I totally missed this this April Fool’s gem. In a perfect world Jon would ping Weblogs.com when he updated and roll to the top of my link list.

Stick a fork in me, because I’m done. My second paper has been handed in and my weekend starts now. Hallelujah! This weekend is looking good with dinner tonight with a new friend who’s in town, a party Saturday, and hopefully oodles of free time to catch up on my reading (check the new sidebar) and work on some new projects.

Do you know that feeling when you’re so sleepy that you can be doing something and you close your eyes for a second and you immediately fall asleep and have a dream, usually quite vivid, and then your eyes open one or two minutes later with a jolt? That’s the state I was in when I wrote paper #2, so barring accidental genius and it getting high marks from the professor, I will not be posting this paper either. Don’t worry though, I have one coming up on psychological and ethical egoism that looks like it’s going to to be good, and I’ll definitely post that. For now, I need a long nap.

Ever wonder what we’re reading here at PhotoMatt.net International Headquarters? Well now there’s a sidebar widget that says what I’m reading now and links to the edition on Amazon, and I even get a kickback. Comments welcome. I’ve been doing a lot of tweaks to the menu and navigation in general so if you have any comments on that leave them here.

The first paper is done, but I’m going to forego my usual practice of posting them here because I think it’s quite bad. Yes I know that was the original point of posting them, but any writing attempting to tie together Aphra Behn and Immanuel Kant should not see the light of day, much less the web.

Two major papers due in the next twenty-four hours. Blogging forecast is light. Don’t despair though, check out my blogroll for the latest and greatest in the independent web world. It can keep you busy for hours, as it does to me often.

For a limited time only PhotoMatt.net is offering free cupholders to all Internet Explorer users on Windows. Get ’em while they’re hot! Hat tip: Waxy.

I was just browsing around Ryan’s pictures when this one caught my eye. Apparently it’s Jason’s iBook with what appears to be a picture of Derek and myself, and seeing it there is quite a bizarre experience. I’m guessing it’s EtherPEG, but that still raises the question of just who was looking at that image over the network? Mysteries abound.

Major new look over at blogrolling headquarters. I really dislike the new interface, nothing is more annoying than dropdown option boxes when you’re trying to get something done. I hope Jason rethinks this and brings back the list of links that worked so well before.

These slides are not only quite informative about some of the new features of PHP5, they are laugh out loud funny. Houston really needs a PHP user group; anyone else interested? Every month the meetup fizzles because of too few people.

Someone must have bumped the thermostat upstairs, because it has gotten quite chilly around here, at least compared to how the weather has been for the past few weeks. Time to closet the hawaiian shirts (and certainly the no shirt) and break out the sweaters again.

This is not a post about the war. They’re doing something just like this in Houston, and I heard on the radio today that the two items really wanted over there are baby wipes and beef jerky. Now think about this a second, and tell me why when we’re spending billions a day we can’t get the fine men and women risking their lives for us some freaking baby wipes? Third party groups have to beg us for money for support operations when we already give gads of money to the government for the very same purpose? I’m sure there’s a good reason, I just don’t know what it is.

HoldTheButton.com. What else is there to say?

Today has been groovy because I finally got my ethics paper back and it got an 8, which was a little disappointing till I checked and remembered that this teacher’s grading scale has 7 and above as an A, so in fact I got a solid A. What paper you ask? Well it’s on Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument, and the entirety is available online in PDF and XHTML format through the link above. Which reminds me I still need to make a system to highlight some past notable post.

Ever want to see those really cool leaflets that we drop from planes on countries we’re invading. Obviously the tactic is to horrify them with gratuitous Times and bad cartoons until they surrender. Hat tip: Typographica

The weekend was a ton of fun, starting off with me barely recovered but going to Rene’s birthday party (which has pics up now), next day getting a Tungsten T and meeting some H-Town people (Kathy and Christine summarize nicely), and then taking an unexpected road trip on Sunday to Navasota and meeting my sister. You see, when I left Austin after SxSW I was in a little bit of a hurry and I ended up leaving 3 pairs of pants, 2 belts, and 3 shirts. I just flat out forgot them. Picked those up and had lunch with my sister and her roommate. Charleen has a thousand stories. We visited a graveyard with an ancestor buried there and it was an interesting experience all around.

Today was a beautiful, beautiful day. Many ups and downs, but the highlight was that the new lenses for my glasses came in. My prescription has changed quite a bit, and I’ve been seeing the world in sort of a haze for I guess a year now. As I waited for them to put the new lenses in I walked from store to store, browsing at Radio Shack, listening to some music, eating a slice of apple pie, and when I got my glasses back I put them on and gasped. There couldn’t be a better time of the year for this to happen. As I walked outside I felt the sun kiss my skin and the trees are beautiful and OH MY GOD look at the amazing leaves I can see each one. Everything is so incredibly crisp I just want to grab it and make sure it’s all real.

“The Oscars, comparatively, are like a five-hour high school graduation with nicer clothes and no beach balls.” Amen. I get more and more tired of the entire industry every time I see one of those gaudy magazines that obsesses over every insignificant detail of people who I don’t think our society should be idolizing.

Source code humor is one of my favorite things in the world. I think when properly done, and ideally involving a pun of some sort, it is the highest form of humor in the world. It was introduced to me by studying the source of Jeffrey Zeldman as a young Jedi, and since I have on some level incorporated it into most of my projects since then. It is meant for a select audience, the elite handful that view source with a critical eye, and is usually either in the form of HTML comments—the blunt way to do it—or subtly interspersed in attributes like id, rel, and class. This is neither, and being server-parsed is never seen by the browser, but I had a hearty laugh after I stumbled on it by accident. Anyone have a favorite example of source humor?

Wes Felter — “Putting college students in prison would certainly teach them a lesson, but will the kids learn not to share or learn to vote?” Ouch! That’s what people in my circle would call a “burn.”

This is a very interesting development, and I can see a lot of potential uses for this sort of technology. Here’s a quote from the email I got:

Sell CDs manufactured on-demand in your CafePress.com for free. The CDs show up in your store just like any other product. Audio CDs include audio samples so your customers can hear your content. Data CDs allow you to add data such as software, photos, clipart, documents, books, etc.

Coming soon: CafePress Publishing!

I’m guessing from the coming soon promise that they’re going to offer a similar process in the future for books and such. Wow.

Well, it’s happened again. I should have seen it coming, the signs were all there, but I hoped “Not this time, it’s different.” However here I sit with what is most likely strep throat, judging from my track record and the terrible pain every time I swallow. This was not entirely unexpected, as every year for the past five or so I have contracted some alphabet letter of strep combined with something else, the worst being last year when I actually ended up in the hospital, on Valentine’s day. This year has been my healthiest ever though, and I’ve hardly gotten a cold or a sniffle for almost a year, so I was hoping this wouldn’t happen. That said, the timing could have been worse; I’m glad it wasn’t at SxSW (like poor Jane or Ernie); I’m glad it wasn’t on Valentine’s day; I’m glad it wasn’t during an “important” school week; I’m glad that you’re still reading at this point. I’m going to try and get some more rest. Updates will either be light, or come at a Kathyesque rate—we’ll see.