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So with just a smidge more distance in time, here are 3 kitty health and end takeaways:

1. Unfortunately the end of life procedure is such that there's a good chance the cat knows something is up. (over the past few years, I had assumed we would try an at home end visit, but I think in practice, it's rare to not give a cat at least one more try at the vet, and when that confirms that a rebound isn't in the cards, it seems like a better path to deal with it there. But I'm having a twinge of second guessing. Though who knows, quite likely the at home vet would have wigged him out as well. And also, even though the penultimate part of the final part - ie before we asked for a bit more sedative- was more stress on him than I had hoped, and it wasn't the calmness of the familiar hangout on my chest as I reclined that we tried to recreate, I need to recognize that that brief time doesn't recolor the past good week he had before, or the good years of happy life cuddling we got before then through dutiful medical intervention, or the years before that. But still it bums me out a little.)

2. But the kindest thing any of the vet people said during the whole rough morning was the reminder that most critical part of the decision of the timing had been made not by us but by Dean's body.

3. Get the cat health insurance shelters offer, like trupanion. It helped with the meds and opened that gave us more years with Dean.

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Melissa points out even at home he was mostly in a escape and hide out mode (albeit at a spot he liked under the bed), so after being poked and prodded it's not surprising he wanted to maybe get under stuff in the that room, and it's not a more specific worry he had than that.

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bun bun look out behind you

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Melissa pointed out that with 2 years with her, 4 years on our third floor walkup in Somerville, and 2 years here, most of Dean's time with us was there on Prichard. Which seems so weird, but says more about my sense of time than about Dean. I admit I scoff and wonder when I see people's phones with 10,000s of unread messages, but admittedly that's because I lean so heavily on Gmail's "Important" heuristic, which is pretty decent (And I have always preferred its earlier yay/nay guess to the "divide into TYPE of mail" that came later) I aim for something like inbox zero, but only counting the stuff labeled "important".

But, my "unimportant" pile was sneaking up 10,000 - I really need to unsubscribe more often - since Dec 8. I mean 10K feels like a TON... but it's only ~40 a day!

The way 40 a day adds up to 10,000 in less than a year, and I think that sounds surprising to most people - is part of a general "innumeracy" most of us share. Like we just aren't good at thinking about how stuff scales geometrically, like "number of emails per day" x "number of days", and 365 days is more time than it feels like. Really good video praising both Homestar Runner and Flash as a medium in particular.

Flash's ignominious end is a tragedy! I never quite understood what happened. The reasons usually given for its demise are
1. "it's insecure". Like with Java applets, for some reason companies just couldn't get their acts together to batten down the hatches? Which is really weird, because it seems like stuff it would be very easy isolate in a virtual sandbox, especially relative to the trend to make javascript do everything.

2. "html5 is much better for video". I mean this is true, but as the video shows being "a wrapper for live action video" was a johnny-come-lately trick for flash

3. "it's hard on processor/battery life". I mean, I guess. But even in Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash letter, he's talking about video codecs, not the lightweight interactive animation that made Flash so powerful.

I think it's right to blame Apple for much of this. In that Jobs letter "Oh it's all mouse-centric, with rollovers, and our touch devices don't do 'hover'" is pathetically short-sighted - but it gets into the real reason, control of content. I think it's less "these Flash apps won't be good enough" and more they'd be too good.

Eventually, html5 technically picked up most of the capabilities that were lost when Flash went away, but there just isn't the community built up around it.

I feel bad that I didn't get into Flash... "Processing" was good enough for most of my stuff I wanted to build and then share via web, and now P5 plays that role. I took a one day class in Flash but it mostly dealt with animations that were easier to teach, not the type of interactive game stuff that I found most interesting.

I'm not sure where the action is, in terms of interactive content creation but especially community. P5/Processing has a little of that, "Scratch" probably has more - and Minecraft and Roblox, I think? And "Mario Maker". But much of the energy has been sapped off my either content creation community for non-interactive stuff, like Tik Tok.

In a related note I started playing around with Nintendo's "Game Builder Garage", pretty cool stuff as well... but it's always challenging to use a system where I feel a bit hobbled, especially at the beginning, relative to what I can make using traditional programming.

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Oh, Bother, I missed that yesterday was Winnie the Pooh's 100th Birthday!

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Hearing the crickets chirp before the storm... like they're saying "C'mon, baby, this hurricane might take us all out, lets get it on before then!" I'm pretty sure I had a dream where Nicki Minaj (dressed in business casual) was a consultant for the company I was programming for. She had written a plug-in that our build system used called KACHINGulator. She was tolerant of but not impressed by my attempts to freestyle a few lines.

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Water is really what a rainbow tastes like.

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my aunt Susan, "Papa Sam", and mom Betty... Melissa was struck by how my Aunt looks like me on the left there...
(of course my mom here looks a lot like Cora...) The team names and identities of the new XFL Teams:


The reveal video had some fun hyping each one:

So the video was fun and ambitious, but overall the teams are a lot more generic and less focused on their hometowns than the short-lived Alliance of American Football. (I snapshotted those here in February.)

Also I would mention Chris Creamer's Sportslogos.net - an amazing archive both of the logo history of teams in successful leagues, and many teams in leagues that have fallen by the wayside.

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My tuba and I show up with a small interview in NBC 10's coverage of the ECCO protest march against our immigration policy. (Pretty sure I didn't say "we are all immigrants", exactly? I'm usually pretty careful to recognize First Peoples.)

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Me: dear god. Please destroy ICE and Amazon

God: yo I gotchu

God: *melts ice caps and starts burning the rainforest*

Me: wait no

@HillaryClinton when you go to prison for defrauding America and perjury, your room and board will be free!

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--Final tweet of Stefán Karl Stefánsson, LazyTown's Robbie Rotten, RIP. Was playing with the idea that all our energy for action - ALL of it - comes from emotion, not from thought and cold rationality. We can shape ourselves so that we have emotions that support rationality so that we act in ways that are in accordance with it, but it's not the logic itself driving things.

One of the occasional participants in my UU "Science and Spirituality" is a therapist who describes her practice as Freudian, and of course she's well aware of the issues with some of his views, and how that kind of practice can seem oddly quaint and out of step. But based on my layman understanding of Freud's ideas, I think there really is something to the Id/Ego/Superego division - a division that is often under the radar of everyday life, but that emerges with sufficient introspection as seeming likely to be an accurate and useful model. (In much the same way you can kind of shove your way into some level of grasping "the self really is illusion" concepts of Buddhism through thinking along side the more traditional practices of meditation.)

For me there's a tie in to Superego and the sense of Objective Truth. Though I guess Superego provides a host of "shoulds", while Objective Truth just says what is. And you can't get ought from is directly. But in my life, one of the highest moral goods is pursuing the most accurate level of shared understanding of Objective Truth, foregoing judging of the should levels. "Whatever works!", objectively, is generally ok by me. I guess that view is what cost me my simple religious faith; the multiplicity of beliefs was on the whole incompatible with singular Objective Truth, and my duty towards that (and my humbleness in thinking 'what were the chances that the faith I was born into was THE one that was correct? Pretty small') caused me to drift from the church of my youth.

But I dunno. I guess there's an obvious parallel in that emotion/thought divide as there is with faith and then the cold dispassionate description of the Objective Truth - that I'm incorrect in thinking I have a pure method for aligning my life with being correct in the objective sense, because it will always be tempered by my subjective experience, what I was taught, and what I feel...

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If only one person in the world had a sense of humor, it would probably be labeled a mental illness.

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One of the essential qualities of liberalism is that it always disappoints. To its champions, this is among its greatest virtues. It embraces a realistic sense of human limits and an unillusioned view of political constraints. It shies away from utopian schemes and imprudent idealism. To its critics, this modesty and meliorism represent cowardice. Every generation of leftists angrily vents about liberalism's slim ambitions and its paucity of pugilism. Bernie Sanders and his followers join a long line of predecessors in wanting liberalism to be something that it most distinctly is not: radical.

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If you're OK with Waltham... you're OK

One of my new favorite blogs is Supper Mario Broth. Besides the awesome name and header image of the famous brothers eating soup, it has a great range of Nintendo ephemera and lately details about glitches and "behind the scenes" various 3D Mario games use. (2D pixel games are generally too flat to have much behind the scenes, so to speak.)

Anyway, with Mario handing things off Olympic-wise (and my own month long "Best Of" Photos series done) what better time to start a week or so showing off the stuff I liked most when I did a deep backlog dive last month or so.

Today's topic: the many faces of Donkey Kong...

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Diamond rings are basically pet rocks.

"1991 is gone already! Time goes faster and faster! And every day, our lives grow shorter!"
"You're such a pessimist ... I like to think every day our lives get longer."

I just got Jimmy Johnson's collection "Beaucoup Arlo & Janis". It's always been a favorite comic strip of mine, prone to bouts of philosophical bittersweetness and charting a subtle sexiness in the title characters' long marriage.

When I posted about my timehoops, my friend Christa Terry posted her mental image of time, a kind of upward spiral:

I made a rough interactive webtoy of it, which unfortunately isn't playing well with some browsers, so I baked it as a looping GIF here.

I kind of admire how she surely used less time doodling out her view than I did with my timehoops, or my webtoy. In fact I kind of like her rendition better in general! All well, c'est la vie (et la vie et la vie) It was the only overcast and rainy day I had in Alaska-- most years, that would be atypical, but it has been a sunny summer there. Perfect for kayaking Glacier Bay since we were going to be wet anyway.

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The only thing can stop a bad guy with a gun is... Antoinette Tuff is amazing.

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My Halloween costume is gonna be Slutty Howard Taft. Oooo, ooo, someone help, I'm stuck in this hot, wet, sudsy bathtub, ooo

--from The Profound Programmer. Kind of a web 2.0 version of "Demotivators". (Eclipse is an free editor for the Java programming language that luckily I don't have to use right now... and of course "99 Problems" is a reference to a Jay-Z's hip hop work.

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At Boston #dataviz the creator of http://livecoding.io showed it off- like a slicker faster jsfiddle -- see also http://vimeo.com/36579366

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I think the last day of the Olympics should have all the gold medalist compete in a game of dodgeball. That way there's an ultimate champion.

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There's kids in the pool playing Marco YOLO. If they drown I'm not saving them.

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http://theprofoundprogrammer.com - more true to the coder's life than Demotivators, even... (warning, swears!)

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Wait, whose iced tea did they give me? (@Flour at Fort Point)

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Nerds:
You know more about technology than anybody else, and anybody who knows less than you is a total dipshit. I love you for that. But normal people deserve wonderful technology too. And half the shit you call computing--running custom ROMs, reinstalling OSes, fucking with network settings--is like a chef sharpening his knives over and over and calling that cooking. Real computing is the actual stuff you do--cutting videos, editing photos, writing. Or at least it should be. Not the shit people do to make all of that work.

click to play

discapede - source - built with processing
Made with Amber's videogame interests in mind, it's a classic Arcade game in circular form... more of a toy than a game, there's no score, no dying... just lots of centipedes and mushrooms to shoot at. Space resets everything.

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http://kisrael.com/java/ - just updated my java page, mostly KotMK. Man that's a lot!
--"Lady and the Tram" from b3ta amuses me way too much - I think it's the detail of the spaghetti angle.

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http://badgods.com/alternates.html - excellent Bad Gods cartoon in this world or any other

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One word says it all: 'you never know.'

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On XP, making a mp3 disk for my car was as easy as dragging files, Vista makes coasters unless I use Windows Media Player. (heh, reminds me of the mid-90s, where "buffer underrun" errors would make, like, $25 coasters.)

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http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/08/21/apple-replies-to-fcc.html 8,500 iPhone store apps a WEEK? Jeez, how does anyone get any attention-- Ksenia ended up moving to a place a few blocks from "our" old apartment, the one with Miller and JZ in it now. So last night I brought her over a drafting table EB didn't have the space for, and we had coffee, and then I went over to hang with JZ.

The lay out he and Miller have, with a big sheet for a projector screen is pretty amazing, talk about a huge picture... I had been kind of set against doing the office-in-bedroom thing, but the way they now have a seperate living room and dining room makes a lot of sense. So weird seeing rooms and some odd bits of furniture that used to be mine, now in a bit of a different context...

Video of the Moment

--Danny Kaye and Louis Armstrong. My mom forwarded a WMV of this to me. Later in talking about she mentioned seeing Kaye as a speaker at some conference, and after he was perfectly happy to pose for a quick photo, but replied to a request to "smile!" with "I don't have any smiles" - just a real life instance of the melancholy that some bright and funny entertainers can have underneath the facade.

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When I was 6 or so, I was running up the stairs so fast I wondered if I was near speed of light. Silly, sure-but I was running REALLY fast.

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The Person's Republic of Michael would have ranked fourth in gold medals and been ahead of all but 14 countries in the medal count-NYT8/17

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I love that the company Hyundai A. sounds like it's trying to fool people looking for a Honda B. have a car named after the MS spreadsheet Literature of the Moment
It's odd how a small passage or turn of phrase or scene from a book can stick with you. I've noticed that with Garrison Keillor's "WLT: A Radio Romance"

The Blue Movers had plenty of songs about losing women, drinking, losing their jobs, shooting people, riding freight trains, finding other kinds of women and then losing them, too, but not so many songs about Jesus, so Slim brought in a singer named Billie Ann Herschel, who had performed with the Shepherd Boys, to do the hymns segment. She was twenty-four. She stood at the microphone while Slim stood behind her, playing guitar and looking at her slim hips under the cotton dress. While singing hymns, she liked to shift her weight from side to side, and he found it hard to keep his mind off her, not that he tried to--

For some reason, it's the visual image brought forth by a young woman at a microphone, "slim hips under the cotton dress".

Also, this one (Mom Warning, some indelicate language about breasts ahoy.)

"Well," Art said, glancing around. "For fooling around with, the girls with the flat chests are your hot babes [...] so you want a woman with nice little tittles. And a talker. You always want a woman with good chops on her. She'll give you a lot of yap but she'll give you a lot of hubba-hubba too."

Franny wanted to know more--what is hubba-hubba,for example--but he didn't want to betray ignorance.

That was Uncle Art leading Franny "down the garden path". I don't know about the "yap"/"hubba-hubba" correlation, but I do appreciate good conversational skills in my companions, so...

Uncle Art also gives him the categorizations of women's breasts, with my favorite (strictly for the richness of language) being "shirtful of hooters".

Finally, a bit of Salvation Army-related fantasia:

"The performer I admired the most, I think, was Uncle Albert, actually my dad's uncle. We hired him about 1927 and he stayed for twelve years until he died. We hired him because he broke his leg and couldn't be a street preacher anymore with the Salvation Army, which he had been for forty years. He was one of General William Booth's old stalwarts, and when Booth came over from London, he and Uncle Albert would go nightclubbing in Chicago. Neither of them touched a drop, of course, but General Booth loved to dance. He was wild about the turkey trot, the foxtrot, and the Buffalo, but of course he couldn't dance with young women, lest it lead to carnal desire, so he danced with Uncle Albert. After a hard day among the down-and-out and a long evening service, the General'd lean over and whisper, `How about a little hoofing?' and off they'd go. Around the hot spots of Chicago, two men dancing together was definitely eccentric. In fact, it was so eccentric that people who were as drunk as everybody in the clubs didn't believe their eyes, and so the old gents, decked out in their somber Army regalia, flung themselves around the dance floor in happy abandon, and left refreshed, and woke up at dawn to resume the Lord's work."

Given how straight-laced and anti-frivolity the 'Army was back then (I remember reading some Salvation Army book from the 1930s arguing that going to a circus was likely to be a distraction from the mission at hand) this seems unlikely, but it does tie in with the apocryphal Booth quote, "Why should the devil have all the best tunes?" (on the subject of the Salvation Army co-opting secular tunes with new spiritual lyrics.)

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Update of a Dozen Years Later Moment
In April 2019 I was surprised I hadn't commonplaced this passage, which has also stuck with me:

I come from St. Paul, Minnesota, a city full of angry maudlin Irishmen and flabby chinless men with limp mustaches waving their shrivelled dicks at the cruel blue sky.

That comes from a sabotaged cowboy story radio script, which also has such tidbits as

Cowboy Chuck had earned vast wealth in the whiskey trade in Chicago and moved in with a dark Paraguayan beauty named Pabletta, whose breasts were pale and small and shivered at the thrill of his touch

There was also

[...] when Cowboy Chuck and Pabletta went swimming and Chuck stripped off the paper-thin white cotton shirt in which her taut nipples protruded like accusing fingers.

You know, I was wondering where I got the phrase "nipples like accusing fingers" from...

Yet More Updates I read the book again, and found some other passages that have stuck with me:

Vesta held to the If-I-can-help-but-one-person-out-there standard of success, a standard that leaves little room for failure.

There is nothing smells so sweet as a sweaty woman, especially if some of the sweat on her is your own.

Jane Phipps was the one who said, It is always too late for grief.

As Dad said, "It's awful hard to carry a full cup."

"My brother is up in Moorhead pondering the imponderable. And I going to go to New York and screw the inscrutable."

"An Everclear is pure alcohol. So pure you feel it evaporating as it goes down. No frills, no coloring, no anise or juniper flavoring, no little olive or twist of lemon, no fruit. Everclear has but one purpose. It is the rocket ship of the barroom. Leaves no evidence on the breath. It's the preferred beverage of gospel singers."

One that didn't quite stick back then but I've been thinking of:

Don’t concern yourself with things you can’t change, I say. It’s more important to make a very good cup of coffee in the morning and a very good piece of toast than it is to worry about Josef Stalin, because I can do something about breakfast and I can’t do anything about Stalin, and I’m sure he’s having a wonderful breakfast.

Years ago I wrote about ROT13, that simple reversible cypher for making text unreadable but decodable. Recently I introduced the idea to Rob, and he wrote me a note with it. It made me realize that we all have "ROT13 Names" of varying degrees of pronouncability and coolness. Rob's isn't so bad ("Ebo") but mine, "Xvex", just rocks. (Hmm. Ksenia's isn't so bad either, "Xfravn"... of course, the first part of her name looks a bit pre-ROT13d already.)

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Complement of the Moment

I'm so jealous.... you have such long eyelashes... like a cow!

She then went on to explain how she really meant it as a true complement.

A day or two later I realized it was making me think of Mimi's (slightly deranged sounding) sister from this one episode of "The Drew Carey Show", where she starts stroking Kate's hair and says "You have such nice soft hair... like a bear's"

Guess you had to be there.

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Music Video of the Moment

--WeAreTheWeb.org... fighting for Net Neutrality! I'm most impressed by the work of Leslie Hall, whose Gem Sweater Galleries with her modeling the sweaters with these amazing gold pants and the same flat expression made her a little famous. (Heh, according to Wikipedia, A. she's only like 25 or so and B. went to the School of the MFA.) I also appreciate the willingness of Tron Guy (who even has his own Atari game made by fans) and Randy "Peter Pan" Constant to exploit their net celebritidom for a good cause, and to be in good spirits about the whole thing. I know this is flamingly self-indulget and goofy of me but I've decided that I miscalculated when settling on the name of my car, a Scion xA. (To be really silly about it, maybe a car's true name is something that can eventually be revealed, something like that naming of cats poem.) Obviously last year I put way too much thought into it but I still got it wrong, settling on Puck, which wasn't terrible, and had some cleverness as well as personal significance, but it wasn't the right name.

My car's right name is Hoss.

Like the character on Bonanza...I think I heard somewhere that his nickname was a derivative of "Horse" and that's kind of how I've started thinking of my car, especially when I see it dutifully waiting for me, parked alone and ready to take me whereever I need to go. There's an element of companionship as well as a utilitarian bent.

So there we go.

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Move Quote of the Moment

I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Funny(ish) of the Moment

I guess you're just my sugar-free daddy...

At work Mr. S has mastered the art of getting two diet cokes for the price of one, and he gives me the extra...I finally realized what his title should be...

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Game of the Moment
Balls Up is a decent little game in the tradition of "Thrust"...the gimmick is getting a sphere in the right basket unlocks that color doors. Less difficult that some other versions, but requires patients... Headline of the Moment
From salon.com's AP feed, Thai man dies while laughing in sleep.

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Quote of the Moment

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me.

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Image and Link of the Moment

--from Wired's article by the famous Edward Tufte PowerPoint Is Evil. I honestly don't think it's that bad, it's just basically an outline structure. But I think it's a funny picture.

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Video Game Movie of the Moment
I previously posted about stunt videos from Grand Theft Auto (third entry in that days "video blowout"), people doing crazy stuff with that game's physics engine. I found something similar and wonderful with the X-box game Halo: Warthog Jumping. Blowing up grenades to send its All-Terrain combat vehicles soaring, against a very funny bunch of soundclips. (Some of the mirror sites seemed slow, but this one was pretty good.) There's also this page of further videos that I haven't seen much of yet. The other day I was publicly pondering changing the name of the blog to "of the moment" or some such. Around the same time, I was thinking about the strict daily update schedule I follow, as opposed to the more typical "whenever the blogger find something cool" pattern. Only yesterday did the small irony of those two ideas hit me.

I wonder if I should switch to a more frequent update pattern? I dunno. Not sure if I want to reveal quite so much about my surfing habits...

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Article of the Moment
Best science link I've seen in a long while: The Naked Face, a reprint of a New Yorker article. The amount of information we send through our faces (both voluntarily and involuntarily) is astounding. Not only that, but evidence suggests facial expressions generate emotions, it's a two way street. By approaching the problem from an anatomical angle, these guys have made great strides...and what they've learned might well be useful in counter-terrorism and other law-enforcement activities. I wish I was better at that kind of thing!

Many of the author's other articles seem worth a read through as well.

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Game of the Moment
Brunching Shuttlecocks had a cool little puzzle game, Roshambo Run Only 6 levels, the final 3 being the only challenging ones. You control one of those tiny "Nun-zilla" dolls through the land of rock, paper, scissors (and muffins and coffee.)

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Line of the Moment

Men always say the most important thing in a woman is a sense of humor. You know what that means? He's looking for someone to laugh at his jokes.

Online Software for the Kirk Friendly Masses
Ok, I've finished up a revamp of k/link, my online bookmark system. This new system is multiuser! Basically, if you think you count as a "Friend of Kirk" drop me a line, and I'll set you up with your own username and password, and you can keep your links online.

K/link has the following features:

• Have the same set of bookmarks at home, work, school, anywhere you have a 'Net connection
• Add a comment to any bookmark (I think it's nice to annotate a link without having to jam it in the link itself)
• An easy 'category'/'subcategory' system lets you easily organize bookmarks in one step, at bookmark creation
• For IE users: a javascript 'bookmarklet' lets you add a single 'Favorite' that grabs the URL, title, and any selected text and stuffs it into the edit form
• Autogeneration of a non-password protected static version of your bookmarks collection. (Like mine!)

I've used a previous, one-user version of this script for years and am very happy with it (although it's not as important as it used to be in my pre-Blog days). Some other people grabbed and started using it too. And you can 'try before you buy'. Go to http://alienbill.com/klink/edit/ with "test" for the username and password. Feel free to add new links, and edit or delete some existing ones (don't go crazy on the deleting, for obvious reasons.) The resulting static page will be at http://alienbill.com/klink/page/test.html. Like I said, if I know you, and you're interested, drop me a line and I'll give you your own account.

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Quote of the Moment

We could smell death... and death could use a mint.

(Nothing else was on...man, did you know those guys had the power to bring aliens back from the dead and repair space station interiors just by linking hands and, I dunno, thinking about it?)