Powdered Non Sequitur Man

We’re back from visiting with friends in Seattle, where we spent a lovely two days playing games and eating and laughing. And partaking of a a turkey.

Haven’t been posting much this week, I know — I’ve been busy with school, mostly. But I had to brag a little! (Non-geeks can safely skip this post.)
For a lab in my computer science class, we have to write a program and create a test plan… so I decided to write code that [...]

I almost feel guilty for laughing at this: Bullet fired during KKK ceremony hits participant.
A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant [the initiate] in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

Normally I don’t bother reading Wired, but this was a particularly interesting piece about one company’s failed attempt at a completely virtual office (i.e., no desks, no land lines, no paper, tiny little lockers for your stuff, and not enough laptops and cordless phones to go around): Lost In Space.

Hey, my friend Karen started a blog!

Wow. I just had my first blue Brainwash soda in years. I’d been pretty sure they were never going to be made again. Yay! And the best, as they say, is yet to come…
(On the other hand, Cost Plus has apparently stopped carrying Taco Dust, which means we’ll have to resort [...]

Salon reviews The Cat In The Hat, trashing it in their trademark thoughtful way, but really the teaser (“It’s not worth your money. Not even one look. Mike Myers has butchered a great children’s book.”) and the last line (“[...] the best argument yet made for extending artists’ rights beyond the grave.”) sum it all [...]

162 hours is a long time to spend with a digitizing graphics tablet. A very long time.

James Bond camera. This might be cool if it weren’t, you know, merchandise. And $100.

So yesterday, while it was snowing, my sweetie took half a roll of pictures. Here’s one.

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
– Brian W. Kernighan (one of the original developers of the C programming language)

File under “vastly underwhelmed”: Was reading Neil Gaiman’s blog, where he mentioned that some of his audiobooks were available via the iTunes store. Fired up iTunes, enabled store, went to audiobooks section. Did not see Neil Gaiman. Looked for list of authors, did not find any. Searched for “Gaiman” under [...]

It is snowing like crazy here in Portland — it’s even sticking to the ground, which it hasn’t done for almost two years. As such, I spent just over two hours getting to school (a trip that normally takes under one hour), but somehow this just makes the day seem like more fun.
I just [...]

What Is The Meatrix?

Two excerpts from an essay by Brian Eno about what he calls the Long Now:
‘Now’ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future [...]

Scanned and posted several new pictures:

Typo in a state park’s interpretive sign.
Me at Disneyland — as usual, I have no idea what I was doing.
Me with a leaf we found at a metro park.

My very cool friend Allyson also has a very cool family. Her youngest sister (who’s now 15, I think) apparently just went through her first heartbreak and, being part of this incredibly smart group of people, has asked all of her family members for a rather unusual Christmas present: boyfriend manuals. That’s [...]

Birthday took a nasty turn midway, but ended up all right. Couldn’t fall asleep, so built an install for my software and now think I’ll be tired enough to actually zonk out this time. But before I do: light bulb jokes! Some of them that seem particularly amusing in my befuddled [...]

Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but since she did… happy birthday, Sara!
(Now I’m going to go appreciate *my* birthday present, which I got to open a few hours early.)

I’m sorry, ThinkGeek, you can use as many fancy buzzwords like “optics” and “reverse polarity protection” (and what does that mean, that it doesn’t work if you put the battery in backwards?), but there’s just no getting around the fact that you’re trying to sell a $150 flashlight.
[UPDATE: this one, though, looks a little [...]