dsandler.org

Archive for July, 2002

[16:33] * dsandler discovers a single piece of brassiere underwire under a nearby desk
[11:18] <ctate> | Stegosaurus: Oh, so you’re sneaking up behind me to eat my delicious body? WHAM! Spikes! For you! In your head!
A Salon blog that seems worth the read: Tor Andre’s TV/Movie reviews. (No, they’re not full synopses — just bite-sized reviews & criticisms.)
It looks like DreamWorks has deployed the A.I. Internet-marketing plan again and started a series of websites related to its forthcoming remake of RING (actually “Ringu”, a Japanese psychological-terror classic).
This is nothing new, but I wanted to make sure I had record of Romeo + Juliet for the Tragically l33t. “WTF R U ROMEO!”

Debugging my IRC operator-and-magic-8-ball robot:

[13:55] <dsandler> opper: Was it your fault?
[13:55] * dsandler shakes opper
[13:55] <opper> dsandler: My reply is no.
News flash: IBM to acquire PwC Consulting (previously planned to be spun off as a public company under the name “Monday”). “We’ve got your company, la la la…”
Last link for the morning, I swear: another Times article, this time based on the thesis that a Bush-instigated attack on Iraq won’t just distract from the country’s economic problems, it will actually exacerbate them. “Eleven years ago, the Persian Gulf war … cost the United States and its allies $60 billion and helped set off an economic recession caused in part by a spike in oil prices. For that war, the allies picked up almost 80 percent of the bill. Today, however, as the Bush administration works on plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the United States is confronting the likelihood that this time around it would have to pick up the tab largely by itself …”

This NY Times article describes the discovery of these mathematicians that elliptic-curve math could be used to generate a rigorous mathematical model for what M. C. Escher intuitively designed in his self-repeating “Print Gallery” drawing. Using a mathematical reconstruction of the original work, the mathematicians were able to complete the drawing where Escher left the original blank (either for artistic or computational reasons).

It’s too bad I don’t have my camera. On the office junk pile (Motto: “Have some junk? Leave some junk. Need some junk? Take some junk.”) there can be found:

  1. One bag with a couple of hundred stylus tips;
  2. One bag with a similar number of stylus ends (complete with pointy reset poker);
  3. A stack of trays, each tray containing 8 or so grooves, each groove containing 10 so stylus barrels, laid end-to-end.

They seem to be raw stylus parts for the Palm V. I guess some oldtimer’s cleaning out his/her cubicle in preparation for the move.

Hmm. A highly-entertaining collection of anecdotes from a girl taking a $6.50/hr job in a bad economy, True Porn Clerk Stories is not exactly safe for work. (You’d think this would have been apparent to me by the title alone). [from mike via wendy]
In case you missed it: Erin has posted her synopsis of last night’s episode of Sex and the City.

Playing To Win: if your goal is to play Street Fighter “fairly”, you’ll lose every time.

An unidentified flying object was observed Friday night in Washington, D.C, pursued by two Air Force F-16 fighters.
“So powerful was the state’s control over people’s minds in “1984″ that, eventually, everyone came to love Big Brother. Perhaps in time we all will, too.

Argh. Why is it that whenever I leave the office at 4, I’m always spctted by important people? Today: “Hi, Dan.” say the VP of engineering & the VP of product delivery.

Suggested recently to foil evil macros:

#define #define //
On MetaFilter, the untold stories of typefaces in an amusing thread spawned by Behind The Typeface: Cooper Black. (And how did I forget about typographi.ca, and miss typographer.com?)
Aviation Leak (er, “Week”): Lockheed Martin is tailoring a laser for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that could be ready as early as 2010 for demonstration and the start of a full-scale development program. [from /.]
Oh, see, I had read this before, but I didn’t see it attributed to Terry Bisson.

Missed this yesterday (I was out with flu-like symptoms):

[11:33] <todd> Current tip for quality code: when using shift operators, make sure they’re pointing the right way. [blush]
This Slashdot thread on .NET has spawned some really excellent comments (example; read at +4 to avoid the crap).

Another thing learned from Getting Away With It … Live: My favorite track from Whiplash, “Tomorrow”, was “written to stop a very close friend from jumping off a roof.” Appropriate.

Now your grip’s too strong, you can’t catch love with a net or a gun
Gotta keep faith that your path will change
Gotta keep faith that your love will change
Tomorrow.

Listening to Getting Away With It … Live, I occasioned to stop by AMG and find out where some of these new tracks came from. Turns out they came from the two UK-only studio albums released since 1997’s Whiplash, and they’re apparently fabulous:

James’ tenth makes you wonder what all the fuss over U2 and R.E.M.’s rebirths are about. [AMG]

(Not surprisingly, I’ve personally made quite a fuss over All That You Can’t Leave Behind and Reveal.)

Bruce Tognazzini’s Quiz To Give You Fitts. (Hint: Fitts’s 1954 law (confession: I had to look up the date) provides a model for the time taken to execute a targeted motion; it’s the reason why a big button is easier to find and click than a small one.)
An excellent side-effect of my new glasses: I take frequent breaks, because my eyes now get tired no matter what I do — glasses on or off.

An evening with Street Fighter 2.

ERIN: So you agree that Balrog looks like Tyson?

DAN: Yeah.

ERIN: And that Dhalsim looks like Ghandi?

DAN: What, just because he’s Indian? And bald? And emaciated?

ERIN: And he breathes fire! Hellooooo!

Chaim Potok dead at 73 of brain cancer.

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