dan-o's blog: Archive

“The consequences of there not being a real Afghan government are probably dire....”

– Rachel Maddow. Pretty much couldn’t agree with this more.

Jul 16th

May 12th

12 notes

Mar 17th

Mar 16th

24 notes

Mar 3rd

Feb 14th

1 note

Jan 28th

Jan 25th

21 notes

Jan 23rd

1 note

I give up.

langer: TPM got its hands on the Democrats’ latest talking points. This one’s fifth: It is mathematically impossible for Democrats to pass legislation on our own. I want my money back. There are a dozen awful things about these “talking points”, but this is another one that particularly sparks my ire: · Saying “no” might be a good political strategy but it does...

Jan 21st

10 notes

I love my friends

2:52:57 PM: took too much cold medicine 2:57:47 PM: i kind of like it 2:57:59 PM: as long as my boss leaves me alone and i don’t set anything on fire

Jan 15th

“I’m amazed at the popularity of the Alvin movies. Globally too! It just...”

– David Cross, on his facebook page today. Love that guy.

Jan 14th

Maybe this year will be better than the last.

Dec 31st

Dec 29th

langer: Avatar is a bad film. Not because it lacks any meaningful character development (which it does), not because its plot is laughably flimsy (which it is), and not because it is little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully, but because it is yet another example of b-grade Hollywood moralizing, of not very smart people with typically superficial good intentions offering Americans an...

Dec 27th

147 notes

my data is just fine, thank you

I think a lot about the evolution of language, and how words come to mean something more or different than they did 50 or even ten years ago. It’s tricky, sometimes, being a bit of a stickler about spelling, grammar, and punctuation (and perhaps more than anything, semantics), while still allowing our language to evolve, and changing with it. I do think it’s possible, though, to live...

Dec 27th

Dec 23rd

my christmas story

It was December of 1981. I had just turned 9, and there were two big-ticket items I and my two brothers (Casey, 6, and Bennett, who we called “Ben” in those days, 11) desperately wanted for Christmas: an AT-AT imperial walker and an Atari 2600. A couple days before Christmas, I accidentally got a glimpse of the Atari in its large, glorious box in the trunk of my Dad’s car. ...

Dec 19th

the three stages of debugging

stage 1: that’s completely impossible and I refuse to believe it. stage 2: ok I believe it now. but now I don’t understand how it worked in the first place, or how anything else is working. stage 3 (if you’re lucky): oh now I get it. Welcome to stage 2, population: me.

Dec 17th

http://langer.tumblr.com/post/280573007 →

langer: “We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works.” — Richard Feynman, Caltech lectures, 1962 (via fdanbo) I got turned onto this quote yesterday by Dan-o while we were...

Dec 12th

Dec 2nd

22T!

danob@michael-jordan:~$ df -h /dev/md1 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md1 22T 1.1T 21T 5% /mnt/raid6

Dec 2nd

It was Feynman’s idea to use the double-slit experiment as an introduction to the principles of quantum mechanics. I have a recording of him explaining it in a lecture at Cal Tech in 1962, but alas it’s nearly an hour long so tumblr won’t let me upload it. So for now I’ll just quote my favorite part: “Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you know...

Dec 1st

15 notes

Dec 1st

Oct 20th

five coolest companies in boston →

Of course Harmonix is on the list, but the CIC made #4! How badass is that!

Sep 25th

1 note

Burglar leaves his Facebook page on victim’s... →

“The victim later noticed that the intruder also used her computer to check his Facebook status, and his account was still open when she checked the computer.”

Sep 22nd

Sep 18th

turbine named in patent lawsuit →

“In 2002, Paltalk purchased two patents […] covering technologies for sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment.”

Sep 17th

great article about the right-wing teabaggers →

Sep 15th

my conversation with a convenience store clerk...

Most mornings, I stop at the same convenience store on the way to work, so all the folks who work there recognize me. One of them is a sweet old Indian lady with a heavy accent. Clerk: “Who did that to you.” Me: “What?” Clerk: “Your face.” I was offended for a split second, then I remembered that we had some fun with glitter last night, and I must not have...

Sep 4th

Sep 1st

Aug 21st

Aug 14th

dear everybody,

This is a slash: / This is a backslash: \ So, if you’re reading a URL out loud, like, “myspace.com/chesterfrench”, please don’t say “myspace dot com backslash chester french”, because it makes me cringe. I realized recently the source of the confusion: if you imagine drawing the character with a pen, for a slash, you are moving the pen backwards, and for a...

Aug 9th

Jul 29th

Jun 3rd

1 note

best achewood cartoon EVER →

May 22nd

Apr 30th

one of my new favorite error messages

Though nothing will probably ever surpass my favorite of all time (from MSVC: “a reference that is not to const cannot be bound to a non-lvalue” — three negatives!), this is one of my new favs from Vista: C:>ipconfig /release The requested operation requires elevation. I tried standing up, but it didn’t seem to help.

Apr 27th

1 note

rethink afghanistan →

So, though I certainly so lean that way, I’m not the most left-wing guy in the world. However, it pisses me off that even the left-wing folks, including Obama, seem to be treating Afghanistan as the “good war”. Honestly, we think it’s worth a TRILLION DOLLARS while our economy is falling apart? Anyway, these videos are pretty good. *sigh*.

Apr 15th

panic tv

So, I like Panic TV. But I really, really liked it when at first I thought it was just a continous video art project, funded with some advertising money. Then I went to their site and found out that they’re NOT just trying to make a neat art project — they are “a fast growing entertainment network of flat screen TVs strategically placed in the most popular bars”. This...

Apr 13th