thought

Lots of great stuff has been going on at The Ajax Experience — I’ll post pictures once I get back — but I thought this was notable enough to share right now: until Douglas Crockford mentioned it at a panel last night, I was unaware that Opera 9 now identifies itself as only Opera 9 in its user agent string, reversing a ridiculous decade‐long trend of browsers pretending to be some form of Mozilla. Type navigator.userAgent into a JavaScript console and see for yourself; my version says it’s Opera/9.01 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en). The truth will set you free.

review
Dead Rising

Dead Rising

Verdict: 89/100 (Minimum score is 0; maximum is 100.)

For the first five days I owned an Xbox 360, this disc barely left the machine. On top of the ridculously‐high replay value, this game is also a really fascinating look at what Japan thinks about American culture. The “Mark of the Sniper” scene (grab the game script and do a search) seemed to be a direct rebuttal to the 1992 Rodney Peairs/Yoshi Hattori incident.

thought

If you’re going to The Ajax Experience, I’ll probably see you there. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow at an intolerable time before sunrise and will wind up in Boston sometime around 1pm. I look forward to several of the panels — and especially Brendan Eich’s keynote — but will also be thrilled to share a beer with those whose code I have used (and whose work I have copied) for over a year now: Justin Palmer, Dan Webb, Aaron Gustafson, John Resig, and other ninja‐like entities.

quotation

There were two schools as to why people kicked barefoot. Neither made any sense. The first was that it provided the kicker with a better “feel” for the ball itself and that this gave him greater control of its trajectory; I recall an argument that claimed making a kicker wear a shoe was like making a quarterback wear a mitten. I can only assume this argument was made by people who threw like Garo Yepremian.

Chuck Klosterman
quotation
3

As we start down the stretch, Bell is picking up on the outside, Perry is still at 35 percent after a year, Strayhorn is fading and Kinky stopped to poop on the track.

Molly Ivins
quotation

Every episode of He‐Man consisted of the two parties battling one another, with their skirmishes having little or no effect on the outside world. This was true of many of those ’80s, action figure‐centric, A vs. B cartoon shows: G.I. Joe vs. Cobra, Justice League vs. Legion of Doom, Autobots vs. Decepticons, etc. But most were at least set on Earth, so you could easily identify the bad guys — they were the ones trying to blow up Mount Rushmore.

Matthew Baldwin