Powdered Non Sequitur Man

Happy birthday to the marvelous shanamadele and her adorable son!

For the third morning in a row, I’ve awakened to… a nasty headache.
On the plus side, it still beats a bleeding ulcer. I think I’ll make a sick-person-to-sick-person call later today.

In a comment on my post yesterday, my buddy Steve asked a question I felt was worth calling more* attention to. Speaking of David Caruso’s miserable acting on CSI: Miami, he wrote:
Can one actually have a 0-dimensional character (i.e. a point)?
* (Slightly more, anyway. I have–what–maybe ten readers?)

This post’s title, “The Top Ten Most Misunderstood Movies Ever Made,” is perhaps a bit of hyperbole. However, it offers some interesting perspectives on some popular mainstream films. I more or less agree with his take on Pulp Fiction (though there are some characters who live without redeeming themselves, like the Wolf), and [...]

For the first time since the prize’s creation 39 years ago, the Turing Award — the highest award in the field of computer science — is going to a woman. Rock on.
(More info at Broadsheet.)

Here’s a brilliant compilation of scenes from CSI: Miami in which David Caruso enhances the dramatic effect of his one-liner by putting on his sunglasses.
(Link via Salon’s Video Dog blog.)

I can’t resist: Oregon Mensa’s page about Portland has at least two glaring typos on it: “Pitock Mansion” (should be “Pittock”), and even better, the “Western Forrestry Center”. (”Forrestry?” Is that, like, the study of Mister Gump?)

For not the first — and probably not the last — time in my life, I’m installing Windows. What’s weird about this time is that I’m installing Windows on a Mac 600 miles away. I’m doing this through:

Parallels Desktop, which allows Windows to run in a window on top of Mac OS X…
…which [...]

Australia bans incandescent bulbs by 2010. Nice.

“Special” features aren’t.

“People, animal corpses and the biohazard symbol are all at risk of being sucked into the time-tunnel vortex.”
(From safenow.org.)

Last time I checked, class schedules for spring term weren’t yet online. I looked again today, and lo and behold, I have not one but two good options for my last non-CS course. The first, Computational Physics, would be a nice, unchallenging class that would let me focus on other things (like, say, [...]

Ran across this back at OOPSLA in October: Marmoset provides a way for students to submit programming assignments and have them tested against several suites of tests. This offers them (some) feedback on how they did. Nifty, if somewhat overly secretive.

From the GeoKit documentation:
GeoKit is a Rails plugin for building location-based apps. It provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation in one cohesive package. If you have any tables with latitude/longitude oolumns in your database, or if you every wanted to easily query for “all the stores within a 50 mile radius,” then GeoKit is [...]

The “defense of marriage” initiative being proposed in Washington state, which I mentioned the other day, is being advanced by a pro-marriage-equality group. (I assumed people would click through and discover that, but I should’ve mentioned it directly. Sorry!)
It’s a great example of a reductio ad absurdum argument which I’ve personally used in [...]

When passing around several objects from the Scent class, it’s convenient to have a container object to put them in. The name Scents is awkwardly ambiguous, so I’m seriously considering changing it to the Funk class.
Which reminds me of a Space Ghost quote: “I’ve got the funk in my trousers for sure!”
Of course, [...]

According to this list, I can die now.

Here’s some stunningly brilliant tactical thinking: a group of Washingtonians is working to get a ‘defense of marriage’ initiative on the state ballot. According to their website, the initiative would:

add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
require that couples married in Washington [...]

Jyte.com — simple concept, very well executed, surprisingly addictive.
(Note to LJ users: because LJ acts as an OpenID server, you can log in to Jyte, and any other OpenID-enabled site, using ‘yourname.livejournal.com’ as your identifier. You’ll jump to LJ, give it permission to authenticate you to the other site, then jump back — no [...]

I just registered for RailsConf, which is super-cool because:

I’d *love* to get a Ruby job; this will give me a chance to network.
It’s on a Thursday through a Sunday, which means I won’t even miss (much) class.
I get a 65% full-time student discount.
It’s right here in town (unlike last year’s, which was in Chicago).
The sessions [...]