Unfortunately, my plans for going to Burning Man this year are not to be. However, it looks like Mr. Sells and his wife are going.

After reading up on the CommentAPI, if I were to write the RatingAPI, I’d pretty much plagiarize the CommentAPI but only make the following changes:

I was fooling around with building a custom stylesheet for formatting RSS items within RSS Bandit and I created one that tries to emulate the Commodore 64 look and feel. While it is possible to download the exact font used by the 64, I chose not to require a font download and instead chose Terminal. It is close enough and exists on most machines. If you want this style for yourself, download the template here and save it to the following directory (assuming a default installation):

For you grizzled Unix hacks out there, this might be old news, but I just learned of a really neat tool that I’m sure will appeal to the geophysicist in each of us (or at least Erik).

Pulled this classic CD out of the crate for a little funky listening today. It starts off with a robotic funky track in “PHD” and progresses through some ragin’ rock in “Name of the Game” before settling down into a lush soundscape with “Blowout”, my favorite track on the CD.

A friend of mine told me about a deal his company is working on in which an dot com internet company which was valued at around a couple million dollars a few years ago has now reached an agreement to be sold for a couple hundred million. He’s not at liberty to discuss which company (so we can buy up its stock), but the company does not deal with rocket science.

This is the type of research that keeps the head of Ikea rich rich rich…

I once scored even faster than this… oh wait, we’re talking soccer here.

Back in the day, amidst all the stupidity prevalent on the web, there was one site that dared to raise the banner and take the stupidity one step higher. That site was, my friends, lostyouth.com.

“Unfortunately, the regular expression language is no different from any other in that it has various dialects and accents” – Masting Regular Expressions, Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

In an earlier blog entry, I asked the question if it made sense to add code in a debug version of the TimedLock class (written by Ian Griffiths in this post and commented on by Eric Gunnerson in this post) to store the stack trace when acquiring a lock on an object so that if another thread blocks an attempt to acquire a TimedLock, we can discover the StackTrace of the blocking thread.

I’ve spent the last 3 days trying to get an installation of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise edition onto a Virtual PC machine. I couldn’t understand why it took so long until I realized I had accidentally selected the ISO image for the checked debug version. Arggggg!!! How stupid is that!?

Code Complete by Steve McConnell was the first programming book that had me glued to its pages as one would read a page turner thrilling novel. I couldn’t put it down. I still have several scars from the many obstacles I would walk into as I read the book and attempted to carry on my normal business. It’s that good!

You’ve got to see this to believe it.

This is freakin’ awesome! Greg Reinacker writes some sample code to generate an RSS feed from the Windows Event Log. This is a simple idea, but very useful for those of us who monitor EVERYTHING via an RSS Aggregator. Event Log Monitoring With RSS.

The video is gone. Sorry.

In a previous post I mentioned that I bought an LCD monitor from some unknow Yahoo store. Well I recieved it yesterday and I can’t tell you how happy I am with it. I’ve never seen such a nice, well built, sharp LCD. It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust as I think they’ve grown accustomed to blurry text. In any case, the store sells it for $399.00 (includes shipping) which is a steal. Here’s the URL http://store.yahoo.com/3btech/deulbysa17fl.html

Heavy Social Drinkers Show Brain Damage, Study Finds

I’m not one to act like an elitist snob and make fun of stupid people. Ok, who am I kidding. I do like to make fun of stupid people. Especially those with no sense of humor. Wired News has this great article about how many people take The Onion as serious news.