disobey.com

I want a shirt that just has ... on the front. Sums me up pretty well.

Steve says it best:

oh god this is the most terrifying ad i've ever seen

I'm a huge proponent of patience. In 95% of my life, I have the most excruciating patience you've ever seen. I'll take three weeks doing the same thing over and over again in a video game, because I believe I will succeed eventually. I'll sit in a traffic jam whistling a sour ditty. I'll explain things seven different ways until, finally, someone gets it. I'll continue to research until I find the right answer. Perserverance, patience, etc. So, it burns my muffins when I get a tech support email for AmphetaDesk, from a guy I've never been in contact with before, which ends:

Basically its a bit discouraging and I'm going to look elsewhere. Freeware is great and I congratulate you for supplying it but a bit more information might help.

My reply:

You know what's more discouraging? Being sent a tech support email where the outcome has already been pre-determined. Ah well. Guess I don't have to waste me time answering you, though (on a side note, neither error is my own - one is coming from your browser, and the other is coming from a server I don't control. But hey, you don't want my help, so I won't give it).

I mean, come on, do you really think a program that has nearly 50,000 downloads has done this 50,000 times? You need more patience. Freeware does not equate to "the author doesn't care". In fact, quite the opposite.

Not a good way to start the day. What's even worse is that a quick Google brings back this matching website which suggest he works "to support teaching and learning". The irony is something I can't politely put into words.

How to write in plain English:

• Keep your sentences short
• Prefer active verbs
• Use 'you' and 'we'
• Choose words appropriate for the reader
• Don't be afraid to give instructions
• Avoid nominalisations
• Use positive language
• Use lists where appropriate

Postal Experiments details the trials and tribulations of dozens of weird, unpackaged items, all sent through the postal service:

Having long been genuine admirers of the United States Postal Service (USPS), which gives amazingly reliable service especially compared with many other countries, our team of investigators decided to test the delivery limits of this immense system. We knew that an item, say, a saucepan, normally would be in a package because of USPS concerns of entanglement in their automated machinery. But what if the item were not wrapped? How patient are postal employees? How honest? How sentimental? In short, how eccentric a behavior on the part of the sender would still result in successful mail delivery?

Good stuff, like:

Molar tooth. Mailed in clear plastic box. Made a nice rattling sound. Repackaged in padded mailer by unknown individual; the postage and address had been transferred to the outside of the new packaging. A handwritten note in a woman's writing inside read, "Please be advised that human remains may not be transported through the mail, but we assumed this to be of sentimental value, and made an exception in your case." Days to delivery, 14.

Never-opened small bottle of spring water. We observed the street corner box surreptitiously the following day upon mail collection. After puzzling briefly over this item, the postal carrier removed the mailing label and drank the contents of the bottle over the course of a few blocks as he worked his route.

This is one article from a much larger improb.com, which publishes a magazine called the Annals of Improbably Research. All good stuff.

My itunes2html script (which generates this list of albums) has been getting some attention lately, from those who contest my use of id3, those who are glad it's free, open source, standalone, and hackable, and those who have minor suggestions here and there. I've also been receiving various patches in the mail. Very cool, very cool.

Here's hoping I have a revised version in a few weeks, with better support for non-Morbus id3 systems, and a bunch of other neato things. If you want to know when I release a new version, send me an email, eh?

Still struggling with old bookmarks. Learning About Life:

Biology-inspired models and metaphors will have their greatest influence when they spread outside of the scientific community and into the general culture. For children growing up in the world today, learning about living systems is taking on a new urgency. The point is not just to understand the biological world (though that, of course, is a worthy endeavor). Rather, decentralized models of living systems provide a basis for understanding many other systems and phenomena in the world. As these ideas seep out of the scientific community, they are likely to cause deep changes in how children (and adults too) make sense of the world. This paper explores ways to help make that happen.

Similar in ways to Joe's stigmergy paper.

Yes! I've finally beaten Ratchet and Clank for the Playstation 2 completely. All Gold Bolts, all Skill Points, all Gold Weapons, all seven known cheats, and all the secrets listed in the Goodies menu. Whoo! That's the third time I've actually been so in love with a game on the PS2 to attempt finishing it at 100% (the others were Gauntlet: Legends and Medal of Honor: Frontline).

Other PS2 games that I own and have placed in the "done" pile: Rez (man alive, this game was lame), The Bouncer (a Squaresoft published game. lots of secret characters to unlock, but ultimately, not top quality stuff) and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (I never did beat this and get all the secrets, but I got tired of it, and with THPS4 out, I'll probably never revisit it). I'm nearly 100% equivalents on Dark Cloud (with the 100 level tower thingy) and FFX (but those are rainy day games... I'm working on Need For Speed 2: Hot Pursuit now).

Joel on Software writes a decent screed on programming knowledge, the various worlds they inhabit, and the disparities between people who know and people who *know*: Lord Palmerston on Programming:

I see otherwise intelligent people writing blog entries saying something vacuous like "Microsoft is bad at operating systems," frankly, they just look dumb. Imagine trying to summarize millions of lines of code with hundreds of major feature areas created by thousands of programmers over a decade or two, where no one person can begin to understand even a large portion of it. I'm not even defending Microsoft, I'm just saying that big handwavy generalizations made from a position of deep ignorance is one of the biggest wastes of time on the net today.

It's a good read. I've never held myself as a Perl "expert" - I think I know more than some, and yes, I think I have more experience than others, but there's insane amounts of room to improve. I've never written an OOP module. Hell, I've never written a CPAN module at all. I don't understand closures, complicated regexp syntax, and the Perl 6 apocalypses make me blush. I've never done POD documentation, nor have I done automated testing of the code (hand in hand with Makefiles, which I've never done either). There's so much more for me to learn that I don't even attempt to act like an expert - I still run to books every day I'm coding, I still ask really dumb questions because the trees are bigger than the forest, and I still love leaning toothpicks.

The 2002 Worst Manual Contest Winners gave me a chuckle today, especially considering I spent a few hours this weekend deciphering the instructions for putting together a futon (a cheapie we bought from Wal-Mart). See, a futon is about the only thing we can fit through our front door, which was apparently built by gnomes (case in point: the futon box fit fine through the downstairs front door, but we had to eventually open the box in the hallway to piecemeal the parts into our apartment).