The noises that Thomas hates

Okay, so I've accepted the fact that I am going to be staying in the same hotel every time I travel to Dubai this year. It's not the best hotel in the world, and it's not in the greatest location, but it's clean, the beds are comfortable, and since my company has a contract with this particular hotel there's really not much I can do about it in any case.

Every morning, breakfast is served in the

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Denton election headed to runoff

Following up on the controversial municipal election in Denton, Texas: it looks like it's not over yet.Denton Mayor Perry McNeill and rival Mark Burroughs are headed for a runoff after neither secured a majority of the vote in Saturday’s mayoral race.Two other candidates, businessman Justin Bell and college student Darac Favre, combined to receive about 12 percent of the 3,330 votes cast —

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The noise that teenagers hate

By now just about everybody has heard of "The Mosquito," a device developed in Britain a few years ago that is designed to repel loitering teenagers by emitting an annoying, high-frequency sound that only they can hear. The device takes advantage of the natural tendency of people's ears to lose the ability to hear very high-pitched sounds as they age; as such, the noises these devices emit do not

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IAH-DXB via EK 212

Dubai again.This time I finally got to take advantage of the non-stop flight from Houston that Emirates began operating last December. It was about as I had suspected, with attentive service, decent food, good in-flight entertainment and (relatively) comfortable seats. My only disappointment was that, unlike the Airbus A340s in Emirates' fleet, their Boeing 777s don't come with footrests in coach

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A brief week and some brief thoughts

Wow, that was a short week. I can't believe that I have to go to the airport, get on a plane and head back to Dubai in just a couple of hours. Like I said, I never thought that coming home would seem like a vacation for me, but that's exactly how it felt.The past week has been busy; I had a lot of things that I needed to get done during my short time here, both at work and at home. The week was

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Butterflies are free

And there are more where that one came from; we have five pupae that should hatch sometime this week.

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Gas tax holiday

Other bloggers (local as well as national) have already written about this, but I feel compelled to add my voice to the chorus: the summer "gas tax holiday" being promoted by presidential candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton is a stupid idea and is little more than cynical, transparent political pandering of the worst variety.The average national gas price is currently hovering right above

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