For two weeks’ worth of links, there aren’t very many. Then again, I do still have 173 unread items in Google Reader.

• glenscott.net » Restore an Eee PC 701 back to factory Xandros from a USB stick with no ASUS Support DVD – This proved quite handy last night in restoring ol' Tammy to defaults for Greg.
• The legend of the superprogrammer – "Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found that the very best developers are much more productive than the worst programmer — when working on small projects. The best developer will complete a 1k line of code (LOC) effort 6 times faster than the lousiest. The productivity delta falls to 2x on a 64k LOC project. Beyond a few hundred thousand LOC both sorts of people perform equally well. Or equally poorly."
• Skepticblog » The Reasonableness of Weird Things – "Many people have quite good reasons for believing in the paranormal. [...] In my experience, the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted."

  Thank you, thank you, thank you. I get so sick of elitist, skeptic douchebags with their holier-than-thou lock on critical thinking that I — despite having the same desires to protect people against fraudulent untruths — won't put the label of "skeptic" on myself. It's a movement that has a rude, pushy face in far too many of the cases I've seen. I hope more folks take articles like this to heart.

• Think Progress » Racist New Hampshire State House Candidate Advises Tea Party To Be More Open With Its Racism – "For far too long white Americans have been told that diversity is something beneficial to their existence. Statistics prove that the opposite is true."

  Um. Okay.

• Because Blacks are not American | Prometheus 6 – Too bad I didn't teach a "fuzzy" subject like history. Then I could have had the opportunity to really screw with people's heads.
• Buttersafe » The Essence of Being Human – Mmm, cat videos.
• 10 New High-Quality Fonts for Your Designs | Freebies – I always love things like this, even if — for the web — it means slicing and dicing text as images. To that end, if sites could consistently and easily push fonts out to users, would that be a good thing?
• Is It Time To Quit Your Day Job? – One of those nice "get off your butt and do your passion job" articles.
• High Test Coverage Ratio is a good thing, Anyway! – Patrick Smacchia [MVP C#] – CodeBetter.Com – Stuff you need to Code Better! – Patrick uses the broken window argument to conclude that 100% test coverage from the start will encourage developers to maintain 100% coverage in code as they refactor. I'm not sure I buy that for cases where rapidly-developed prototypes are refactored and developed into deployed applications.
• 70 Unique Examples Of 404 Error Pages For Your Inspiration – These are gorgeous and helpful. And inspiring.
• How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made – Don't know about you, but I can't get enough of Mustafa.
• Rules For Games: Do & Don’t #1 | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – "Don’t: leave diary entries by one person scattered over miles of corridors, buildings and countries. That’s not how a diary works."

  Keep reading >>

“Esteemed Relations” is the fifth piece of the Witches of Ming Ung tale:

“Did you really need to wear that?” Hardi whispered to Robert. “You look like a clown.”

Robert straightened his lavender shirt. “I, my dear, am a peacock in a field of pigeons.” One of the soldiers behind him snorted a laugh. Robert shot him a look, but continued, “I know how station ladies are. I have to stand out from these military types, or I’ll never get… noticed.”

Hardi rolled her eyes and eyed his luggage dubiously as they moved forward in line. She refused to ask what was in the five bags, since the answer might be “more shirts like those.”

Keep reading >>

• My God—it’s full of unicorns! – Meta Stack Overflow – This is hilarious. I'm going to have to play around with this in WP.
• Dynamic Dummy Image Generator – DummyImage.com – C/o my darling, this is a pretty cool way to generate placeholder images.
• Alex Payne — On the iPad – This is the best damn commentary on the iPad that I've seen yet.
• A Toronto Data Guy, I want privacy because I break the law – This is a good essay on privacy and how that related to purposefully and accidentally breaking the law. I like that he doesn't once go into copyright violation (which isn't law breaking, although many think so).
• 10 things netbooks still do better than an iPad – Laptop & Notebook computers – I'll personally be sticking with netbooks for a while longer (for several of the reasons mentioned in this article, actually), but what tickled me pink here was the line: "Even the most basic netbook has a 160GB hard drive." My netbook has 4GB. I knew it was a dinosaur at ~2 years old, but damn. Maybe $400 for a newer one wouldn't be so bad.