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!
This week’s internet cruising:
- Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else – WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress plugins, themes, news and help – WPMU.org – I'm not at all surprised by the hackery going on in free WordPress themes.
- YouTube – Brick in a washing machine – I've always wanted to do this!
- Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard | Threat Level | Wired.com – "Twitter introduced a new feature last month without telling anyone about it, and the rest of the tech world should take note and come up with its own version of it
Twitter beta-tested a spine."
- Dot Dot Dot – Animated – This is really damned funny: a dramatic reading of a lousy flash game comment… including bad spelling and grammar. Great voice, great text animation.
- The Saddest Book in the Universe (pic) – Imgur – This is, indeed, rather sad.
- Windy City Times – VIEWS Surviving the ex-gay program – 308 – A man's attempt (and ultimate opting out of) trying to become straight. I knew that there were programs to try to do so, but wasn't aware that they were based in Exodus: "I learned the basic theories of Exodus: that homosexuality wasn't real, that gay people were just confused straight people, that gay sex was a sin similar to idolatry. The theories seemed a bit far-fetched but I did my best to embrace and understand them." A good tale.
- <Insert title here>: TSA encounter at SAN – I'm disappointed that I hadn't heard about this back when it happened (I'm sure I was under some rock). This guy–who had done his due diligence on his local airport and believed it to not have the uber-scanners–opted out of the scanning process and the pat-down.
I swear, my heart was racing as I read it.
- Privacy Icons: Alpha Release « Aza on Design – An interesting attempt to have “second-tier” sites label themselves in terms of how they store and use your data–“I share your information with advertisers”, etc.
There’s a great discussion in the comments (albeit not much back and forth) on the flaws and pluses of the idea, but the biggest issue seems to be that companies with crappy practices just wouldn’t display the icons. Asa proposed some Mozilla-initiated measures around that, but it seems like a hefty undertaking.
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."
…And more.
- The Dawn Chapel – Firefox has crashed – I like cookies. And cuteness.
- Siobhan – “they were going to strip search me … this feeling, this experience, is the hardest for me to reconcile and one of the times in my life I have felt the most powerless” | G20Inquiry.org – I've evidently been sleeping on some serious shit going on.
- Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew | World news | The Guardian – Leaving aside the crazy Israeli politics and the legal side — is deliberately lying about something to get sex with someone rape if you know the thing you're lying about would make the other person say "no"? As of this moment, I think so.
taking joy in human unreason
