Powdered Non Sequitur Man

Yay! My summer reading (this, and this) just arrived. Now if only summer would be so helpful… (=

I can’t remember the last time I posted something that wasn’t uber-geeky.
This post is no exception.
If anyone reading this knows MySQL better than I do, do you know if there’s a way to save a query in the database in MySQL 4? I can put a bunch of SQL strings in a [...]

I just sent a file to myself via email without once touching my mail program. Yay, Quicksilver!

serenitymovie.com has a trailer up now, which heavily features River kicking copious quantities of ass. Neat. Oh, and apparently there’s going to be a preview in Portland next week. Spiffy!
[UPDATE: Said preview is sold out already, 9 hours after it was announced. Damn.]

“You’re a natural. You were born to fold bras!”

It’s not finished yet, but I’m not going to work on it for a while, so enjoy Blogger Bingo in its larval form. (=

Here’s the thing: if my only exposure to the world of programming and computer science had come from the CS coursework I’ve had to date, my current course (CS 202) would be the last. C++ is, in my beleaguered opinion, the worst language that could possibly be used to teach programmers how to [...]

…the way to set one’s path in the OS X bash shell is to place the following line in .profile:
export PATH=”$PATH:~/pathname”
Sometimes I really hate *nix. Other times I merely tolerate it.

We recieve at least one call every day, and sometimes two or three, which show up on our caller ID box as “TOLL FREE” and some 800 or 888 number. We usually just let these go through to voice mail (and they never leave messages), but I hate just letting the phone ring, so [...]

Gorgeous day today — from T-shirt weather in the early afternoon to lightning *and* rainbows earlier this evening, to a generalized beautiful glow right now.
Mental note: in addition to having more than one bathroom (oh, the luxury!), our next house should have a covered porch. I’d go work on my programming assignment outside, [...]

Well, the Hipster PDA lasted just over a week. Carrying around white index cards in one’s pocket without anything to protect them is, it turns out, a great recipe for making a slightly scummy-looking wad of no-longer-white index cards with raggedy edges. Also, the bulldog clip gets in the way a bit.
However, this [...]

Just got back from meeting with the professor-with-summer-grant I mentioned in my last post. As he put it, “the purpose of the grant is to expose undergraduates to a research environment, hopefully stimulate pleasant experiences, and encourage them to go to graduate school.” Not quite sure about that last part — I’d like [...]

“Where do you summer?”
“What?”
“Where do you spend your summers?”
“Right here in LA.”
*scoffs* “He can have the chicken.”
(The above exchange is from “LA Story,” naturally, when Steve Martin is at the bank trying to get a reservation at L’Idiot.)
I will be summering right here in PDX. Apparently I didn’t mention this before, but toward the [...]

According to the Google Blog, Google now remembers your searches, if you (a) have an account, (b) do the searches while signed in to that account and (c) haven’t put this feature on hold (so, e.g., your search for “Totoro pr0n” doesn’t show up when you’re trying to find that article on comparative theology).
Very cool. [...]

Apparently there’s a new pope now — one who, from what I hear, makes the old one look like Al Franken.
On the plus side, he’s 78. So he’s already pretty close to his “sell by” date…

…that’s “blogbag” for short, or maybe just “blag.”
VoodooPad continues to impress me. I happened to be typing someone’s name in a page, and it highlighted them in green (links internal to the document are blue by default). “That’s odd,” I thought, and clicked on it. I got a little dialog asking me [...]

I love the Internet: RFC 3092 (rfc3092) - Etymology of “Foo”

Amazon.com: DVD: The Greatest American Hero - Season One

My life is now complete.
(This came up when fawnapril searched to see if Season 2 of Magnum P.I. was available yet. It is. So, as it turns out, are at least the first two seasons of Sledge Hammer. Who needs crappy modern TV when [...]

On the off chance that anyone reading this wants a crash course intro to writing unit tests with PHPUnit (for PHP4, note that PHPUnit2 only runs on PHP5) and Smarty, I’ve created an unzip-and-go archive with some bonehead test cases in it. The archive is here and includes all necessary libraries.
(You’ll probably also want [...]

I was fidgeting with my iPod Shuffle yesterday when I accidentally yanked the headphones out of their jack.
What happens when you do this to every other piece of audio equipment you’ve ever used in your life? The music goes right on playing, whether you can hear it or not.
Not so the iPod Shuffle — [...]