Charlotte is a city cool enough to have a Cars and Coffee event monthly. As the weather gets colder, the turnout seems to be reducing, but I went this weekend and had a blast.

I’m not very knowledgeable about the innards of cars, but courtesy of C&C, I’m learning. M.K. (and the friend of his I met this weekend) is more than happy to pontificate on the differences between the LS3 and LS4 engines, as well as the pros and cons of an M-series BMWs vs. the more tedious 1-series. I’m happy to absorb it all–even in the cold–with the comfort of my home-brewed coffee.

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Don’t ask where I’ve been. It’s been dark and full of things like strangely proud “humble views”, polka dots and stripes, mock objects, skiing, the IRS, gradients, and a strange dampness.

Still not sure where the dampness is from.

Getting back into the swing of things, have some links!

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This week’s internet cruising:

• EA takes games from Steam – Hilariously written, and found because I was eyeballing Dragon Age 2 to see if it still comes with Mass Effect, as it did once. …Not that I want DA2. I haven't finished the first one yet.
• Abortion may be legal, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get one – Includes numbers from a rather large sample-size survey that was done.
• Showcase of Inspiring Arabic Calligraphy Artworks – Just a compilation post, but gorgeous.
• Showed up on my news feed. Made me feel shocked,… | – Aw, hell no.
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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• The legend of the superprogrammer – "Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found that the very best developers are much more productive than the worst programmer — when working on small projects.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."

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• Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 3 (Preliminary Notes On the Expendability of the Foreskin) – In summary: I'm not a huge fan of circumcision. (Very long article.)
• MetaFilter Saved My Pals From Sex Traffickers—Exclusive Interview | Mother Jones – This is incredibly cool, although the article is a bit confusedly written.
• Blog U.: Book Publishers’ Regrets in 2025 – Technology and Learning – Inside Higher Ed – "Sell the Book, Not the Format: Whenever we buy a book we should automatically have the option of receiving the book in all formats."
• Big Fat Deal » The Rhetoric Of The “Real” Woman – Hear, hear. "[...] the whole “eat a sandwich, I’m a real woman!” dialogue is damaging in its own way. It keeps women running after and policing each other in a little circle of body obsession, while men get to go off and run the world."
• Elf M. Sternberg – Google Translate from Korean… not so much. – Awesome find from Elf, and a good discussion in the comments about human vs. computer translations. From the translation: "Indeed, the Demon Squid embarrassment for the United States the pain does not go off maybe 12." Um, yeah.
• Fatshionista – Fat Joke Fail: In Which I Do Not Namecall Ricky Gervais – This article is from January of 2009, but is a very thoughtful treatment of equating (or conflating) oppressions, namely being gay and being fat.

  "Whether or not fatness or gayness is easily measured or authenticated is irrelevant. Whether or not fatness or gayness is biologically inherent is irrevelant. What’s important here is the suggestion that certain people are owed humiliation for looking a certain way."