The Art of the Pun—apparently the worse it is the better it is, which I’ve been saying all along but people just groan. Or at PVA they would do the classic “chop” to show their distaste. Philistines. 😉
Yearly Archives: 2002
Performance Today
For those of you who may be interesting, I’m playing a big band gig today at 2:00 PM at Saint Christopher Episcopal Church at 1656 Blalock. I think it’s some sort of festival or something, so it should be fun. We’re doing an interesting alto feature called “Harlem Nocturne” which yours truly will be playing. Sorry for the short notice though! I hope everyone has a wonderful Saturday.
Gallery: 11-2-2002
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Gallery: 11-1-2002
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Happy Hallowe’en
I hope everyone has a safe and pleasant night. In honor of the night I coerced my lovely black cat Helza for a brief (she doesn’t like being held long) photoshoot. She was more interested in looking around than looking at the camera, so here’s what came out. Besides, would this be a blog without at least one cat picture? Her full name is Helza Poppins, which we named her because when she first joined our household she would hide behind everything and jump out when you least expect it. I’ve seen some pretty interesting costumes today, and of course the decorations are always fun.
PHP Goodness All Around
Michael has some very cool stuff going on at his site. If you use Cafélog or just like seeing wicked PHP code, check it out. I can’t believe I just said wicked. If I get any free time tonight I’m going to look at the regex stuff he’s doing and see what’s going on with it. Not to mention the redesign, which I think is quite groovy.
Gallery: 10-31-2002
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Pun-A-Day #19
In the 1900s an English town had fallen on really hard times. For decades its primary industry had been its textile mills, but now the mills were all closed and unemployment was at an all-time high. Desperate, the town’s mayor looked frantically around for other industries to invigorate the economy. He found that there was a man in Germany who was looking for someone to take over his thriving hunting-dog breeding business. The man had made a fortune raising the animals and was willing to unload it for a fraction of its value so he could retire with his new wife. The mayor used his influence to have all the mills converted to kennels and all of the dogs transported to his town. Employment skyrocketed and the town prospered! Everyone was happy, even though, sometimes—especially on the nights with a full moon—the animals got a little noisy, keeping some residents awake. They just sighed and said, “The mills are alive with the hounds of Munich.”
Palm Teleconference
I’m “watching” to Palm’s special presentation for PUGs on the Zire and Tungsten units right now. More when it’s over.
PHP at Yahoo!
It’s just beautiful. Too often I see PHP dismissed for other more ‘mature’ languages, so having a little website with more than 1.5 billion pageviews a day and some of the smartest engineers on the web decide to use it is quite heartening.
Tired
I took a long rest earlier because I had a terrible migraine. Why am I so tired now? Too tired to read, too tired to talk, and too tired to work on the code I wanted to get to this evening. I think it’s time to try that sleep thing out again.
Gallery: 10-30-2002
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Only $37,500 per Letter
After reading The Name Game I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Well actually, I laughed out loud the entire way through the article. The sheer frivolity of the industry described boggles the imagination. I actually checked the date to see if it was published on April Fool’s Day. Maybe I’m missing something very big here; if so, please enlighten me.
Rain Happiness
Happiness is thinking you forgot your umbrella, then spotting it in your backpack and walking through the pouring rain dry.
Interior Decoration
I mentioned earlier that I was rearranging some things in my room, and now in the photolog you can see before, after, and what was added. The photos from tonight all look a little grainy because the ISO setting on my camera was set wrong. The noise can really be killer on my cam at 300 and above.
Matt Is Bored
Well, everyone’s doing it. Here we go, Matt is . . .
- . . . it worth it?
- . . . a critic, hear me roar, or snore!
- . . . taking the extra
- . . . currently married to the love of his life
- . . . new Colts coach
- . . . so cute
- . . . a sad but amusing old drunk
- . . . way better than chocolate
- . . . a lil gerbil ish
- . . . yummy
- . . . a clown
- . . . great!!!
- . . . me name
- . . . a babe
So there you go. If you’re really cool you can put your full name in there, but alas that did nothing for me. I might try “Matthew” later to see how Matts and Matthews compare.
Palm Tungsten-T Released
Well, just minutes ago Palm officially released their new Tungsten T product. They really need to start coming up with better names for these things. This is bad, and Zire? What’s up with that? Anyway this unit looks quite good, it has everything Palm has been lacking for so long:
- Sliding graffiti area, so it should be pretty small.
- Voice recording and playback, which has been missing for far too long on the PalmOS platform
- High resolution screen (320×320), Sony has had this for ages. Again, long overdue.
- Bluetooth, this is a big deal, and a first in the PalmOS market. Finally, innovation!
- Multimedia Card and Secure Digital expansion slots. Groovy.
- OS5: evolutionary, not revolutionary.
What’s going to decide how this unit does in the market is how Palm markets this, and how the well the form-factor and screen is received. Most people don’t admit it, but the feel of a handheld is really the one of the biggest factors in making their decision. That’s why people think the Treo looks funny but love it once they hold it in their hand. Palm hasn’t been very consistent as far as screen quality goes, so I’d really like to see how this one looks, and how it compares to the ones Sony is putting out. The only real flaw I see with this unit’s specs is that it has the headphone jack and hardware to play MP3s, but it says “separate
Hopefully this will be the unit that keeps Palm afloat and reasserts the PalmOS over PocketPCs. There is really no reason to buy a PocketPC anymore: not for speed (try actually doing something on that faster processor), not for multimedia, not for working with Office documents, and certainly not for the price. If you did somehow end up with a PocketPC through some twist of fate, do yourself a favor and put GNU/Linux on it.
Update: There in a nice review on Infosync by Larry Garfield, an old PalmStation buddy, where he covers pretty much everything I was worried about, including the screen. His review is very favorable. Palm Infocenter as a pretty detailed announcement with some good discussion. PDA Buzz has hands-on reviews from a number of people who have one already. Brighthand also has a new review up, but I’m hesitant to recommend them because their design looks a little too familiar.
Pun-A-Day #18
This guy goes into a restaurant for a Christmas breakfast while in his home town for the holidays. After looking over the menu he says, “I’ll just have the eggs benedict.” His order comes a while later and it’s served on a big shiny hubcap. He asks the waiter, “What’s with the hubcap?” The waiter sings, “There’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise!”
Note to Self: Chenille
Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Never put chenille in the washer. Especially with other stuff
More on Monospaced Fonts
Well I’ve found a few more I plan to check out, and I’m going to give each at least a day’s worth of heavy coding, then narrow it down progressively until I finally decide on one. The non-free fonts that don’t look terribly promising I’m going to try and test drive online, but MyFonts anti-aliases things pretty heavily and indiscriminately, which makes it hard to tell how fonts work at smaller sizes. The new entrants in the contest are:
Several of these font suggestions come via Aaron Swartz’s favorite fonts list. Personally I’d like to see more lists like this, perhaps in a semantically meaningful way that could be indexed and presented in different ways. Any format come to mind? I know I’ve read a couple of similar lists before, so I’ll try and dig up some more links.