pun.org

A personal web site

History

pun.org is the ancestral domain of Joshua R. Poulson (“Josh Poulson” when I'm less formal), an Internet inhabitant from the mid-1980's onward. It is the hope of the webmaster that people will enjoy their stopover here, and can make use of the web pages herein.

I'm married to this lovely lady, named Misty. We got married in Cozumel, Mexico in 2003 while on a cruise through the western Caribbean. Son and daughter Ryan and Alana got to go with us. Alana was very interested in the dress. Ryan was very interested in burying dinosaurs in the sand.

We've moved Josh's biographical information here.

Misty is a nurse (BSN) who works at the Southwest Medical Center Emergency Department in Vancouver, Washington. We keep plenty busy with 13-year-old Alana and 10-year-old Ryan. We are a little outside the hustle and bustle of the Portland metropolitan area, north of a town called Ridgefield, Washington.

I keep a blog going about all my weird interests called, oddly enough, “Josh's Weblog.”

About Puns

Puns are described by Merriam-Webster with this particular boring definition: “the usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound.” How droll. If you are looking for puns that I have collected, there are a few here, but I judge that I've not done justice to the subject, and I've left everyone hanging. I do most of my puns in person, on the fly, pretty much winging it. I've been meaning to start gathering my lists of emailed puns into the collection, but there have always been issues with copyrights, either real or imagined.

I got my start with puns at a tender early age working my way up to collecting the huge collection stories. I still love to rattle off quick puns and I've been through my share of contests. I owe my love of puns to the influence of my family, which was further enhanced by a Christmas gift from my father in the 1970's… Crosbie's Dictionary of Puns.

Places I browse to every day

This is a short “hot list” of the places I visit every day on the web. Many of the blogs I read I get through RSS feeds so I no longer list them here. If it doesn't have a reasonable RSS feed, though, I have to have a link somewhere.

First of all, I tend to get most of my browsing from Google Reader, rather than going to a lot of sites directly.

Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes (reruns, of course)
• Foxtrot (only Sundays now)
• Dilbert
• Dork Tower, for the D&D geek in me
• PVP Online, for the MMORPG player in me
• User Friendly, which is nerdy, but there's also
• Joy of Tech, for the nerd in me
• “day by day” by Chris Muir
• xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

Subscribed Pages

There are very few web sites I pay for, specifically these two:

• Wall Street Journal Online
• Audible.com (downloadable audiobooks)

The Wall Street Journal offers a number of good blogs that I enjoy through Google Reader now:

• Law Blog
• Washington Wire
• Real Time Economics
• Business Technology
• The Numbers Guy

These are the web sites I used to pay for via Network Subscriptions. In addition to the Wall Street Journal their “Business Network Plus” plan included:

• Financial Times Online
• The Economist Online
• Morningstar
• Institutional Investor
• Encyclopædia Britannica Online
• Get Abstract
• Technology Review (an MIT enterprise)
• Harvard Management Update (via email, always with delivery problems)
• Harvard Negotiation Newsletter (discontinued, to my dismay)

Audible.com used to deliver my Harvard Management Update, but I sure miss my PDF hardcopy. Now I don't even get it through Audible anymore.

General News

• Business Week Daily News
• My Yahoo (portal)
• Fox News
• Drudge Report
• Hot Air

These other ones I used to visit, but now not so much.

• Washington Times
• Pajamas Media
• Memeorandum

Portland, Oregon News

I have reduced this list to the sources that are useful more often than the other links I used to provide.

• Northwest Newschannel 8 Local News
• KATU, Channel 2 News

Computer News

• ZDNet News
• Tom's Hardware Guide
• Slashdot
• Engadget and the TV-focused Engadget HD

Linux

• Linux Weekly News
• Linux Kernel Traffic (updated weekly, but it is worth reading carefully)
• IBM Linux Technology Center news (where I work now)

Law

• Groklaw (a site run by a paralegal tracking the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit)
• Professor Bainbridge
• The Volokh Conspiracy

Miscellany

• SJ Games Daily Illuminator
• The Straight Dope

Places I browse to every week

These sites don't get updated as frequently as the ones above, or I never have the time to browse through them like I do on the weekend.

Computer Games

• Gamespot PC Focus
• Gamespot Playstation 2 Focus
• Civilization IV at Apolyton
• Civilization Fanatics
• Neverwinter Nights news

Movie News

• TheOneRing.Net (Lord of the Rings)
• TheForce.Net (Star Wars)
• Ain't It Cool News (Movie News)

Columns & Online Magazines

• A List Apart (web design)
• Web Standards (web standards advocacy)
• The Libertarian Enterprise (libertarian)
• Ann Coulter (conservative)
• Larry Elder (libertarian)
• Dr. Laura Schlessinger (conservative)
• VW Vortex (VW, Audi, Lamborghini news)
• Junk Science (reflections on the news by a skeptic)
• The Onion (humor)

Gun News

• My NRA (portal)
• packing.org News (news for gun owners)

Software

• Mozilla (standards-based web browser)
• VanDyke Software (terminal emulators and ssh clients)
• Trillian by Cerulean Software (multiple protocol instant messenger client)
• Vim (text editor)
• GNU Emacs FAQ for Windows (text editor)
• IBM DeveloperWorks (developer resources)
• Sun's Java Page (Java VMs and development kits)
• The Eclipse Tools Project (integrated development environment)

Resources

• NRA Course Descriptions
• Portland, Oregon Firearms Training
• Constitution of the State of Oregon (from the Oregon Blue Book Online)
• The Declaration of Independence (from the Library of Congress “Thomas” Web Pages)
• The Federalist Papers (from the Library of Congress “Thomas” Web Pages)
• The Constitution of the United States (from the Library of Congress “Thomas” Web Pages)
• Joshua R. Poulson for State Representative, 1998

About Style

Look familiar?

I developed the look and feel of this web site on my own time, but I have indeed used previous designs elsewhere at nratraining.com and nwsafe.org. I have to admit that I have a hobby that involves guns, and training other people how to use them effectively, which seems to annoy certain short-sighted (or bigoted) people.

I'm used to have a look that recalls folders, although each section is more like a 3x5 card. Now I try my best to have each entry as a bubble on the main part of the page. I strive to make it easy on the eyes. I generally use CSS to format the content, although I use a Javascript hack to round the corners on my various windows.

This is bold. This is strong. This is italic. And this is emphasized.

About Browsers

At this point Mozilla and Opera are the best things going for the world at large. They pay more than lip service to the standards bodies that drive the web. In fact, they do more than sit on the committees that make the standards that one particular browser manufacturer likes to ignore.

I test my web pages with Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7. There's no valid reason to be using anything older than these, and I still support the use of Opera, because even if you live on a dialup line in the middle of nowhere, better standards support will make the web faster for you! I used to have satellite Internet so I know how important speed is out there.

Web Site Provider

pun.org is currently hosted by Dreamhost.

Before I cratered their bandwidth, I was hosted at CGI101.com—a web site business from the same web mind that brought out the book CGI Programming 101 and the sequel, CGI Programming 201. We go way back in the business, to when I was encouraging people to learn Perl and she was dreaming of being an artist.