2009 June❮❮prevnext❯❯

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Georgia's motto "Wisdom, justice, and moderation" is pretty good, but I dig the scifi vibe of Kansas' "Ad astra per aspera" - "To the stars through hardships"

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http://badgods.com/zanandjayna.html - great Super Friends and Vonnegut reference in "Bad Gods"

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Bible Translation Times!
"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" in the KJV is "Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?" in the NIV. It's good advice but the KJV translation choice is a bit odd - funny that the greek must be ambiguous like that.

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Dada Chess: http://www.crummy.com/features/dada/chess/

Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists.

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You know, I'm kind of irked by how chess says "the king is never captured". Such blatant monarchism - down with the king!
My latest apartment project! Still potentially a work-in-progress, but also at a point where I could leave off for a while and be happy with how it looks and whom it reminds me of.

I meant it to be chaotic but it turned into a big letter Q, with my dad on thin ice at the center, FoSO as the tail of the Q, then clockwise from top it's Ksenia on the stairs, me with EB+EBSO in our worker outfits, my Aunt, Mom, and Uncle perched on Irish rocks, my buddy Mike and a pal of his, having beers in the afternoon on their roadtrip to Boston, Jane making a muscle, Professor Couch from Tufts, and Mo, Veronika, and V's friend B in line at the Statue of Liberty. On the facing wall, clockwise from top-left it's Sarah in Groucho glasses, Josh raising Erin, JZ imitating Blue Man, and Mr. Ibis contemplating a coconut.

Unshown here are a few more photos, a family photo from when I was may 10 or so (with my folks in Salvation Army uniform), a Prom photo that I cherish in large part because the background was made of extra of the material used to make my date's dress, and then a semi-diptych of diploma-accepting photos, my mom with her masters and me at the end of high school (my Aunt assembled that and had it down here in what was her workspace.)

The photos are meant to be chosen for visual appeal as well as emotional value to me. There were a few people I just don't have interesting photos of, and now I need to buy more frames. (Mostly these are $2 wonders from Family Dollar.)

Inspired a bit by Henry Miller's bathroom, though I kept it more friends-and-family-ish.

If nothing else, the bathroom is a lot less bare now!

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When you think about it, the whole process is rather strange: Northern Europeans and some sub-Saharan Africans have become "mampires," mutants that live off the milk of another species.

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Anyone who says Dustin Pedroia wouldn't be even cooler with a jetpack and sixteen-foot metal claws is just lying.

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Rules for Programmers: Every class need a comment. Any time you do something in a complex way when there's an obvious simple or hardcoded way: EXPLAIN WHY.

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notepad++ seems like a good editor. Using Firefox has made me appreciate a IDE-ish "restore open docs", tho I guess textpad coulda done it.
--Damien Walters Freerunning. (According to the BoingBoing Comments, Parkour fans are trying to reclaim the word as a practical study of escape, not this flashy stuff.)

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Glance after a shower at a pillow feather that had been stuck to my chest. Moment of alarm to think your nipple is sprouting a feather.

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8 Pointless Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow - oh right, comic book films DO tend to bring out the biggest villain in the first movie, so the followups tend to have multiples.

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Happy 25th Birthday Tetris!
--A little Weird Al "Polka Party"-ish, but fun!

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et another RIP for David Carradine - though I gotta say, if Uma Thurman did the five point palm exploding heart technique on me and I was sitting, I'd try to put off those "five steps ('til DEATH)" for as long as I could. Hope I liked the chair! (oh wait, he might've committed suicide... er, guess I shouldn't be so flippant)

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Bought a box of TuffStuff Tall Kitchen Bags (Family Dollar) - Wish I knew why they are strongly scented with vanilla. But I do like vanilla!

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Love is two crickets hopping in the same direction.

Old quote rediscovered from an old love letter

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Cleavage is not a substitute for decorum.

--Via Jacques Demien, Max Fleischer: Dancing On The Moon (1935)

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Oddly sensual dream involving a big hicky on the base of my spine, which felt better in the dream than it sounds.

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A few years ago "Berts Horrible Cookies" from Pickering Wharf, Salem... dunno if they're still there... basically a brownie in a cookie- mmm

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https://www.testmybrain.org/index.html - famous face test, I got 3/14. I think I'm a bit face blind, I've always recognized people via hair.
--"Top 60 Ghetto Black Names" Yes I know "gee, some black people have distinctive and faintly humorous names" is a bit tired and maybe a tad racist, but this is pretty well done, funny, and I don't think mean spirited. (via trunkbutt)

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http://cymonsgames.retroremakes.com/alleytris/ - a startlingly simple re-energization of Tetris - via CymonsGames

--From e-merl.com, my new favorite webcomic of the week. Other cool ones: Luna Lies, Who?, and While Falling

-- Australian Red-Eyed Tree Frog from Wikimedia commons photos of the year, 2008 - some fascinating photos there.

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Got the chance to play with a friend's Palm Pre yesterday. That seems like a worthy device! I love how compact it feels, rounded like the old PEBL.

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http://www.word-detective.com/back-d.html , its vs it's - "it's" used to be the possessive! Too bad "'tis" got labeled as archaic.

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Hmm, I'm becoming a bit dependeing on Firefox's auto-URL-complete especially for odd dev'pt server - less diligent about saving URLs.
I think this is Abri N°177, by the Oz Collective. I like how it uses both open and closed umbrellas. (Via ArchMage who runs a weekly "Photo Friday" type LJ entry.)

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Terrorism as an "autoimmune disease"; their strategy is to provoke over response. Those "terrorist will have won" jokes were right.

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Geekgripe. JSP added JSTL, "Java in view is bad". But all these other toolkits want to make Java your only coding language. Bleh.

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Wait, Andy Rooney is still alive? Another Etcha-a-Sketch Animator miniproject... I'm not sure if I ever tried to use it as a Poor Man's Music Sequencer before.

Random other Etch-A-Sketch Animator links, my use of it as a Poor Man's Web Cam (virtual version), the fun animations that came in the instructions with it back in the day, and a commercial that shows just how rad it was.

And make no mistake - it was pretty rad. 12 frames of 40x30 pixels (oddly, the exact same size I had chosen for small gif cinema) and the ability to string them together in any order, up to 96 steps, its neat screechy (but not generally grating) sounds, and an interface that was easy enough to learn, but lacked any editing tools beyond "copy and paste this whole frame", so if a kid really wanted to make something cool, they really had to think it out a bit...

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One of the worst bits about tinyurl'ing in twitter is when you open a series of links in tabs and have lost which page came from where...

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USA might stay dominant because of...English? - USA might stay dominant because of...English? Like England did?

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Moslems dig on green, in part it's in the middle of the spectrum. I dig that logic of moderation, and like green, though I can't decide if my "favorite" is green or blue.

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bankruptcy as shipwreck - bankruptcy as shipwreck infographic
--Man. "U Cant Touch This" Flash Mob. That would have been an experience. Thank goodness for youtube, who else would believe the people who were there? (via Mr.Ibis)

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I weaponized your mom.

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90s Saturday morning cartoon anti-drug crossover. I want to see a Smash Bros. clone based on this.

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Some stuff I find sexy now was stuff I found sexy as a teen. Do teen years SET preferences, or are they just the first reflections of innate 'likes'? Probably some of both. (This was partially inspired by stumbling on Craig Thompson's excellent graphic novel Blankets, about young love in an Evangelical Christian environment.)

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GEEKRANT. debugging JSF bean-driven crap -- *gah!* -- THE JSP IS RUNNING THE ASYLUM. This is no way to live. Or to pretend to be MVC.

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It's spooky when you're debugging someone else's code and find a suspiciously helpful debug statement - here be dragons... From a 1978 essay by Philip K. Dick: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later:

However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe--and I am dead serious when I say this--do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

I think I should add this to mortality guide quote page.

In the essay, he toys with ideas like sneaking into Disneyworld and replacing the fake birds with real ones. Bill the Splut pointed out a 1999 article that thought Marcel Duchamp's "Readymades" may be just that - rather than manufactured items being rebranded as fine art, they may actually be hand constructed things pretending to be manufactured items being rebranded as fine art. What an odd hoax that would turn out to be!

One my favorite bits of readymade art is performance art: when I see one of those vending machines with the glass front and a "nestled spinning spirals" dispensing mechanism, and one of the slots is empty, I'm always tempted to put in money and select the absent product in order to turn the act of trying to dispense a snack into a bit of lovely and hypnotic-- if brief-- mechanical dance, rather than a crass act of commercialism.

But, most of the time I end up just buying a Snickers instead.

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If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2220302/ - Slate on how the recession can put a strain on friendships. Money can be so annoying- especially in its absence

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Biased against http://bing.com because I have much more "kirk israel" Google Juice than Bing Flow-- stupid other kirk israels! (And my résumé is more interesting than my site? Bleh.)

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http://www.bemboszoo.com/ - charming typography animal fun

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Thinking how I like writing haha rather than LOL; a bit of old school snobbery, but also you can write "HAHAHA" vs "hehe"- some nuance there

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My informal "cold call emails from recruiters" barometer is pointing way up this past week or so. Good sign?
Mighty God King has a whole series of these (PG13, but really funny.)

--Shields & Yarnell - "Robots", from 7 Great Sci-Fi Moments From The Muppet Show. I remember being kind of fascinated with this skit as a kid, and even now, the idea of automatons crudely trying to emulate a domestic scene is pretty nifty.

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"I have a VERY selective memory. Unfortunately, it's not me doing the selecting."

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Love without passion is dreary; passion without love is horrific.

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Oof. New romance is making me question my impartiality selecting poems at http://loveblender.com ...

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(heartish berry for new blender digest)

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Penawawa-X must've been like the coolest name for a wheat OF ALL TIME.
--Wolf researcher Shaun Ellis... he does a great howl and has obviously paid his dues in terms of studying wolves, though I wonder if humans lack, like, the right kind of fur and tail to actually speak the wolves' language.

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At The Dollar Tree - "Help Spider-Man erase the jumbo errors of the world!"
--Over the years I've grown more fond of the Pop originals and the "Polka Parties" than the Parodies, but for old time sake... WEIRD AL! (doing "Craigslist")


--Sesame Street Fighter, seems like an awesome T-shirt to have.

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Lena claims that growing up in Russia in the 80s, in general the only ice cream flavors available were vanilla, chocolate (rare), creme brulee, and "fruit" (tutti-frutti). Got the iPhone OS update yesterday... now I'm cutting and pasting and going into landscape mode like a fiend! One of the other updates was a new app "Voice Memos"... I already had an app of the exact same name, and I thought I'd go ahead and transcribe the things I had languishing in that older app before deleting it:

Dream where, uh, it's almost like a superhuman scourge on the city, or whatever, like there's like human locusts that go to like trading floors and conference centers, and businesses, strip it down to the floors like a bunch of locusts. Uh Then they go to the streets, they drive around, in these giant vehicles, you know, these great big construction vehicles, just plow through dirt and mud, and tear down signs, it's just weird.

Scrabble is to words what "Guitar Hero" is to music

The trouble with putting the patch formalism into SR to GR is that it is a long and complex answer to a question nobody has asked

Nerds, and those uh, cartoons from "Great Space Coaster" - they were a total influence to how I was drawing as a kid.

what was the song, "down on the corner, out in the street, something something" -- also the line about the "nickel down"

Ok, so with Lin, his thing with naming his bed "The Word" so he could say he was late because he felt he needed to spend more time in "The Word" that morning.

Veronika's story about the Y2K Nutella and the Phhwwwt! sound, and stuff

Story idea with the guy guarding the tomb, uhh, of Jesus, and he manages to keep Jesus inside, har har har.

_____'s story about his father going a little nuts, taking a trip to Mars, and the astro van, and the canal, and the mars bars...

So Jonathan woke me from a dream, told us about, this thing about a Game and Watch store display, maybe it had the "Braid" rewind mechanic, also paint every corner...and someone wanted to take my picture, like some fan boy of mine, who know I did this shit, but we had to turn on the light, maybe Trevor was there, maybe Joe, someone... anyway.

TVtropes "boomers" for "kick the puppy"

lookup "indexed annuity" funds

The freemasons just told me did you know they believe a man's worth can be measured, and its not his power or wealth? why yes... it's the SIZE of his JOHNSON!

do do doot do doot doot de doot doot -- doot de do doot do doot do doot... doot de doot da doot doot de doot doot, doot de doot doot de doot ...

bumper sticker: "god bless the whole world. no exceptions"

the logo of 222nd street jazz

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3:06 Saturday Afternoon... Carla hereby relinquishes the right to bitch about her sunburn.

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I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

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http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/06/17/iphone-30-software-walkthrough/ - best iPhone 3.0 rundown I've seen. But - why "shake to shuffle"?

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http://manolobrides.com/2009/06/18/lovehate-the-its-a-long-story-edition/ - supercool wedding invite
--Paul Robertson's "Kings of Power 4 Billion %" - 12 minutes of absolute epic. The way he uses the old video game shoot-em-'til-they-blink-and-disappear formalism and ramps it up to way, way, way beyond 11... (Previously linked: kind of the old Gameboy version of something similar, Pirate Babys Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006)

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Suspicion climbed all over her face, like a kitten, but not so playfully.

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http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060322/sheffield_01.shtml - an older piece on 1 button gaming

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The Unix timestamp is creeping up on 1.25 million seconds. Wow, was it that long since it hit 1 million even?

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The gal I'm seeing just called me on it being a billion, not a million seconds in the Unix Time Stamp..that is so hot.

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(but like my old physics teacher Charles Reno said, "what's a few orders of magnitude among friends?")
--via Mighty God King
click to play

pretty colour crackdown - source - built with processing


My entry for Klik of the Month Klub #24 - what I said about it there:

this is rainbow invader legion genocide pretty colour crackdown

i recommend you don't actually play this but instead just watch the invaders flow around the current mouse location

if you want to play just hold the fire button to send in a stream of bullets to kill them.

if you feel guilty about that, and you probably should, press space to send in another 100 invaders.

UPDATE: I kind of like the initial "orbit around the individual random starting points" look of when the app first starts, something you couldn't get to once they started tracking where the mouse had been, so now after 30 seconds of not moving the mouse, the invaders return to that pattern.

Actually this used to be "rainbow invader legion genocide" but on the site Six wrote

makes me feel like a riot cop firing into a group of people who are staging a demonstration about how much they love pretty colours.

So that's the theme I'm going with, and I changed the bullets from rainbow to monochrome to match.


--via BoingBoing. I don't have any good justification for posting this except I like the retrofuture styling of the building and enjoy the mental image of Charlton Heston running through the street proclaiming:

"GENERAL MOTORS... ...is PEOPLE!!!"

(Will Soylent Green references ever get tired? I hope not.)

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Watching Henry+June with some_chick last night I realize that it was that movie, not Indiana Jones, that got me wearing that damn fedora during college.

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Jeez, a barrage of Spam leaking through at gmail, "hot girl" appeals where the only contact info is a live.com email address.

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It's oddly reassuring when Google "guess ahead" knows what you were going to say about a technical issue - you are not alone.

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I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

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All this rain- it's hard not to wonder if we've somehow broken the weather and the sky, that this will be the prevailing weather from now on, that weeks of fair, sunny weather is something we'll have to tell our children about.

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You are still sounding like a typewriter. Sing like handwriting.

click for fullsize
Patrick Farley charts out the debate about gay marriage. Weirdly, I had just been wikipediaing him up (wondering where his brilliant e-sheep web comic site had gone; luckily his brilliant literalist-reading-of-Revelation-as-Pokémon Apocamon flash animation has been preserved) as this was making the rouunds on Twitter... I found out that he has a Livejournal and plans to revive e-sheep.

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http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/06/triumph_of_the.php - ode the the concept of the default setting

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Dollar Tree FTW - MUCH better selection of photo frames than Family Dollar and everything actually IS $1.

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In typing the name of the local pizza joint, "Il Mondo", Amber notes that Italian is not the most sans-serif-friendly language out there.

I was a few months behind in updating my java/javascript page. The choice of 50x50 icons is a challenge, but kind of a fun one... today's entry is just an exercise in seeing how various presentations of the links look - I don't know if it's any more or less compelling without the written description of what's going on. I took out 3 or 4 duplicate or non-java things to make a nice box, but that innumeracy thing comes up, where (to me at least) 49 things in a 7x7 box looks more like... I dunno, thirty-odd something.

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We reason deeply when we forcibly feel.

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Taking the train to DC. Did a lot of train travel in Japan, and now I'm jonesing for Calpis/Calpico, like the ultimate train drink from there.

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Man, twitters full of MJ's death... I just want him to come back as a Thriller zombie. Also: Farrah and her friends in that swimsuit...
--In Virginia and Maryland for a family reunion -- youtube-ish autopilot GO!

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I'm not being 100% facetious when I say: maybe Singapore has the right idea; people who put gum on the sidewalk should be beaten. For reals.

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Cushy recliners are almost ridiculously decadent. I think the ones with the built-in cupholders might be over the top. (-shades of Wall*E)

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Man, down here in Virginia I'm reminded how much I miss fireflies. They're serious earth magic. Cleveland had 'em too, Boston is too north.

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The gray area is holy ground.

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The typical laptop is such a beautiful study in self-sufficient grace and technological wonder...

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Digging Chrome. Don't like its "tab sorting" though, bummed Firefox might emulate. Prefer tab bar as chronology of opening, wish for option!

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Oh I almost forgot--you probably shouldn't have sex with Skinhead Katrina.

If you do have sex with Skinhead Katrina, and you do it around the side of the house during a party, know that you will never live it down. Your asshole friends will be putting that shit on the Internet ten years later. You didn't even know the Internet was going to be invented, did you? Ha ha! Should've kept it in your pants, Caligula.

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http://www.retrosabotage.com/ - nifty little playable artsy commentaries on classic games

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http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html - stroke victim brain scientist: a bit hippy, a bit bad drug trip, quiet a bit Oliver Sachs Sacks...

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My mom has a book of quotes on aging "Old Age Comes at a Bad Time". An alarming number of them use my current age, 35, as kind of a marker of a turning point.

--Interesting how to get a steady pan, you have to crank up the rate of zoom so much. Also, I need to go brush now.

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what the chimney sang for aphrodite / one spreads its white wings on a far-reaching track, a man like me?

--I ripped this as an MP3 if anyone's interested... great stuff!

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Growing old -- it's not nice, but it's interesting.

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The Accela crowd is so much more PC laptop and Blackberry than Macbook and iPhone....

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I guess I have no sense of scale for business in this country. The way that there's enough business to keep all these jokers on the Acella busy seems crazy. I think we all survive with an insufficient sense of scale.

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He was your Elvis, and when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure.

In other words, you two died a bit today.

Welcome to the only game in town.

Man, why have I not been reading this comic? Went to my mom's place for a family reunion in Virginia.

2009 June❮❮prevnext❯❯