Happy birthday. You know who you are.
March 2007 Archives
After mentioning it a month-or-so ago, I’m actually twittering semi-regularly, if you’re interested. My theory about the appeal of Twitter? It seems like everybody idealizes some earlier stage of their life — high school, college, grad school, whatever. As a group (and this is a massive generalization, but bear with me), the geek/digerati/hipster crowd tends to idealize their college days and that dorm-life/hang-out/group-of-friends collective experience, where there’s almost always a like-minded individual close to hand regardless of what time of day it is. (After all, what is SXSW or ETech but a repeat of Frosh Week with more money and shinier toys?) Twitter seems to tap into the same sort of communal living vein that dorm life had, where you get a group bonding effect because of the sharing of life’s inevitable minutia rather than any larger commonality.
(I’m not trying to imply there’s anything wrong with idealizing college, or hell, even high school — and obviously I’m using Twitter enough to be thinking and writing about it, so please don’t read any of the above in a negative way. It’s a cool toy, maybe with a limited shelf life, but I’ve been pondering why it seems to be catching on with the groups that it’s catching on with, and this is what popped out of my noggin.)
- Since we’ve moved to the DC region, we’ve joked about Virginia issuing guns to new residents. It’s starting to happen. So, free guns, but you can’t have a radar detector. Yeehaw.
- Term::HiliteDiff — so close to what I’d like, which is ‘diff’ with just the differing parts of the lines highlighted. Anybody know how to do that?
- Net::Twitter — cause I linked to tw1t.el
- OMB to require standard Windows desktop configuration — there has been much rejoicing at work over this news.
- Guitar Hero - 80s edition. w00t.
- Would this shirt be inappropriate work attire?
- “Austin City Limits” is a Nerve writer on the Zendik commune/cult/hippie thing.
- For some reason, I wasn’t putting together that the recently deceased John Backus was the ‘B’ in ‘BNF’.
- Inmates May Cut Time By Donating Organs — yeah, this doesn’t lead down a slippery slope or anything…
- Fun with screen — this looks interesting. into the “play with this” pile…
- Google Test Automation conference — must remember to point out to the new QA team lead at work.
- Lucero on YouTube: Ben solo accoustic (with the awesome
JawboxJawbreaker (thanks Liz) cover towards the end) and the video for Just That Kind of Girl — love the Slayer-esque drum kit logo. - Lingon — launchd GUI
- Make a ringtone from any MP3. Must find non-sucky sounds for new toy…
- Ferrofluid Magnet under glass — a 3D version of the iron filling mangentic field demo from sixth grade science class
- Sepia update
- Mark Pilgrim’s Good Easy 2007 is worth a look. I should write up my current tools list; the new work-provided MBP is causing some shifts in that area.
- VirtualBox — also on to the “play with me” list.
- Emacs interface to Twitter.
- Actiontastic opens up. I think playing with Actiontastic may be the “hey this feels like productivity even though I’m not doing any actual work” activity-of-choice for me today…
- Code Monkey.mp3 — “Code Monkey very simple man with big warm fuzzy secret heart”. Awesome. (via Merlin)
- gtags — should forward to work…
- Emacs client for Google services
- Installing Puppet on Ubuntu
- JMeter — need to look at this for work
- Dreams With Sharp Teeth — a film about Harlan Ellison (via Warren Ellis)
- Random Package Management — everybody has a story like this, right?
- I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? — lolcatz-poloza.
- Mail.app encryption. Work has some free cert generation thing; I should look into setting this up.
This weekend, I used the fact that the CompUSA near our house was going out of business as the rationalization for buying Guitar Hero II (because, hey, 10% off!). This game is teh awesome. If you have not yet checked it out, I highly recommend it. Mechanics-wise, it’s basically DDR-meets-air guitar, but it ends up being quite a bit of fun, and it’s challenging without being impossible. The song selection is decent too. (TheChild is currently walking around saying “Mommy’s alright, Daddy’s alright” because I spent quite a lot of time on “Surrender” the other day…)