My girlfriend and I are visiting San Diego over the 4th of July weekend. What should we do and see? Are there any special 4th of July events we shouldn't miss? And what about good vegetarian restaurants?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 10:02 PM on June 28, 2008 (11 comments)

Hey Metafilter electronic hardware folks: I want to set up a digital picture frame that I can control via software on a Linux desktop to toggle between two different images on command. What should I buy?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 10:02 PM on May 23, 2008 (6 comments)

Help! I'm about to have more money than I know what to do with! I'm starting a career, and right from the beginning I want to make good financial choices, invest, et cetera so that I'm setting myself up for continued wealth rather than just wasting all my money. What resources are there to teach me how to do that?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:27 AM on March 15, 2008 (16 comments)

What are some great vegan, low-fat and low-sodium recipes suitable for a Christmas dinner?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:54 PM on November 28, 2007 (14 comments)

What's a good algorithm for finding the lowest total price if I want to buy several items from several different sellers, where each seller charges a flat shipping cost?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:05 PM on August 3, 2007 (5 comments)

I'm having a few people over one evening "for cocktails." In order to provide a decent repertoire of standard cocktails, what should I stock my bar with?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 2:38 PM on December 11, 2006 (41 comments)

My parents' neighbor accidentally saved a blank file over the book she's writing in Microsoft Word 2003. The last backup she has is from April. Is there any way to recover a more recent version, or at least pieces of it?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 12:48 PM on September 3, 2006 (17 comments)

Another question about travelling to Milwaukee, a follow-up of sorts to Frank Grimes' recent question. My girlfriend and I are going up to Milwaukee this weekend; are there any neat non-beer/bar/brewery-related things to do and places to visit? And does anybody know of a good vegetarian restaurant or two there?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 1:21 PM on March 20, 2006 (12 comments)

What resources exist for non-techy social scientists who want to use relational databases to store their data, but don't know how?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:40 AM on December 24, 2005 (7 comments)

What's the sum of all integers? I remember from somewhere in the distant past of my math education that you can sum up all the integers and get a wide variety of different results. For instance, you can write the sum as S = 0 + (1 + -1) + (2 + -2) + ... where each pair cancels to 0, so S must be 0. But you can also write it as S = 0 + 1 + (2 + -1) + (3 + -2) + ... where each pair adds up to 1, so S must be infinity. With a little more work it seems like you could also get other answers. My question is: are these answers correct, or are all but one of them mistakes like the numerous "proofs" that 3=2? If they're all correct, how does it make sense that the same numbers can add up to different things when you get to infinity? If they're not all correct, what's the fundamental mistake?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 9:25 AM on October 5, 2005 (29 comments)

Why would requests for other websites show up in my web server's access log, and does it indicate that there's a vulnerability in my server?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 10:43 AM on June 12, 2005 (14 comments)

PHP programmers: what would a well-laid-out PHP project look like to you? I'm a computer science grad student who's never used PHP for anything much and not in many years, but I now have an opportunity to write a small-to-moderate-sized site for somebody and thought I'd give PHP another go. I'm well versed in generally writing tasteful programs and I even have a pretty decent amount of experience with writing web sites using other technologies; what I'm really interested in is specifically how PHP programmers use the language in practice to make maintainable sites. For instance, what's the best way to separate content from HTML so it's easier to make site-wide HTML tweaks? What are the sorts of things that you wish someone had told you about how to build PHP projects?
posted to Ask Metafilter by jacobm at 8:47 PM on February 19, 2005 (10 comments)