You’re a fuckonaut, in a silver spaceship, traveling a parallel universe of stupid.
Month: September 2006
After offering his version of events, Owens said he plans to practice Thursday. He also hopes to play Sunday against Tennessee, if his surgically repaired right hand can take it. That officially would make him the first player in NFL history to be upgraded from suicidal to questionable in the span of less than a day.
Saying that you’re going to make the web a place for comics is like suggesting that you plan to colonize the Earth.
We’ve got nine Iraq war veterans running for House seats. President Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy is the Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia. A three‐star admiral who was on my NSC staff is running for Kurt Weldon’s seat in Pennsylvania. We’ve got a huge military presence in this campaign — you can’t let [the GOP] have some rhetorical device that puts us in a box that we don’t belong in. That’s their job. Their job is to beat us. But our job is to not let them get away with it. And if we don’t we’ll be fine.
Bill Clinton (on the midterm elections)
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
Company of Heroes
Wow. This game scores very highly on my RTS rubric: full camera control, no forced micromanagement, sane multiplayer, and a forgiving learning curve. It’s so engrossing I’ll forgive it for indulging in the boilerplate “noun of noun” naming convention for World War II video games.
Hixie’s trying to standardize innerHTML. One simple test gives five different results in 4½ different browsers. I don’t understand how he stays sane.
Nokia releases Carbide.ui, a new skinning application for Series 60. It’s based on Eclipse and is roughly 4,000 times less crappy than its previous offering, S60 Theme Studio. Here’s hoping it leads to equally‐less‐crappy S60 themes.
It’s hard for me to write a WTF — not because I can’t remember one, but because I remember too many. Netscape was one giant WTF — or, as they called it back then, AOL. The company had grown so inept that “WTF” became just another thing we said each day, like “Hey,” or “What time is it?” or “We just lost another 5%,” or “Marketing wants to replace the Back button with an ad for Bowflex.” In fact, as I’m sure you know, the Mozilla movement itself was born when Jim Barksdale looked at the old Netscape 4.x codebase and announced, with tremendous gusto and wondrous pride: WTF?
I consider myself humbly fortunate to have been added as a member of Prototype‘s new core development team. My first patch: optimizing getElementsByClassName. Browsers with XPath support get an eightfold performance gain; others get a modest gain of 50–100%.