(Inspired by some odd-looking steers we saw today on the way to Brazos Bend State Park.)
Archive for May, 2006
E and I spotted this bumper sticker on a truck in Sugar Land, TX:
Bush made me a Democrat.
Wow. It’s a flashback to the 90s today (thanks to the news that twelve men and women agree that regardless of whether you’re malicious or stupid or malicious pretending to be stupid, you’re still guilty), with an all-text chron.com frontpage:
I’m trying to sleep until (very nearly) exactly every minute, on the minute. So I’m perplexed when, expecting to wake up at 10:54, I see the following: (from the Console log output)
2006-05-25 10:53:60.000 CuckooChimeAgent[1654] Wakeup @ 53:59
The code:
NSCalendarDate * now = [NSCalendarDate calendarDate];
int min = [now minuteOfHour];
int sec = [now secondOfMinute];
NSLog(@”Wakeup @ %02d:%02d”, min, sec);
So I woke up at 10:54, but the calendar date still shows 10:53 and, apparently, sixty seconds. What the hell kind of time is 10:53:60?
Erin and I like to eat. Houston’s a great place for that. When we lived elsewhere, we’d visit Houston and eat our way through the trip. Now that we live here again, we can (and do) eat at our favorite places all the time. Not content to eat at the same places over and over, though1, we occasionally venture out to the odd new eatery. We hit two today: DNR on Montrose, and Earl of Sandwich out in Sugar Land. Here’s what we thought; ratings are on a scale of −2 to +2 (each of us kicks in −1, 0, or 1 point to the total).
(continued…) (786 words)I’ve been meaning to look at the Mercurial source-control system for about a year now. It’s Python, it’s distributed. Sounds like a winner. But I go to their home page, which is a Moin wiki, and…well, where’s the darned introduction? I was hoping to find a document along the lines of, “This is the SCM system for you, and here’s why.” The QuickStart motivates use of the system by showing how lightweight it is to get started, but that’s a do-it-yourself kind of sales pitch. I guess I’ve been reading too many ebullient research papers, but I figure if you built something cool and want people to use it, you should—clearly, concisely—tell them what it is and why it’s better than everything else that’s come before.
I finally realized what the boxy, raised keys on the MacBook keyboard remind me of! Compare:
Dear blog owners, I’ve got some new software you should try:
- Updated: The powerful TrackBack Validator plugin for WordPress has been revved to version 0.7. This plugin kills almost all existing TrackBack, dead. [I say “almost” because I (coincidentally) received word today of a spammer who sets up real blogs to try to spam people. I think of this as a victory for our plugin: It has forced spammers to, you know, behave like real bloggers. Who’s to say a TrackBack from this guy is spam and not a legitimate link to your blog?]
- New: Illuminati is a new Internet measurement project from the CoralCDN (”Coral cache”) guys. They’re gathering much-needed statistics (like these awesome graphs) about the edges of the Internet (that’s you!), including NAT and proxy statistics, and they need help from website operators everywhere. Visit the site to learn how to contribute, or (if you’re a WordPress blogger) install my Illuminati plugin for WordPress.
Emil Sit postulates about a TV drama about grad students. Here’s what would actually happen if you pitched an idea like that to a studio: they’d say, “It’s perfect! Except, maybe as a straight sitcom, instead of a drama. And instead of being about graduate scholarship, we’ll just make the whole grad school thing part of the quirky backdrop. Instead of going to lab or office hours, the characters would spend all their camera time in a coffeehouse or something, engaging in banal four-camera comedy.” [Ironically, this is one of my can’t-miss shows right now, and it just about matches that show profile. I guess I’m a sucker for snappy comedy writing and good casting.]
