Snapped this one of myself two nights ago. Didn’t like the colors, made it black and white.

Some recent observations, which I’ve found surprising:

*) Computers never, ever make mistakes. Computers only ever can do exactly what the’re told. Tracking the cause of a “malfunction” or “bug” is always a matter of finding the one exact point where expectation diverges from fact, the fault-line where what you want the thing to do turns out not to be what the thing is being told to do. I’d been told then this before, and even discovered its truth myself before, but my latest re-encounter with this particular flake of truth has left me with an appreciation for a nuance I never noticed before, namely that computers enable the possibility of adjusting fact so that it, at last, meets expectation.

*) There’s a weird kind of connection between: the capacity for error, creativity, and intelligence.

I want everyone to give it up not only for tha mt-blacklist plugin, but also for the entire Movable Type community. When I opened up Thornography this morning I found that EVERY single entry had been with hit with the same ad for online gambling. Since I hadn’t been paid my usual $5mil fee for such personalized advertising, I did what any good little blogger would do.

I freaked the fuck out.

Then I collected myself and began deleting them by hand. I realized after three deletions that this was going to take me a …

The Frito-Lay Nutrition Center website has made it official: “Healthy eating does not mean you have to give up your favorite snack foods.”

From the wild and wacky folks at Magnetbox: the complete image history of one offender on file with the Lexington-Fayette County Division of Community Corrections. We make felony fun.

[for those of you in the dark, the title of this entry comes from this stirring state song.]

NOFX provides some incisive (and catchy!) political commentary.

Not safe for work, and you must have sound….Andrew.

“Germs can’t grow, it’s so cold out.”

Just keep tellin’ yourself that, lady, just keep on tellin’ yourself that.

Some links today from Slashdot that all go to different pages about this amazing aerogel stuff that NASA’s using on the Stardust spacecraft. Aerogel’s 99.99% air, and transmits almost no heat. See eerie pictures of this ghostly solid here, as well as some smaller ones at the page of a graduate student who works with aerogel; FAQ here and eBay auction here.

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MIT has conducted a survey of most-hated “must-have” technologies. Alarm clocks were #2, televisions #3, but can you guess what #1 is?

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You must play the penguin game. I …

I just learned a new figure of speech, one I don’t think I’ve ever heard before: to sit below the salt refers to the practice of arranging guests at a dinner table with the most prominent guests seated near the host (who sits at the head or top of the table), and the less prominent ones seated further away, down the table. So if you’ve been seated “below the salt” it means you’re further away from the host than the salt is, though I’m not sure where that would be at a formal dinner party, maybe the middle.

The three …

Last year, a friend thanked me for starting to include the &lttarget=”new”&gt attribute in my external links. In my naivete I assumed that this was simply a polite thing to do, or maybe just a sensible way to “keep” visitors at your page, and I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t do it.

Then I learned that there’s actually some debate out there among web page designers over just how good an idea this actually is. Some, I learned, were even vigorously opposed to it. Opposed to it? I stopped reading the debates then, because I wanted to …