Tighter

So you got justly fired from your substitute teacher job.

Don't worry -- if you're reasonably attractive, you have a lucrative career as a dominatrix ahead of you!

Fresh from liposuction

Tasty!

(Incidentally, I have half a box of this stuff in my cupboard, and it stinks up everything else inside. Damn icky fat.)

Neglect

Oof.

You know it's been a while since your last blog post when your blog's URL has vanished from your browser's autocomplete list.

How do I hit people?

I got the same impression of Second Life that Drew got.

In one ear, out the other

So today I installed Windows Vista on my grandpa's laptop. We felt that since he's less than comfortable with a keyboard or mouse, that the speech recognition would enable him to soar.

So some observations:

• Contrary to this infamous video, the speech recognition is surprisingly accurate out of the box.
• As someone who writes Windows software, I felt like my relationship to the speech recognition to be like Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy:

  Me: Start listening.
  Vista: Listening.
  Me: Open Texas Hold-'Em.
  Vista: What was that?
  Me: Open poker.
  Vista: What was that?
  Me: MOVE!!!!!! [reaches for mouse]

Foolish consistency

A reader of Andrew Sullivan criticizes Sam Harris:

...This is where Sam and I part company. He offers no alternative to our human need to believe in a power outside of ourselves that is greater and more permanent than ourselves. Worshiping some branch of ever-changing science, as Harris seems to suggest, cannot fill that need...

Really, who the fuck comes up with this shit?

Don't act like you're not impressed

You stay classy, Tony Snow.

Cupid's blunt arrow

I'd like to wish everybody a happy Valentine's Day.

The shot heard 'round the world

So is the rumor about Tom Lehrer inventing the Jello shot based on some fairly reasonable hearsay?

Or is it along the lines of "The number of African elephants has tripled in the past six months"?

So happy together

This just in:

Jesse Palter rocks.

That is all.

Nothing but a no-good basehead

True story from today. A coworker, in all seriousness, believed the following method was how you converted from base-10 notation to base-2 notation:

• Take any number, e.g. 131.
• Perform an explicit expansion, e.g. (1 x 10^2) + (3 x 10^1) + (1 x 10^0)
• Replace every instance of 10 with 2, e.g. (1 x 2^2) + (3 x 2^1) + (1 x 2^0)
• Re-evaluate the expression, e.g. 4 + 6 + 1 = 11
• Thus, 131 is represented in base 2 as 11.

Today in torture

• Recently an Army brigadier general stopped by the set of 24 to let the show's creator know that 24's casual displays of torture were having "a toxic effect". The show's creator blew the general off and didn't show up for the meeting.
• Kevin Drum, in response to a study showing the dramatic increase in torture scenes on television, and the increased use of torture by protagonists:

  Pre-9/11: torture is used by bad guys. That's one of the ways you know they're bad guys. And today? Actually, nothing's changed. It's still how you know who the bad guys are. We just seem to have temporarily forgotten that.

  Very wise words.

I spit on your shitty publication

Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online:

Sixth, It's worth noting, yet again, that 24 continues to depict America's most-liked TV action star as a routine torturer, willing to brutalize and dehumanize his own brother without losing his own humanity. If the moral issues were remotely as clear-cut as some anti-torture obsessives claim, we should be hearing some protest about the show. After all, if racism came to Jack Bauer as easily as torturing people for information, the show would be off the air by now thanks to all the protests.

Is this the much-vaunted conservative morality I've heard so much about?

Culture shock

Kevin Hoffman has a new series on starting Mac OS X programming.

He is a lot like me -- someone whose brain is atrophied from using Visual Studio .NET. As a result, we think things should be easier and/or harder when diving into Xcode and Interface Builder.

What's Patch Tuesday? Never heard of it

Bill Gates, February 1, 2007:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

The Web site of Miami's Dolphin Stadium, which plays host to Super Bowl XLI on Sunday, has been trying to hijack unpatched Windows PCs for about a week, a security company said Friday...

...The attacker planted a link to a malicious JavaScript file in the header of the front page of the site; that script executed when the official Dolphin Stadium site was rendered. Hubbard said that the script exploited two Windows vulnerabilities, one patched in April, the second last month....

Traitors in our midst

Bill O'Reilly asks,

Do you think these people are traitors, the ACLU? Are they putting us all in danger?

(If you won't charge Bush with treason, at least charge him with this stuff.)