The Woodwork

Someone took exception to me saying:
“I have yet to read a good “Pragmatic Programmer Series” book.”
…with the lines:
“I think that’s a bit of a hard knock of the Pragmatic Bookshelf. I’ve had a number of books which I’ve really enjoyed from them; The Pragmatic Programmer and Practices of an Agile Developer spring to mind.”
Hehe, he [...]

Last week, the politics of fear ended:
“Because I care so deeply about protecting our country, I take strong offense to your suggestion in recent days that the country will be vulnerable to terrorist attack unless Congress immediately enacts legislation giving you broader powers to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans’ communications and provides legal immunity for [...]

“Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states — outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.”
—Mark Penn, Chief Strategist for the Clinton campaign
By my count, if you are from Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North [...]

Blurb is hosting Lunch 2.0 today on Valentine’s Day!
Reading people’s twitter’s I think
Am I the only single person who loves Valentine’s day?
Oh the gifts, flowers, chocolates, singing telegram, and the the restaurant dinner reservation! I love watching the public trauma this day brings to two people in love. Sometimes it is like a romance sped [...]

Just now, Mager messaged me:
“I am excited for Lunch two dot oh—I don’t say “point-oh” anymore.
Flashback.
…
In the summer of 1992, a friend was reading me a geek purity test he got from USENET.
One of the questions was:
Do you pronounce “*.*” as “star-dot-star?”
Of course, since he was reading it aloud, I heard:
Do you pronounce star-dot-star as [...]

At dinner with Morgan the other day, someone pointed out the past participle of “to twitter” should be “twat,” or perhaps “twatted.” As in, “That’s what she twatted.” Or, “I twat that.”

In twitter-speak, OH means “overheard” which is a polite way of saying, “I don’t want to embarrass the person we all can guess [...]

At dinner the other day, A— quoted someone saying:
“San Francisco. 14 square miles surrounded by reality.”
I thought that was rather clever as I seem to like a slight self-effacement now and again. I bothered to look up the full reference. It turns out the quote was by our very own Mayor McDreamy and he really [...]

In the early 90’s, random dot stereograms made really popular geek posters.

I haven’t a clue what this really looks like. click here to view larger. You can view more and get other stereogram paraphernalia here.

To view them, you had to unfocus your eyes a bit and then stare at infinity. I could never do this [...]

(For my cousin Alex who asked I blog more often about politics.)
On Obama’s Iowa win:
“Hope could give way to fear once again. But, for tonight at least, it holds a mirror up to the face of America, and we can look at ourselves with pride.…It’s the kind of country we’ve always imagined ourselves being — [...]

Someone designed the framework like a big game of Jenga. Every time someone went into fix something they pulled it out of the core and put it on top. Now the whole thing is unstable.
—Mark Jen, talking about building code on top of bad OO architecture