dsandler.org/wp

Quick notes for the evening:

1. The US version of Coupling isn’t nearly as good as the BBC version.
   It is also, however, not nearly as bad as I was afraid
   it might be. So, I mean, “there’s an upside.”

2. Erin finally opened one of her birthday albums — the new John
   Mayer release, Heavier Things. (This is the album that she was
   compelled to desire after listening to Mayer interviewed on NPR.)

   We’ve barely scratched the
   surface of the music (so to speak — damned slot-loading CD
   player!) but I’m already blown away by the design of the CD (classic
   Columbia records throwback, with late-1950’s phonograph line art and
   “COLUMBIA” set in Century (or similar)) and the liner notes
   (charming, hilarious, inspired infographics and statistics
   accompanying each song).

secsh is SO GOOD
for a couple of reasons:

1. It is a pure-python implementation of an SSH2 client, supporting
   private key and password authentication.

2. “milestone releases are being named alphabetically after pok?mon.”

Someone forwarded me a link to this
ThinkGeek t-shirt, explaining that it made him think of me.

I believe this is cause for deep, deep shame on my part.

A Slashdot article appearing last Monday, which reported on the claim
that scrambled
words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place,
was circulated to the University of British
Columbia‘s Linguistics department. An interesting counter-example
resulted:

“Anidroccg to crad
cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh
Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a
slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut
to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr.”

As demonstrated, a simple inversion of the internal
characters results in a text which is relatively hard to decipher.
— Slashback
9/25