Weekly Linkage: Grumpy Heroines, CRUD, and Prison Work

This week’s internet cruising:

• Questionable Content – Tool reference!
• What does English sound like to foreign ears? – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks – An absolutely amazing song and video by an Italian comedian faking English, plus some adorable animal sounds.
• Why CRUD might be what they want, but may not be what they need – Reading this sent me back to an old client’s site (from almost two years ago), remembering the CRUD-based admin console I developed that was such an incorrect way to go about giving them the functionality they needed. Oy.
• Renaming Many Files At Once with Pattern Matching in Bash | Andy Regan – This proved very handy in renaming about 40 files quickly at work.

Video interlude! This video convinced me to start playing Mass Effect (the first) tonight.

So far, it’s a blast, and not too chock-full of grumpiness. Just enough to be fun.

…I did punch a rambling scientist, though.

• On the Lieberman/Coburn plan (again) – “What we really should care about in [using life expectancy as a factor in Medicare change] is not life expectancy at birth, but life expectancy at age 65. In other words, if you make it to 65, how long will you be on Medicare? That’s when things get tricky.”
• Leave to live by no man’s leave – Ayende @ Rahien – This is a 2005 post by a developer I frequently read from Israel, writing about his four years in the IDF working in prisons.

  “On the one hand you are required to provide the prisoners with proper treatment and on the other hand… you listen to the news and see a bombing in Jerusalem and hear them celebrating. And that is in addition to the usual conflict of being in a position where you need to take care of people who would truly like to kill you.”

• Why Steam Makes You Reinstall DirectX | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Finally, an explanation! It’s still annoying, but I feel a bit better now.
• O’Reilly OSCON Data 2011, Steve Yegge, “What Would You Do With Your Own Google?” – YouTube – Learn math and solve important problems, apparently. I’m a fan.
• Google, at scale – Ooh, a book review that makes me interested in the inner workings of Google. This one’s going on my wishlist.