"He had me at Roadmarks."
(well, perhaps not strictly true, but it fit nicely)
-j
The forgery thing is likely to prove embarrassing to both sides. To CBS for not being ready to produce a credible defense immediately (except, apparently, to Kevin Drum), and to the Right-bloggers for embracing it so quickly and uncritically: "no proportional-font typewriters in 1973" (ask any veteran secretary), "no way they could have matched Word's kerning" (kerning is off by default), "Times New Roman wasn't around" (well, not the TrueType version, that's true), etc.
My favorite, though, is the garbled quotes from the typeface expert which make him sound like a complete buffoon, insisting that only digital-era Times New Roman has a "4" with a closed top and no foot. It's obvious what he was trying to say, but even after updates they've still got it wrong.
I think the real story is going to end up being about a hand-written memo that was transcribed by the author while assembling his memoirs, sometime before his death in the Eighties.
-j
Picked up my copy last night, and just began reading it. Now all I need to do is figure out what "jointed fouls" are. :-)
-j
At least one MilBlogger who recently returned from serving in Iraq quoted it without even the slightest hint of disbelief. That means the jargon's right, the operational details are plausible, and the attitude fits the role the writer claims for herself. Someone who could pull a hoax that clever doesn't need to.
-j
About twelve years ago, I got woken up by what I thought was a domestic dispute in a nearby apartment. Turned out that the real domestic dispute had taken place a little while earlier, further down the hall.
The screaming and pounding that woke me up was a different neighbor, letting me know that the building was on fire. She personally took responsibility for making sure that everyone got out.
[and, yes, the couple responsible for the fire had a long history of domestic violence and visits from the local police]
-j
DDB, on Mac OS X it's sufficient to just type "whois 63.224.10.74"
In fact, the "@" version doesn't work at all. Ditto for OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
-j
This seemed like the thread most appropriate for linking to a news story titled "Editor's body seen on floor, but raised no alarm".
[oh, and a quick note to Our Hostess: the ML monthly archive pages still use pop-up windows for the comments link]
-j
Hmm, it seems there are more sensible combinations of "aif" and "aifv" than I thought. I knocked together a quick Perl script that found 480 such pairs in /usr/dict/words, so I guess it wasn't much of a hint after all.
I doubt your guesses were cod/coda or ear/earl, but there are a bunch that could make sense in a quote. I suppose my own guess was shaped by knowing with whom I was dealing.
-j
Xopher, if you figure that it's in English, you should be able to guess the meaning of "at", "aif", and "aifv". With those letters resolved, Google should give you a short list of quotes.
-j
Riffing on the nutbar shirt (which my color-deficient vision parses very poorly), a baseball cap with the following slogan printed in metallic silver:
Bush stole the election and all I got was this tinfoil hat.
-j
From the way he told the story, I suspect Bob knew exactly what sort of person he was dealing with, and just made sure that no one else was at risk. He gave a fool the opportunity to learn from experience.
At least this guy got the point, in the end.
-j
Idiots with katanas:
Knifemaker Bob Engnath used to make pretty decent Japanese blades the traditional way, and kept several finished swords on display at his shop. One day, a guy came in with a friend and, proclaiming his mastery of kenjutsu, offered to demonstrate a perfect chopping stroke with one of the katanas.
Unfortunately for Our Hero, Bob's blades were more curved than the ones he'd been practicing with, and as he raised his arms over his head, he stabbed himself in the ass.
-j
Robert L: I already know of a typesetter that outsources its keyboarding to Ireland.
In a previous life, I worked with an HR department that sent incoming resumes to Scotland for data entry. It was a bit more expensive than OCR, but the Scots did a much better job of handling tech-industry buzzwords and acronyms.
-j
On the programming tangent, I recently had an interesting experience with rejection. For more than a year now, we've had an annoying bug in our service-management code that no one has been able to isolate and fix. Progress toward a solution has been extremely slow, due in large part to the fact that the problem only occurs on machines that have about 50,000 active users, and then only after the code has been running for at least 48 hours.
In our latest meeting, the programmer dedicated to solving the problem for me had A New Idea. "Why don't we just replace this program with DJB's open-source tool?" My response was to throw up my hands in a warding-off-evil gesture and shout "no, no, anything but that!"
From my point of view, it was a joke, playing off a number of previous suggestions to use one of DJB's tools in our service, all of which had been shot down for good reasons.
From his point of view, it was a deliberate insult to him, rejecting his input as worthless.
It took us five minutes to calm him down enough for the meeting to continue, and I felt it was worth the effort to spend two hours writing up a detailed explanation of why I didn't like this idea in particular, why I didn't like DJB's tools in general, and why my response had nothing to do with the person who suggested it. I'd have done that to anyone. :-)
-j
How about changing the comments-border class to use border-top instead of border? Actually, it looks like you could add it to comments-body and just remove the comments-border div.
-j
Three cheers for eliminating the popups. People who want a link to open in a new window still can, and people who don't (or who prefer tabbed browsing) aren't forced to browse The Wrong Way.
On that note, someone finally found two high-ranked comments on my blog and spammed them by hand. Being stupid enough to post the exact same text twice, with a name that screamed German Credit 'Repair' Company, made them easy to spot.
I'll probably update my little link-breaker to include comment aging and finally turn it on.
Hmm, how about "default to breaking links in comments less than N hours old", which prevents new spams from working and gives the blog owner time to approve or delete?
This would reduce the annoyance of adding link-breaking to a blog with a long history of worthwhile comments.
-j
If 40 people do it, I bet they'd pack up the van and leave.
...and if fifty people a day do it, can you imagine fifty people a day, walking up, laughing at the poor animals, and walking away, they might think it's a movement...
-j
I can't take the "blogs poisoning Google" claims seriously, mostly because I've gotten used to them giving top rank to phony pages dynamically generated for the sole purpose of directing traffic to shady retailers and "pay sites of dubious merit".
If I use any of the major search engines to find a user review of a product, I'd love to find a blog entry; I could use the rest of the blog as a sanity check. Instead, I usually get three things: Amazon, hole-in-the-wall dealers who parrot press releases, and traffic-directors with no real content at all.
-j
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 27 |
| 2003 | 32 |
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