I'm Chuck, and this is my personal web site that's gotten out way of hand over the years. It's a huge, labyrinthine and delightfully overgrown compendium of knowledge about New Orleans and Louisiana cuisine and culture, and lots of other fun and fabulous stuff; dedicated to the enjoyment of great food, drink and music, and to the preservation of New Orleans culture.

The 'Parker-style' ballpoint refill is actually a standard pattern refill known as the G2, and is used by many manufacturers for their ballpoint pens. It was originally created by Parker, and is best known as their refill, but it is now an ISO standard (ISO 12757-2), and is used by many different pen brands.

I was horrified reading this, and it dawned on me how wrong we've approached our internal vacation policy. This text sums up exactly what's wrong with an open vacation policy. People take less time off, and it's celebrated as a success of giving people more responsibility.

Make perfect CURSIVE handwriting practice worksheets using our new "Perfect Cursive" technology. The precision of connecting lines is amazing!

Redditor monkey_n_pig gets the credit for starting the conversation this time; yesterday, s/he posted an AskReddit thread inquiring, “What are some simple work etiquettes that most people just don’t get?” Putting aside the grammatically incorrect usage of the work “etiquettes” here (sorry — once an editor, always an editor), it’s an important issue to address — and Reddit rose

Pixar story artist Emma Coats has tweeted a series of “story basics” over the past month and a half — guidelines that she learned from her more senior colleagues on how to create appealing stories:

The humble ballpoint pen is an item so ubiquitous the chances of you not having one near you right now are so low E.T could probably give you the percentage on his right hand. Few people realize just how much technology, craftsmanship and effort goes into creating a single pen- probably because you can buy 30 of them for a few dollars, only to mysteriously have them all disappear within a week.