Wedding Update



I’ve been particularly quiet these last couple of days because I’ve been working on the new wedding website. Well that and slogging through some data analysis for a journal article. Anyway, head on over there and let me know what other CSS nightmares I’ve caused.

http://tying.the.knot.org

PS: No, I didn’t plan that when we got the knot.org domain.

iPad Idiocy

Or more specifically, the nonsense that some sites are propagating in the name of the iPad. I know they’re just trying to garner page-views by starting controversy, but it’s still sheer nonsense nonetheless. Here’s a quick sampling:

5 Reasons Why We Are Already Depressed About The iPad — Seriously? This article wouldn’t even be worth mentioning except to question the waste of ad dollars on the site for this sort of drivel. I know the iPad is big news, but this sorry excuse for a hack journalist (yeah, Tim Difford, I’m talking to you) shouldn’t be collecting a paycheck with so many other worthy people out of a job.

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Prosecute the Parents

Story of a silly, pointless, avoidable death: here.

Seriously, who cares why the 3-year-old messed with a loaded gun left on the table. Prosecute the parents for endangering the child by making a loaded weapon available. Somehow making this the fault of the Wii, which does not come with a “solid black automatic-looking type mechanism” by default, is just plain silly. Especially since the 3-year-old didn’t shoot the TV — which is what you’d do with a Wii gun. Who ever wrote the article is either a twit or just too willing to be conned by parents trying to avoid arrest.

A Couple Blog Stats

In the last 4 years, Akismet has handled 102,497 spam comments. That’s better than 25k spam messages a year. Pretty impressive when you consider that Google Analytics says the site had less than 10k pageviews last year. I know that the spambots do not generate trackable pageviews, but it’s pretty sad that more log space and energy goes into serving them than legitimate site visitors.

Perspectives on Programming

Lately Mike Taylor over at the Reinvigorated Programmer has been on a roll with a couple of interesting blog posts (at least interesting enough to make Slashdot). First he blogged about deterioration of programming into pure drudgery and more recently he’s disagreed with Dijkstra on the value of BASIC as a first programming language. Here are links to the articles:

Whatever happened to programming?
Where Dijkstra went wrong: the value of BASIC as a first programming language

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Review: CTEK 7002 Battery Charger

I’m a bit odd when it comes to car repair. I like to get my hands dirty, but I’m not really reliable enough to accomplish all the work I need to do on the cars. The result is that my Corrado is constantly in need of some attention, and recently that attention is almost exclusively dealing with drained car batteries. Somewhere a previous owner has spliced in an accessory that’s draining the car’s battery, but I haven’t taken the time to track it down. In the mean time, I’ve gone through 2 Optima car batteries and spent too much time and money keeping the batteries charged.

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