The New Orleans Saints finished the regular season at 8–8, but finished dead last in the NFC South. This table confirms that our division was, indeed, the hardest this year. Parity is a bitch.
Category: Tumbles
Happy new year, folks. It’s been a while since I spoke in my own voice on this blog with any regularity; mostly it’s just quotations and links and such, with the occasional post about JavaScript. I will stop short of saying it’s a resolution of mine to reverse that trend. (Here’s a tip for resolutions: pick something small, sustainable, and quotidian. Don’t resolve to lose weight; resolve to drink one fewer soda per day, and start on January 1.)
To watch collectors of arcade games insulting people who were once high score champions on video games is, to anyone even 20 feet away from this subculture, like watching people in fursuits insulting a documentary about people in fursuits who play in a band. It just doesn’t scan, folks.
Fallout 3
Let’s get straight to the point: Fallout 3, despite its minor flaws, is the closest I’ve felt to inhabiting a real‐life world inside a video game. It’s built for exploration and will deliver enough substance for at least a hundred hours of gameplay. On top of all this, enemies’ heads explode if you shoot them just right — and that’s pretty cool by itself.
Even now, many years later, people are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big a hit. Yes, of course I knew. We all knew. The only one who didn’t was the director, George Lucas. We kept it from him because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression.
This image “evolution” simulator would be a good benchmark for the up‐and‐coming JavaScript engines… but, sadly, Google Chrome doesn’t yet support Canvas#getImageData. Anyway, both Firefox 3.1b2 and the latest WebKit nightly do very well.
Minnesota’s recount is a long way from over. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to predict the winner, I would tell you to shoot me.
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. Perhaps at least 2% of California voters are DB engineers who voted against Proposition 8 so they wouldn’t have to solve this problem — and would change their minds now that Sam Hughes has done it for them. But I must admit that’s unlikely.
CBS’s underlying problem… is the arbitrary and largely ineffectual nature of the fact‐checking process employed by the mainstream media. I have written for perhaps a dozen major publications over the span of my career, and the one with the most thorough fact‐checking process is by some margin Sports Illustrated. Although this is an indication of the respect with which SI accords its brand, it does not speak so well of the mainstream political media that you are more likely to see an unverified claim repeated on the evening news than you are to see in the pages of your favorite sports periodical.
CSS Advanced Layout Module. I suppose this is a good spec, even though the syntax is a bit weird. But — Christ — can they please stop overloading the display property? It’s hard enough to use as it is.