Powdered Non Sequitur Man

YouTube currently has one of my very favoritest scenes from UHF. There’s no reason I should find this so entertaining, but I do.

I love it: annoyed with O’Reilly’s official schedule for RailsConf, someone hacked out a Rails application designed to let people plan conference schedules. Here’s my plan.

Yipes. This morning, I deleted all of the comment spam caught by the Akismet plugin. Checked back in this afternoon to manually delete one that made it past Akismet (but was still held for moderation), and there were 319 more. I thought that was impressive, but then when I refreshed the page [...]

The A-bike, at GBP150 ($300 at current exchange rates), looks like a fantastic way of increasing one’s car-free range in an urban environment. It’s the smallest folding bike I’ve ever seen. Fantastic.

CardMeeting is starting to look pretty damn cool. Not from a whiz-bang graphics point of view, mind you, but its UI very cleverly takes advantage of the spatial way humans think about the world.
Index cards work very well for certain kinds of planning meetings because they’re cheap, relatively egalitarian (anyone can pick them up [...]

Absolutely engrossing interactive cloth simulation. Trust me, it’s cool. Go check it out.

Swiped from realsupergirl:
Go to IMDB.com and search for 10 of your fave movies. Put 3 key words for each and see if people can guess.
Following RSG’s lead, I’ll send a little surprise in the mail to whomever guesses the most.
Titles are listed in no particular order. (Note: several are not movies, or are [...]

(Hey! You! Get your mind out of the gutter. You’re blocking my periscope.)
After meeting with my thesis advisor this afternoon, I hied over to the climbing gym, where I spent about half an hour or so bouldering until I couldn’t hang on to the wall anymore. I now feel at one [...]

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money. Don’t get me wrong; the money helps. But past the first year, this kind of thing becomes incredibly important.
[EDIT: fixed my markup error. Bad developer; no hummus.]

“Make it stop! I don’t like watching suicidal Pac-Man!”
-My sweetie

Here’s a USA Today chart of George II’s approval ratings since he took office. It’s remarkably linear. If long-term trends continue, he should check in at under 10% approval by the time he leaves office.

I dropped my sunglasses in the toilet.

With my sweetie down in The Pith Of Dethpair San Jose for a conference, I stayed up way too late last night puttering on my computer. One of the things I did was check out Second Life, since it was given an interesting writeup in the latest Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Aside from being [...]

Video of a 2005 Richard Dawkins talk on the strangeness of the universe. (If you’re not familiar with Richard Dawkins, it’s been said of him that if atheism had a Pope, he would be it. Or, uh, it would be he. Or something like that.) Anyway, it’s 22 minutes, well worth [...]

Two images I’ve had up in my browser for a day or so:
Hip-hop Nazis (because really, if you can’t make fun of Nazis, the terrorists have already won):

And one of the better electric-hand-dryer graffitos I’ve seen:

Both via Reddit. Original files were found here and here.

Mathematicians design a better Weeble. (In other words, an object that always returns to the same position when placed on a flat surface.) There are some really great quotes, including the one above and this bit:
They looked for objects in nature that might have such a property. While Domokos was on his honeymoon [...]

One of the many amenities here at CubeSpace is a big dispenser thing like you’d find in bulk-foods section of a grocery store. It’s filled with salted peanuts, cereal, some sort of salted snack mix that always gets stuck in the dispenser, and M&Ms.
I’m not usually a big fan of M&Ms, but it turns [...]

Straight on the heels of my last post about all the great stuff we’ve been watching on Netflix, I’ll now link to Ten Financial Reasons To Turn Off Your Television - And Ten Things To Replace It With. Nothing particularly new or earth-shattering here, but some good reminders of what we’re giving up when [...]

My parents surprised me a while back by telling me they’d started watching Buffy. Since I suspect they’ve reached the end of the series by now, I thought I’d recommend a few other shows we’ve watched and liked.

Doctor Who (the new series). In my life, I’ve probably watched one whole episode of the [...]

“Microsoft Is Dead,” in which Paul Graham comes to an extremely belated realization.
I’ve been thinking this for a while; as soon as it became clear that Vista was going to be the late, bloated, pale shadow of OS X that it is, the next obvious question was, “well, who’s next?” And I suspect that [...]