Powdered Non Sequitur Man

This site is awesome: Black People Love Us! (Link via soapboxgirls)

The link below is apparently a screenshot of a bug tracking system being demo’d. It’s funny, if you happen to be a geek.
Fun with sample bugs: “I would just like to say that Programmer Longhair’s attitude is quite inappropriate…”
– from Joel on Software

So I was talking on the phone with my dad today. He does a fair amount of consulting with local social service agencies, and some time ago, I wrote a little database application for him that lets his clients enter data for him to collect later. The app works fine for what it [...]

So my sweetie and I have been somewhat obsessively working our way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer — at least, the first two seasons, which are the only two available at our local video stores.
(And huzzah for local video stores! Hollywood may be managed here in Oregon, but it’s a nationwide chain, and did [...]

I broke my electric flyswatter, which means I can’t currently (no pun intended) do much about the seven flies buzzing around the living room. Until, that is, reinforcements arrive. (Be sure to check out the demo video in Windows Media format, if you’ve got an appropriate player….) Quake in fear, pesky little [...]

I now have four full (and by full, I mean a full six hours) working days left before I am Unemployed. I’ve run out of immediate changes to be made to my last major project, I’ve identified half a dozen potential improvements, and now I’m just waiting for a half hour here and a [...]

The main page of Doonesbury features this choice quote:
Maybe it’s part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn’t work that way in the Middle [...]

One of the fun things about having your own Internet domain to play with is that you get to pick your own email addresses. And, if you’ve got an account set up as a “catchall,” you *really* get to pick your own email address. I often make up random email addresses, since [anything [...]

In the spirit of Dr. Evil (“In the summer we made meat helmets”), my friend Allyson sends this, er… prime website: Hats Of Meat!

In his weblog, Neil Gaiman referred to something he called “plot coupons,” which was so amusing I had to go searching for other references to it. Found this piece from 1986, which I really must finish reading later. [Update: I did. It was highly amusing, and incidentally mocked Leonard Nimoy's poetry.]

The theme for this weekend has been “we don’t like fun.” Rather than going to a party last night, we stayed home and watched the first season of Buffy. We also went to Sauvie Island today and had every intention of walking through one of the several corn mazes there, but when we [...]

Came home a little early from work yesterday to attempt to sleep off a headache. (It didn’t work.) Then we watched Buffy all evening… and when bedtime rolled around, I realized I’d gone seven hours during the day without touching a computer keyboard. For some reason, that seemed like a lot. [...]

So I watched Les Misérables again this evening, while my sweetie was out. (She’d declared a boycott, you see.) Damn, that’s a powerful story… and there were some fine actors in it, and you really get a sense for the characters in this particular production.
Powells, in their info page about the book, includes [...]

Doh. In addition to the previous catalogue of salsa-making woes, it turns out that I had also utterly forgotten the red onion. Which is probably part of why it smelled so wrong.
Anyway, I made another batch of salsa last night, and it’s wonderful as usual. I even put half a habanero pepper [...]

Hmm. Apparently I am unable to correctly spell the word “hierarchical”: I keep wanting to put the ‘e’ first.

For the first time in my life, I aborted a batch of salsa. A few tips on salsa-making for the curious:

Good bell peppers are as critical to the success of a salsa as good tomatoes. The yellow bell peppers you yanked out of the garden because even though they’re still green and it [...]

Wow. I feel particularly underobservant — I never realized that Lawrence Lessig has a blog. His extended, but extremely thoughtful, take on the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (to overturn Congress’ most recent copyright term extension law) is here. It’s long, but well worth the read for anyone interested in copyright.
The relevant article [...]

We have flies. Lots of flies. Lots of little flies, smaller than your standard housefly but bigger than a fruit fly. I’ve killed at least ten of them today. (Make that eleven.) Using an electric flyswatter is kind of cool and all, but damn. It’s almost like a first-person [...]

…and speaking of wackiness, I got an email this morning via my resume page from someone in Pennsylvania wanting to know if I could help them convert a database from Access to SQL Server. Which should, on the scale they want, be relatively straightforward, but this was completely unsolicited — it basically fell into [...]

Oh, yeah… I just realized it’s only a month to my 28th birthday. Wacky.