the next couple of weeks, and I hope to be writing far more often than I have been. Though, we’ve all seen that promise before.

And wow, is my PHP rusty…

And if you’re three? You want to be WordGirl’s sidekick, Captain Huggy Face. You want nothing more than to be with and like your big sister.

And if you’re their parents? You want to be the type of parents who can wield a glue gun and cut some felt. And sometimes, you succeed.

Happy Halloween.

I’m currently in the first week of my distance-learning classes: Databases, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. As it turns out, college courses from elite universities take a bit of time out of the week. I’ve pretty much made it through week one, but it’s going to be a fun challenge to fit them in during the rest of the semester.

At least I’m doing well, so far. I’ve had nothing but 90′s and above in the DB and ML classes. I don’t get my scores on the first AI homework until Monday. Fingers crossed.

Kinda wish I’d paid more attention in calculus though. Also? Kinda wish it hadn’t been twenty years since I’ve taken calculus.

First, a professional update. I’ve transitioned away from day-to-day involvement with Practically Green. I’m still an advisor and shareholder, but I’m not going to be in the trenches any more. I believe deeply in PG’s mission of helping people go green, and I’m looking forward to the great things they will do.

As for me, I’m taking a little time off. I’ll take a few classes, bake a few brownies, rake a few leaves.

And, of course, by “rake a few leaves,” I mean “throw the children into the leaf pile.”

But this year has been different. We’re in our new house, living our new life. Writing has not fit in.

The past ten years (and really most of the 29 before them) have been times of transition. Dotcommer to traveler and teacher to mild-mannered grownup. To boyfriend, fiance and husband in scandalously few months. To homeowner. To father. And again. To entrepreneur: author, developer, salesman and janitor. Now to respectable member of a community and startup executive.

I’m not sure where that leaves writing. We joke of the many things I’m planning to do in my infinite free time. Most of them ain’t happening. 39 is not 24, nor 16. Time is limited, and I need to drop some projects to excel at others. More on that soon.

But for now, I’m still alive, all is well, and I promise to blog more regularly from now on.