I don’t know about you, but running into an unlocked workstation in the office is like finding a voucher for a free airline ticket and hotel stay at Vegas complete with gambling money. In other words, pure fun. (Ok, perhaps I overstated that a bit. I’d much prefer the free stay in Vegas. Anyone? Anyone?)

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Man, I’ve been so heads down busy with work lately that I haven’t had time to regale you with the fantastical events that have been going on around here. Tales of wizards, warriors, and actuarials. Seriously, kick-ass actuarials.

Ha ha ha! Thanks for publishing this one Robb. If anyone is offended, my finger is pointing at Robb. I’m just the messenger.

Reading this post from Jayson’s blog caught my attention for two reasons. First, his very strong reaction to some code that swallows an exception. Second, the fact that I’ve written such code before.

Oh yeah, this little curse is going around right now as Microsoft recently released some new security updates. I love Robb’s take on the real message underneath the Automatic Update dialog.

This is the must see video of the month. I would love to see this video in reverse.

Very early this morning my slumber was disturbed by an extremely lound noise. Like Maverick in Top Gun, those durn shuttle astronauts did a fly by enroute to Edwards, setting off car alarms and howling dogs in the neighborhood. Couldn’t y’all have flown by quietly. There were people sleeping you know. Next thing you know, them punk astronauts will attach a huge bass subwoofer in the back of that thing, spinners, just to let you know what’s up.

So you’re ready to bore the world with your stuttering lisp via podcasting. Congratulations! Join the thousands of others podcasting their mind numbing undifferentiated message.

Before I mention this, I better knock on wood and cross my fingers so as not to jinx it, but I haven’t had any comment spam for several days. In fact, for the past month, the amount of comment spam on my blog has been greatly reduced. Is rel="nofollow" actually working despite the naysayers? Or have I become such a small fry, that I am not worth the extra CPU cycles and bandwidth to graffiti my site?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I wrote a really simple little class for converting State Codes to State Names and Vice Versa.

In ten minutes we’re getting on the train to go to the Narita airport. I always feel sad when leaving, but excited to get back to work and the exciting opportunities therein. The fact we are flying Singapore airlines is some consolation. They have a fantastic in-flight entertainment system. If only they had wi-fi.

And if so, is he angry? I wondered this after reading Is Object Oriented Programming The Problem? in which Don invokes the programmer archetype, “Mort” to make a point.

We here at “You’ve Been Haacked” (well, actually just me) bend over backwards (and sideways) looking to enhance your Haacked experience and deliver more bang for your buck (What!? You’re not paying for this content? You lousy cheapskates!). To that end, we are adding Job Postings to the litany of entertaining drivel posted on this site. At least, we are adding this one job posting and reserve the right to add others. Here is an opportunity to work closely with yours truly on a project or two. Please, only reply if you have the skills to pay the bills.

Since I have a free moment (and the internet connection is back up), I thought I’d write a short status update of my trip to Japan. But first, let me point out that I used the term “status update”. What am I? A project manager?

Yesterday we were given a tour of Asakusa from an old family friend who resides there. He is an “Edoko”, a 3rd generation Tokyo native. Apparently, it takes three generations before you get to carry the Tokyo native membership card. I’m not sure if it gets you into the hottest clubs or not, or even if it at least provides car insurance on rentals, but I am sure it is an honor nonetheless.

Kevin Marks says in the comments to my last post that my example of how a format designed for both machine and human readability might run into problems was a little contrived. My dear Mr. Marks how silly of you to say so. I must vehemently disagree with your lack of insight. That example was a lot contrived. I blame Jet Lag for the lack of a better example, but the point that I was trying to make (albeit unconvincingly), is that…

I had an email discussion with Dimitri about Microformats a little while back, trying to understand the purpose of Microformats and what they intend to solve.