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via Jay Pinkerton's Superman Origin Comics
(the comics are hilarious but juvenile and a tad foul-mouthed so clicker beware.)

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So I sometimes like to start the day reading in bed a bit... and I sometimes like to juggle 2 or 3 books at once. But man, both books I started are kind of rough. One is "Welcome To Your World: How the built environment shapes our lives" - the author is an architecture critic, snobby as hell, but he's not wrong about many aspects of how as a species we've gone for expediency instead of more thoughtful design, and you can point to many detrimental effects, and so I can fill up bits of my helpless-rage-or-depression meter about that. And then I pivoted to "The Diagnosis" by Alan Lightman (who wrote two of my favorite books, Einstein's Dreams and Mr. g (the latter is a delightful creation myth compatible with science that I'll be going over for my UUSS reading group tonight)) - I grabbed "The Diagnosis" because of the author and because he throws in a lot of details of late 90s Boston, but honestly reading about a middle aged guy going through some major dementia-ish neurological episode on his Red Line commute isn't a delight.

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Some hidden history of the iPod. My boss digs Steve Jobs' attitudes about excellence - and an aptitude for taking resources at hand (in the case of the iPod, a new small Toshiba hard drive) and applying them in novel ways.

Two things I hadn't heard much about:
1. the signature click wheel has heavily drawn from a phone, the Bang & Olufsen BeoCom 6000
2. Part of the secret sauce was a large 32Mb "skip buffer" - advertised as "20 minute skip protection" (remember this is an age of jostled portable CD players leading to poor experience) its true purpose was buffering of songs, so the device could load a few songs at once rather than have the little hard drive constantly spinning, and so tripling the battery life to meet critical performance metrics.

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I think Mojo Nixon was wrong - there's at least a bit of Elvis in Michael J. Fox. (Though not in Alex P. Keaton)

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I liked seeing what edits wikipedia editors are tired of undoing.
via Jay Pinkerton's Superman Origin Comics
(the comics are hilarious but juvenile and a
tad foul-mouthed so clicker beware.)

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UCLA's Nia Dennis rocking Beyonce, amazing mix of athleticism and fun.

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Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.

Socialism is what they called public power.

Socialism is what they called social security.

Socialism is what they called farm price supports.

Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.

Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

i <3 leap day.

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I spent the bulk of last week sick, with a low grade fever and congestion. Saturday night I felt surprisingly miserable and the fever seemed as high as ever, but maybe that was some kind of last hurrah because Sunday I felt pretty decent and didn't run a temperature all day, so I'll use the old "fever end plus 24 hours" guideline, WFH today, go to band tonight.
Still based on my coworkers (here and in other cities) seems like a lot of icky stuff has been going around.

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If Trump by some god-forsaken anti-miracle somehow wins it alI want to be able to vote Stuart/Colbert in 2020.

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Every four years I feel like "I'm not doing enough for leap day!"

Today: a resolution! I've been really good at keeping up with a digitial todo list for- yikes, like 20 odd years almost... first on PalmPilots, then on iPhone. Lately (as in for like the the last 7 or 8 years) I've been using Appigo Todo. My pile of "due or overdue" - the stuff that shows up on the home screen icon - hovers around 20, give or take 5. And that's too much.

Historically I've resented Appigo's conflation of "things that I could start working on now" with "things that are actually due" (also I hate the sophomoric assumption that the more overdue stuff something is, the higher the urgency is (as shown in its order in a list) when in reality the opposite is generally true - if something has slid for a month, it can probably slide for another week, while something that was due yesterday might actually be pressing!)

But now I think I should embrace that conflation, so here's my resolution: touch EVERY due thing on my todo list, every day. Ideally, make a smidge - or a smudge - or a swoosh - of progress on it, but if nothing else, just bump it to tomorrow (or even beyond, if that makes sense.)

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I know that everyone was psyched about getting Morgan Freeman's voice on Waze but saying "in .1 miles - at the roundabout - take the second exit - for freedom" is a bit much click to play

dinobeeboxer - source - built with processing

The finest dinosaur boxing bees simulator IN THE WORLD.

Or maybe just the first.

It made it into this (slightly NSFW) video Small Compilation of Pirate Kart V Games.

Also, one of my fellow Jammers Darius ported it (sans sound, and running kinda slow) to Processing.js -- see it on jsfiddle here.

Probably my second favorite creation this go round... if I do a sequel, the bees will probably be stinging you, not just trying to get past.

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I love how this is a bit of a "lost day" on the retrospect feature of my site, that 3/4 of the time, you skip right past 2/29 if you're going forward from 2/28, and miss the 3 or so entries there.

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Am I a hack engineer if I think simplicity trumps flexibility? A hack UI guy if I say tables make better grid layouts than floating divs? Happy Leap Day y'all.

I spent it being sick, sick, sick. I was in bed 'til like 3:30, bar one trip to CVS for Saltines and Gatorade.

Thank goodness this only happens one day in 4 years.

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Web Comic of the Moment

--Garfield minus Garfield "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"

Whoa, it took two cute little froggies in a Goggle holiday logo to remind me that today is Leap Day! The day that only comes around once every 4 years, and brings the Summer Olympics and a Presidential Election with it. When I was a kid I was fascinated by the idea of someone having a birthday on this day, how your birthday could just go away 3/4 of the time...you could get a driver's license on your fourth birthday! Or drink when you were six! Hahaha! Amazing!

Query of the Moment

Dear Dr. Science,
Why is there always room for Jello?
       --Mike P.
The technical term for Jello, I believe, is 2, 2, 4 Trimethylpentane in a colloidal mucous base. Early attempts to promote sales of the colorful and somewhat tasty product failed to catch on, perhaps because of their slogan "There's always room for 2, 2, 4 Trimethylpentane in a colloidal mucous base." Then they hired a copywriter to coin a catchier phrase for the product; the rest is history.

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Movie Quote of the Moment

[on his appreciation of lesbians] Oh, God love them. They get so much done in a day, don't you think?

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is a low-budget Canadian indie musical/chop-socky flick. With lots of lesbian vampires. My favorite character name? "Mary Magnum".