Events

For just a few euro and an hour each way by train, I visited my 24th country this afternoon. Here is the heavily-guarded border between Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany and Słubice, Poland: Seriously, though, if I hadn't had a phone with a GPS and cached Google Maps I would not have known exactly where the border was. It's not marked; there's just a two-lane bridge with sidewalks. The border is about 100 m from the German bank of the Oder, with no indication that you've entered Poland until the roundabout...

The Times Wellness blog today reports on fitness tracking devices: Each volunteer was fitted with a pedometer, two accelerometers, several wristband monitors and, in each pocket, a cellphone, one of which ran three iPhone-based fitness-tracking apps and the other of which featured an Android phone running one tracking app. The volunteers then began walking on treadmills set to a gentle 3 miles-per-hour pace. A researcher stood nearby and manually counted every step each volunteer took until that...

Unfortunately, it's my Canon. So even though I promised photos, I'll have to get an old USB cable tomorrow in order to post any. Fortunately, I have a phone on my camera, so I was able to photograph this Apfelstrudel goodness that I'll be walking off for the rest of the week:

Fitbit says I've gotten 10.4 km in so far today, over to the Brandenburg Gate, through the Holocaust Memorial, down to Mehringplatz, then up Friedrichstraße past Checkpoint Charlie and back to Unter den Linden. I might have some more walking in me yet. One bonus (at least on that front) is that my hotel room is not only one of the furthest from the hotel entrance, but it's up one flight of stairs and down another to get there. Nice room, though, with windows that actually open, which is unusual these...

I've arrived in Berlin, whose international airport reminded me of LaGuardia, and I've just woken up from a nap. That makes some sense, as my body thinks it's 7am, not 2pm, and the caffeine from the tea they served me at breakfast (just before 11pm Chicago time) may have worn off. After showering and putting clothes on I'll start exploring. I foresee no difficulty making my Fitbit numbers, but I do foresee some difficulty taking in this immense city in three days. But, my Dog, I do not like overnight...

The Seattle Times catches up with the former Groupon CEO: Mason, 34, became rich by trying to create the world’s biggest bargain bin. In 2008, he transformed an online service devoted to social causes into Groupon, which offered steep discounts on everything from restaurant meals to hot-air balloon flights if enough people bought them. By late 2011, Groupon had become an Internet sensation valued at $13 billion in an initial public offering of stock that turned Mason into a billionaire. Things unraveled...

I remember, when I was a kid, how much I loved going to Radio Shack. When I was about 7, my dad got me a 50-in-1 kit that had electronic components like resistors and capacitors, and little wires you could use to connect the components. I made things that buzzed and flashed, even a thing that changed an 8-bar LED into different numbers, and somehow remained completely immune to the principles of electronic engineering the kit intended to impart. I also had a TRS-80 Model I, with the enormous 16K (yes...

After a nearly two days with above-freezing temperatures, our sidewalks have become passable and our faces have stopped falling off from the cold. Consequently I've spent a good deal of time today walking places. Consequently, though it's just 3pm, I've gotten better Fitbit numbers (15,000 steps, 11 km) than on any day since January 3rd (16,800 steps, 12.1 km). From January 3rd you have to go all the way back to November 30th (23,500 steps, 18 km) to find better results. I'm not going to do that today...

After 15 years and hundreds of thousands of posts, Sullivan posted the last Dish entry this afternoon: I hope that this fifteen-year catalog of insights and errors, new truths and old lies, prejudices and loves, jokes and intimacy, prescience and forgetfulness, will not be taken for anything more than it was, or ever could be. I hope we can all simply look back at the journey, and the laughs we had, and the pain we lived through together and the love that sustained us as a team and as a community, as we...

No, the company isn't hiring a celebrity chef; the Times sent one to review the food: Mr. Zakarian took one bite of his wrap and then looked inside. It seemed mostly tortilla, with some wan strips of chicken and shreds of iceberg lettuce. It was, in a word, tasteless. “Why would anyone come here for this?” he asked. “You can get a much better wrap at Chipotle. McDonald’s should stick to what it does well.” “Of course, the food could be better,” he said. “All fast food could be better. McDonald’s has...