out of the blue

So I was walking back from Safeway tonight, you see, and this old car it rolls right on up beside me, and this ol' man he leans outta the car and he says, middlin' excited-like, "Hey, man, you want some jumpsuits?" I look over at him, and he's just a-sittin' there as happy as he can be with his two white jumpsuits folded nice and pretty next to him, and he's calling out to me "I got two jumpsuits for sale!" So, I'm not in the mood to buy no jumpsuits, and I tells him so, and he rolls on out around the corner and away into the city. I can't help but wonder, though. Jumpsuits?

Two things:

First, go read this amusing fake article concerning the blame game and Katrina: "Bush administration promises speedier response to national disasters"

Second, completely aside from being a practical article on writing sensible e-mail messages, this one wins oodles of points with two significant quotes…

One major piece of advice is "write a great subject line", meaning that you ought to summarize the e-mail or hit the high points in the subject line, to show the recipient that the e-mail is worth having. Here is the best subject line ever: "Thanks for the new liver–works great!"

When I read Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, I encountered the wonder of the word "Grok". This Martian concept is brilliant in conception and form, and ever since I immersed myself in that book I have wanted to encounter the word somewhere. This article realizes that dream.

Well, good news to everyone. Opera has gotten rid of the ads. What was hardly an incentive not to use their browser now doesn't exist. Go free software! Kudos to Opera! Opera!

Of course, this doesn't mean I'm switching. (Firefox still has extensions.) Just letting people they have options besides the devil. Who wants to sell their soul, anyway?

Have you ever been annoyed when people post images that are too wide on LiveJournal? Have you thought it rude for them to have the audacity to make you scroll horizontally through your entire friends page if you want to keep them as a "Friend"? Well, I haven't. But some people have. So, I programmed this Greasemonkey script to solve the problem. All it does is check each image on any livejournal user's friends page, and resizes all images that are above a certain limit. (The default is 900px, but you can change the variable max_width if you want it to be different.)

Here is the script: http://www.azureabstraction.com/code/friendly-image/imagewidth.user.js

To use it, you must be running Firefox, and install Greasemonkey. Follow the instructions on the web site about how to install user scripts (they can be found here: Using Greasemonkey). Then, enjoy never seeing any images bigger than you want to on your friends page.

I hope you enjoy it, if it would be useful to you.

Are You A Pirate?

For those of you who aren't lucky enough to know Jess, I'm quoting her blog:

Many of you know, or should know, today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. However, it was pointed out to me that since most of us are bloggers, perhaps we should spend our time today trying to Type Like A Pirate.

Digital Computer Programming is the easiest class in existence. It supposedly lasts from 2:10 to 5:00, but I've not yet failed to finish before 3:40. The first day was an overview of the class. Then the second day was a history of computers. On the third day we "studied" cout and commenting. Today, we used some math functions and didn't even get to basic input (that's for the next class). Since I've already done some programming, I was able to write the program in no time at all, do twice as much as the rest of the class, and still finish before anyone else. The last few minutes were spent making the program display all three methods of calculating the answer.

This is going to be bloody easy. I'm not going to learn much. Oh well.

John Scalzi says it.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050905ta_talk_surowiecki

Tipping is an odd thing. Fundamentally, the idea is to reward someone for good service. But we only tip certain kinds of people. Waiters at restaurants get tips, and boys who carry your luggage to your room at a hotel get tips. Why don't we tip the handiman who fixes our kitchen sink? Or the people working at the bike shop when you need a tune-up? Simply social convention, it seems. If you're interested in the history of tipping and some studies done on what affects how much people tip, check out the article. (Stolen from Justine Larbalestier.)