January 2012
1 post
December 2011
1 post
When I release my forthcoming Correctly Designed Versions Of Every Useful Piece of Software Ever collection, the Web Forum will have a button on every post that shows you the avatar, signature, post count, and any other changeable fields as they were when the post was made.
I’ve wanted this more than once, but just now I was reading a post from 2006 that included the now-forever-mysterious...
October 2010
2 posts
FB Privacy Issue?
So last year I took a class from Professor Wendy Chun of Brown university. It was a very good class! But that is beside the point.
She made a facebook page for the class, which didn’t get used much, but at the beginning I decided maybe that meant she was open to being friended by students, which seemed possibly like fun, since she seemed pretty interesting. So I sent her a friend request...
“The movie created a spot of controversy last February. According to a story by...”
– Roger Ebert, 2005. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050811/REVIEWS/50725001
May 2010
1 post
March 2010
1 post
Got bored, Googled things
During a class, I googled things with the following rules:
1) Pick an initial term
2) Use the first full word (used as a word) from the first organic result’s snippet as the next term.
Here’s what happened:
a -> the -> Mar -> a -> [3-loop]
google -> enables -> to -> terrell -> the -> [3-loop]
query -> in -> government -> home ->...
January 2010
2 posts
Debugging!
So I’m modding Spelunky, which is written in Game Maker.
Part of what I want to do involves drawing a bunch of previous scores to the screen.
I initially had my code just read them in from a file and spit them out onto the screen. This worked fine.
Next, I wanted to wrap the scores in objects, so that they could be manipulated in various ways. I went ahead and did it, changing the code in...
November 2009
3 posts
Worst Academic Pun Ever
From Clement Hawes’ Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse:
“White caps his catalogue of racial differences with a remarkable specimen of mammary iconography:
Where shall we find, unless in the European, that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain .. . ? Where the perpendicular face, the prominent nose, and round projecting chin?...
October 2009
1 post
“For as to be a true beggar, it will cost the richest candidate every groat he is...”
– Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
July 2009
1 post
“Geoff Manaugh writes and thinks like some unholy hybrid of Umberto Eco, Paul...”
– Warren Ellis, being a very typical Warren Ellis.
May 2009
2 posts
Chincoteague, VA
Our waitress this morning, with no context:
“If you open the door and go outside and see a woman who when she opens her mouth bell noises come out, that’s because I shoved it down her throat.”
Web Services That Should Exist
txt -> png; png -> txt
Enter text, it spits out a 100 x 100, suitably random-looking block of colored pixels. Upload or link to one of those, it spits out the text that made it.
Preferably makes equally random-looking output on any input including null; preferably returns variable amounts of consistent, unique gibberish when fed images it didn’t generate.
phone number anonymization
...
April 2009
1 post
Context Switching
Keystrokes I use on a (*semi-)regular basis to switch contexts:
cmd-tab, cmd-shift-tab (OS X applications) cmd-`, cmd-shift-` (OS X windows within app) cmd-Q (OS X quit app) cmd-W (OS X close window) cmd-opt-rightarrow/leftarrow (OSX Firefox/Opera tabs next/prev) cmd-[0-9] (OSX Firefox/Opera specific tab) cmd-k (OSX Firefox google search) cmd-l (OSX Firefox/Opera URL bar) cmd-t (OSX...
March 2009
3 posts
“…she cut straight into the pointy end of a nice slab of brie, rather than...”
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/mar/27/middle-class-food-woes?commentid=4a83b985-ccce-442e-9842-29b469a2191a
July 2008
2 posts
“Over the next few weeks, as the trial version winds down, we’ll be opting...”
– the Facebook Redesign Page.
“‘Yes?’ she asks, compressing so much data into the twenty-four-bit...”
– from Halting State, by Charles Stross.
April 2008
1 post
Nice musics →
December 2007
1 post
Taking Notes
I’m in a small English class - seven students total. Everyone but me takes copious notes. One day (a day a friend from highschool happened to be visiting) I raised my hand in class and made a pretty good point. Then there was this cinematic moment - a tiny silence, and then everyone else in the room picked up a pen and jotted down what I’d said. I shivered. I hated them.
November 2007
1 post
A Pun
Three men were stranded on a desert island, with only a tiny, muddy spring of fresh water to sustain them. They all spoke different languages and could not communicate well, and so a natural order based on strength fell into place. Each day, the strongest man always shoved the other two out of the way first, and drank his fill from the spring. Then the second strongest fought off the weakest and...
October 2007
2 posts
Seen in the XKCD puzzle forums
There are two types of people in the world: 1) those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.
I wonder if this is a thing
that I will use.