The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jeremy Osner:

Wow -- I see Jill posted the same age estimate for Andy as mine, while I was typing.

Andy -- I am going to guess you are about 30, or slightly younger, but not less than 28. (I am 34.)

My own childhood TV appreciation is complicated by the fact that my folks did not have one -- I only watched at friends houses or at my grandparents', and only after I was too old to really get Sesame Street. I watched Electric Co. and Mr. Rogers once in a while but they never really got me going either -- but I loved the experience of being in front of the box, being *entertained* -- despite that I did not really dig the show content. Go figure. The same was true in my teenage years of lacksadaisickally watching reruns of Three's Company, The Jeffersons, etc. -- they did not move me to laughter or emotional response but it was great just to be able to *watch*. I blame my parents of course.

I too've started to get spam e-mails with from headers of people who post on blog comments. My theory is that somebody built a robot for harvesting e-mail addresses from comment threads and putting the name of another poster on the thread in the From field, on the theory that people are more likely to read the spam if it comes from a name they recognize.

Thanks Elric, yep -- here is a link to the text. The house is built not in "the desert near L.A." but in Laurel Canyon.

A nice tesseract story is "And he built a crooked house" by (I think) Martin Gardner... No, no, Google reveals to me that it is by Heinlein. An architect designs a house which is an unfolded tesseract, and builds it in the desert near Los Angeles; while he is showing it to his clients there is a tremor, which causes the house to fold back up. Fun ensues as they try to get back into the third dimension. (This is my memory of the story from long ago and could be off; also I really think the story was by Gardner so it may well be that I have the wrong title.)

Faren -- thanks for that link. Very funny!

Thanks for the Patrick Farley link, Stefan -- an inspiring bit of reflection it is.

Oh and, in the course of my browsing I found Lucida Unicode Sans (not a monospaced font), which makes a very nice display font for my browser.

Hmm well a bit of browsing around different monospace fonts convinces me that Lucida console is indeed the way to go. I use it at 10-pt. which on my monitor, shows up as about 3/16" or 1/4" tall letters (very roughly, I don't have a ruler on hand).

What I like about Lucida Console (among other things): The letters can be fairly big before they start to be rendered with heavy lines, a trait I associate with bold text and which doesn't look right in code (to my eyes). I and l and 1 are nice and easy to distinguish; 0 and O not quite as easy (if they are not side by side) but not impossible; I wish commas were a bit more visually distinct from periods (and semi-colons from colons); but this complaint applies fairly generally across all fonts that I am familiar with and it would not be fair to Lucida Console to place this at its door.

Browsing around led me to this page which appears to link to a vast number of monspaced fonts...

Anybody got recommendations for a good monospace font? I use Lucida Console currently but I haven't seen many others to choose between (the only monospace fonts I've tried out are Courier, Terminal, FixedSys, 8514oem, Reuters Mono, and Lucida Console. Monospace fonts are very useful to programmers.

Thanks, Seth!

I picked up from the local used-book vendor an interesting volume called "Mother Goose in Prose" by L. Frank Baum(!!) -- I never really knew he had written anything besides the Oz books and journalism -- he apparently took a number of nursery rhymes and created stories for them. Does anyone know about this book?

Speaking of teaching elephants to write, are you guys familiar with the work of Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar?

Debra -- yes, but "shrimp" works the same way, no?

Here is a PartiallyClips that is apposite.

I have written a letter to Marvel and D.C. asserting that in their action, they have infringed on my IP rights to use of the term "unscrupulous".

Say, I was reminded of the Nielsen-Hayden anti-spam battles by this Slashdot posting -- apparently porn site operators are using their viewers to help their spam-bots decode captcha images.

Thanks and good work! What motivated you to abandon the pop-up windows -- is that a security hole or did people just not like them? I am considering writing a comment engine sometime and this would be useful information to have.

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