04/19/2008

From a funny online post about how ABC might have run the Lincoln-Douglas debates back in the day:

LINCOLN: In my opinion, slavery will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?

LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?

LINCOLN: Sounds right — his ex-wife was from Kentucky.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did you remain in the church after hearing those statements?

LINCOLN: I was eight.

DOUGLAS: This is an important question George — it’s an issue that certainly will be raised in the fall.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you denounce him?

LINCOLN: I’d like to get back to the divided house if I may.

04/18/2008

I’m wading through some PHP programming code written by another company, because I’m replacing it with my own (vastly superior) programming. Apparently they have some speling problems:

Maybe they’re big Lord of the Rings fans, and when they heard “column” they thought of Gollum, and ended up with “collum”…

04/11/2008

The European Space Agency just released some graphics showing a fairly comprehensive display of the satellites and orbital debris surrounding Earth.

Of course it seems amazing that there’s so much junk flying around up there. But I’m not very surprised, because I did exactly this back in 1998 or so.

Those were my days at Raytheon Space Systems, where I wrote (amongst other things) software to do orbital analysis and 3D visualization of satellites. For fun, I decided to get the full catalog of satellites from all countries and drop their orbital information into the simulation. The result was a graphic almost identical to the ESA one shown here.

Strangely, I didn’t get the same press they’re getting now. I guess it’s because I was just a brilliant but somewhat quirky analyst working in the bowels of an aerospace giant instead of a multinational space agency. Go figure.

04/11/2008

Ahh, another productive meeting with a client. I was at IZZE’s headquarters talking with them about a deal with Amazon, and when I left they asked if I wanted to take any product home with me.

I love my clients.

04/09/2008

In today’s mail I received a little brochure for summer kids’ programs at a nearby school. Although I’m sure the programs themselves are a real hoot, I must say their choice of a photo for the brochure is even funnier.

So we have a bunch of kids all waiting in line for little Maria to stop staring at that rock and get on with the game. Whatever the game is… that looks like a four-square grid, but I don’t see any balls and that’s way too many kids to play a proper game.

Maybe they’re doing some kind of geology study, learning about rocks in nature. Or physics: why an object at rest tends to remain at rest? Although you never know– the rock might suddenly and unpredictably move across the playground or do something equally spooky.

In any case, this makes their summer program look like as much fun as watching grass grow. Sign me up!

04/08/2008

This may be the best spam message I’ve ever received.

If it’s even spam, that is. Maybe it’s a secret communique from my agents in Kazakhstan. Or the al Qaeda. Or a beautiful Russian woman asking me to marry her so she can become a citizen and realize her lifelong dream of working at Burger King slapping patties on a triple-decker. The wonder of it is I just don’t know.