furtive explorations

Look for:
The Bank of Wal-Mart,
Amazing New 'Swiffer' Fails To Fill The Void
NFL Star Thanks Jesus After Successful Double Homicide
Regulation Spitefully Obeyed To The Letter
As You Can See From My Name-Brand Clothing, I Am Not Poor
Baby-Care Tips For First-Time Parents
It's The First February Of The New Millennium!

Two quotes from that last one:

Did you see Ricky Martin on the American Music Awards? He tore up the stage with that smash-hit of his, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida-Loca." I tell you, he's still got it after all these months!

Item! Rolling Stone magazine recently revealed the parentage of singer Melissa Etheridge's baby! Of course, she was the mother, but did you know that the father was not her husband, but corpulent drug sack David Crosby? I don't know. I guess her husband must have been sterile. I'm just glad they came up with a solution that benefited everyone: Melissa Etheridge got a baby and David Crosby got to have sex.

1. Yes opensource should be one word =)
2. Revolution is a nasty word, it bothers people, we should stop using it.
3. Opensource advocates talk a lot about the ability to go in a fix anything you want and they mention the "more eyeballs make bugs shallower" mantra -- usually in the same paragraph -- but they never really point out that the two statements are different! I have been contributing to the Mozilla project by finding bugs, not fixing them. Anyone with the gumption can try and trace a bug down and explain where it isn't and where it must be. Doing the research on a bug can save more time than sending in a patch. You may not be the expert on how to write the code but you can sure accelerate the process!
4. The real opensource breakthrough will happen when corporate hiring people realize that OSS people fix things and make things faster for internal development. In a year or so, people with their fingers in the Mozilla pie are going to be hunted by some companies the same way Apache and Linux people are starting to be today. If you are already hooked up with an opensource project, you can do what they need that much quicker.
5. A gain that most people underestimate is that the code doesn't wind up being lowest-common-denominator. It isn't scatter-code or randomly formatted. It isn't simplistic and slow. Instead, it is more standards compliant, usually much more cross-platform than any one person or small team could pull off, and generally more consistent. This is the benefit of bringing diverse experts or even diverse mediocres, they learn from each other and have to come up to a certain level to play the game. And with respect comes influence over how others code, they stop using so many ugly casts and start writing macros and use indirection and normalize their tables and wrap public interfaces so they can be multiplatformed without extra levels of indirection.

There are four types of programmer: wannabes, mediocres, hackers and gods. A mediocre OSS expert can often whup-up on a hacker without those resources. A hacker in OSS knows where to get more god-level code than any god could kickout in a year.

It turns out the science guys and I had entirely different things in mind when we referred to ball lightning. There is no reason to be afraid of a weather phenomenon, no matter how much it hurts.

Hey that looked pretty good so I dug up another favorite image from Yesteryear, this time a long lost Quake humor site.

and this one is a bit I did for a joke banner ad contest and then decided to use on my own page since their rules made you give up all rights when you submitted it!

Everybody loves The Onion. This is the best bit they have done all year, (OK it's Feburary but still...)

I love this song: Tangled up in blue Bob Dylan wrote real lyric poetry that stood the test of time. That's gotta be worth something somewhere, right?

You didn't see this here: Furious George and the cross-country crime spree. 2098 is my first score. 5200ish is the best I've done.

And then, the Gates of the city fall without warning due to termites throughout the business structure. We come to praise Caesar, not to drink coffee

Random Math Fact from Wolfram and The Picpage. I was cross-loading these two as fast as I could re-load them in two windows. Wow. Intense math and pseudo-pr0n at the same time.
BTW, I kinda wonder about the PicPage now that I've loaded a few. Is this a Child-pr0n stalker site or what? Are there no women over the age of 21 on here or what?
Hey, I think the random page is playing with me or I took it to a limit, it always returns the same thing now =( Asymptotical web site behavior.

htmlib.com Hmmm...

I-resign.com at first I thought this was a joke on the annoying trend of prefixing words with "I" or "E". Do check out the letters section. Very funny. Gotten from Limbic Nutrition who has yet to cease to amaze me with the variety and volume of links on his page.

Meta This blog isn't enough. I think I need a Journal/Article Log, a blog, and a link engine to track everything I want to do. This blog is feeling the strain of links + chatter + long term links + opinion. I may have to do something about this. =(

Here you go, an article right up my alley: Hollywood's Total Stinkers A run down of the worst movies of the last two decades that is priceless.

No, it must be from mainstream cinema, and let's restrict it to the modern era, say, the last two decades. Let's also, just to make it interesting, add the following purely arbitrary difficulty: It cannot have been directed by Kevin Costner. More: It has to have been released by a major. It must lie, cheat and steal, corrupt the young, inflame the elderly, insult the intelligent, deaden the masses and be in color. Someone has to have invested millions in it, and supported it aggressively in the theaters with an ad campaign that got more and more grotesque as its ignominy wore on.

This was from Robot Wisdom, thank ya Jorn!
and thanks for Coming Soon.net too. =)

As a quick primer here are some definitions:

Kosher

Fit or proper as pertains dietary laws found in Shulchan Aruch.

Shulchan Aruch

Code of Jewish Law, based on biblical readings, especially from the Pentateuch.

Kashruth

The state of being Kosher

Challah

Ritual burning of a small portion of bread.

Mitzvah

A commandment or law.

Pentateuch

The first five books of the Old Testament or Torah.

1. Genesis
2. Exodus
3. Leviticus
4. Numbers
5. Deuteronomy

Pareve

Parve

Free of dairy, meat, their derivatives, and contact with impure (meat/dairy) surfaces and thus able to be eaten with meat or dairy without restriction.

Shochet

Trained pious kosher slaughterer

Shechita

Proper killing method using a smooth razor-sharp knife to cut the esphogus and trachea of an animal.

Bodek

Trained animal inspector

Bedika

Inspection of the slaughtered animal, especially the lungs. Animal are considered trief if lesions (sirchot) caused by adhesion in or puncturing of the lungs are found to be bad enough.

Trief

Non-kosher

Glatt

Pure of any adhesion or other abnomalities, even those that don't render the beast treif. "Glatt Kosher" is the usual term.

Nikkur

Extended ritual cutting away of impure veins, nerves and some fat in beef, veal and lamb.

Koshering

The removal of all blood from a piece of meat, usually by salting or broilling.

Cholov Yisroel

Requirement that milk must be from a kosher animal.

Thanks for reading this, I didn't want to be the only one with all this useless knowledge. Well, useless to me anyway. =P