Me … in watercolor
The awesome Tacoma artist Chandler O’Leary painted a watercolor portrait of me in her sketchbook last month. I’ve been meaning to post it here, but if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll see it there too. Chandler, among other projects, has a cool new site called “Drawn the Road Again” that is a watercolor/sketchbook travelogue. The whole site is illustrated and painted and it looks fantastic. (Side x Side helped her out with building it, hence the awesome portrait as a thank you). You can also expect to see Chandler’s artistic sense on the cover for my science Read more…
Better. Stronger. Faster.
The new ErikHanberg.com is still a work in progress, but I didn’t want to leave the danged “coming soon” page live any longer than I had to. So the site’s up, and hopefully it will continue to improve. Like the Six Million Dollar Man, the goal is that this version of the website is better, stronger, and faster. The previous site, while it had some features I really liked, was terribly slow to load and if I ever was lucky enough to grab a big influx of traffic, it would have faltered under the load. There were also some issues Read more…
Quick to Market Isn't Always a Good Thing
I’ve always liked Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life,” which I first read in high school. Here’s the last stanza: Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. When I first read it, the last word felt wrong to me. In a poem that is all about how time is fleeting and how we must be a hero in the strife, it seemed weird to end the poem with an admonishment to learn to wait. Since then, I think I’ve come around to better understanding the Read more…
Living with just one car …
We filmed a short video with a Masters student at UW about what it’s like to have just a Nissan Leaf as our only car. It’s been really great, as I wrote about earlier. But now we have a nice documentary video about it as well! Enjoy.
What is "Frank Herbert Park?"
I remember as a kid opening up “Dune” and seeing a picture of Frank Herbert, with his big bushy beard. His short author bio listed him as being from Tacoma. I was blown away. I was pretty young, and for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that someone “famous” would have come from Tacoma. For some reason, I’ve always held that with me: Frank Herbert was a Tacoman. Which is why I was so excited to read his biography and discover what a life he lived while here, and how important Tacoma was to him and his writing. I Read more…
Parking along the Prairie Line Trail
According to Peter Callaghan, there are some ideas about parking cars along the possible new Prairie Line Trail. I don’t want to be that guy, but do we really need surface parking in downtown Tacoma so much that we want a portion of a pedestrian and bike trail for it? This is one of the most dense parts of downtown Tacoma, and yet within two blocks of the trail, there is plenty of parking. Check out this satellite image that I turned into an animated gif. Yes, some of these are privately owned garages and lots. But still: That’s an Read more…
All Electric
Just over a month ago, Mary and I sold our two cars and went down to a single car: a Nissan Leaf–an all electric car with a 100 mile range. On the one hand, this might seem kind of crazy. 100 miles isn’t very far, after all, and if you turn on the A/C or the heat, the expected range isn’t even 100 miles. But after a month of driving, we’re really happy with the choice. A lot of people have asked questions about what it’s like, so I thought I’d devote a blog post to it.
A Taste of Mexico
After a fabulous vacation to Bucerias, Mexico, in February, Mary and I have been all about Mexican meals. I’ve been refining a margarita recipe, we have shrimp fajitas at least once a week it seems like, and this morning I gave huevos rancheros a shot. They turned out to have pretty common ingredients (eggs, tomatoes, chiles, tortilla, cilantro) and I didn’t need to go out for anything. I have to say, they turned out incredibly well: Here’s the recipe I used.
The Three Book Multipack
If you haven’t read one of my mysteries, have I got a deal for you. Here’s all three books in the Beautyman series put together as a single Kindle edition. It’s $6.99, which is a savings of four bucks if you bought them all individually. That’s The Saints Go Dying, The Marinara Murders, and The Con Before Christmas, back to back to back. Three books to read. No extra downloads. Save some money. Such a deal! On Kindle, Nook , and Kobo.
Martin Van Buren … #8
One of the things that happens when you read biographies of all the presidents is that you read about vaguely boring Presidents like Martin Van Buren. (For a less boring taken on Van Buren, here’s Seinfeld and “the Van Buren Boys.”) But he did some interesting things, usually not while President though, as his administration was crippled by the Panic of 1837, the worst economic crisis until the Great Depression, at a time when no one had invented the tools for a government to address them. He was very much the founder of the modern political party system. He was Read more…
^