Posts Tagged ‘funny’
To Be or Not to Be
(Not about the excellent film or the excellent animated short.)
Bit off more than my mind could chew,
Shower or suicide, what do I do?
— Julie Brown, “Will I Make it Through the Eighties?”
If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.
— Fran Lebowitz, “Metropolitan Life”
Razors pain you, Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful, Nooses give,
Gas smells awful. You might as well live.
–Dorothy Parker (several tentative suicide attempts, died of a heart attack at 73)
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
– Cesare Pavese (who committed suicide, WTF?)
And of course no mention of suicide is complete without Maddox’s How to kill yourself like a man.
The procrastinator’s nature
I just started using LeechBlock yesterday, and already I know why “How can I block Google’s cached versions of sites as well?” is in the FAQ.
LeechBlock is wonderful. (Install)
There are no results on Google for “LeechBlock saved my life”, but there are testimonials like “Leech block has changed my life”, “Leechblock just saved my life”, and “This application is saving my thesis, and improving my social life”.
If LeechBlock isn’t working for you, you can try more extreme solutions like (on Mac) Freedom and SelfControl. (Found via this post.) But for me, right now, with my current level of work and self-awareness and other devices being employed, LeechBlock seems to be just about sufficient. (Although I do wish Safari were an even worse browser than it is.)
Semi-unrelatedly, also worth reading is Aaron Swartz’s experiment involving one month offline: Before/After.
Have you been high today?
If not, you need to see this (besides needing a bun to bite Benny Lava): [Make sure you read the subtitles before, not after the corresponding sounds.]
Why doesn’t Cathy eat breakfast?
Unsolved mysteries of our time (or the 1970s):
Why doesn’t Cathy eat breakfast?
If anyone can tell me what the National Dairy Council wanted us to think, I’d be much obliged. (They have managed to include a dairy product in every kind of food shown!)
In the meantime, I can only suggest: Maybe because it’s not such a great idea after all?
IMDb Top 250
It turns out I’ve watched only 108 of the IMDb Top 250.
Update: There have been changes in the Top 250 since this post; The Dark Knight is now No. 1 with a rating of 9.5 :D
Part of the problem is that good movies keep slipping out of the list; look at some in the last 20:
231. 7.9 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
234. 7.9 Strada, La (1954)
236. 7.9 Dolce vita, La (1960)
237. 7.9 Shaun of the Dead (2004)
239. 7.9 Roman Holiday (1953)
240. 7.9 His Girl Friday (1940)
241. 7.9 Brazil (1985)
242. 7.9 Network (1976)
244. 7.9 Once (2006)
(I’m not saying all of those are great; just guessing that anyone thinks at least some of those are :))
My numbers are better at the top:
10 of the top 10,
36 of the top 40 (WALL-E and the 3 LotR movies),
39 of the top 50.
But only 59 of the top 100.
Update [2009-08-02] Currently, of the “endangered” movies I listed last time,
Pirates of the Caribbean is out,
La strada is safely in at 212,
La dolce vita: 246,
Shaun of the Dead is out,
Roman Holiday: 241,
His Girl Friday safely in at 213,
Brazil: OUT!,
Network: 223,
Once: out.
And I’ve seen:
71 of the top 75 (Up! (2009) and the three LotR movies),
87 of the top 100 (getting there!),
142 of the top 250
Who is 122.164.3.158?
122.164.3.158’s contributions:
* To CMI
* To NCJ
* To INPho
* To Chennai
The last two aren’t too relevant, and the first one I fixed, but the NCJ one has me in a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m firmly Inclusionist, and think such things are indeed notable, and eventually enough other things will fall in place and so on, so I’m tempted to leave it there, but on the other, there’s a sense of moral duty and it seems…
Deprecated
AINDERBY QUERNHOW (n.)
One who continually bemoans the ‘loss’ of the word ‘gay’ to the English language, even though they had never used the word in any context at all until they started complaining that they couldn’t use it any more.
Before encountering computers, I had always seen the word ‘deprecate’ in contexts from which I understood that it was synonymous to disparage, deplore, condemn, belittle, derogate, and so on.
The computing world uses “X is deprecated” to mean that the feature X is discouraged, often because a recommended replacement has been found for it — thus X is obsolescent, and while using it will work currently, it is expected to stop working in the future, so one is recommended to avoid using it.
With the rise of technology and the decline in reading, many people have encountered the word solely in the latter context, and have taken it to mean something that is “old”, and for which a newer replacement exists: Thus I see people announcing, with no sign of self-deprecation, that “This blog is deprecated”.
Word censoring
Autotools
A pretty good Autotools tutorial (presentation/PDF) that already tells you more than you would like to know (which, alas, is probably less than you need to know).
Ars Technica describes it as
Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous.
2008-04-01: Found these:
Stop the autoconf insanity! Why we need a new build system.
What is Wrong with Make?
Make alternatives: “SCons is my preferred tool in this category and also my preferred build tool overall.”
It was (is) a fundamentally misguided idea to make up a new limited language for use with make, then another one for automake, and another for autoconf. Who has heard of m4, really? And tools that add an extra script (and sometimes a language!) for creating the input to this vicious chain are even worse. One of the useful lessons from the Lisp people is that is really easier, and better, to use a real language than to make up and parse and understand a limited one.
The sooner everyone moves away from the make/automake/autoconf madness the better.
SCons is written in Python, uses real Python for its files, and might be the future. Or it might suck. It’s too early to tell; it has only been around for a decade or so.
Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
Gibbon v/s Tiger
Not Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” v/s Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, but a real gibbon v/s real tigers:
Form > content
David Mccandless (?) has an excellent set of parodies of websites, from Porn for Girls by Girls (awesome!), Crackbook (click), Amasszone, Schmapple, Good News, and all the rest.
We do not realise the extent of our association of the content with its “form”, I think. The Porn… site, for example, is distinctly a porn site. It is helped by the words of course, but take the words away, and still something remains… is it simply a matter of image sizes and colours?
Leia does a Nigerian 419
Wikipedia’s logo
has several errors.
Here’s the image:
and although I had seen it thousands of times, I hadn’t really noticed it until I saw it for a moment in Lessig’s corruption video. The errors in the Devanagari and Kannada scripts are immediately obvious; the New York Times ran an article about the error (they knew of only the Devanagari and a Japanese error).
Apparently, the original author has lost his source files, and no one knows how to fix it (seriously), so they have been either simply giving up, or using the ingenious argument that the logo is appropriate, as the existence of errors is characteristic of Wikipedia.
Pop culture potpourri
The Cure for Information Overload
This post sums up my situation perfectly.
It’s probably even more appropriate now than it was a year-and-a-half ago.
Why was the water yellow? What’s with the hat thing?
We went to a temple today.
Examples of bad design
Here is a poster for Gattaca:
Maybe they have some notion of who the more popular actor is, but would it really hurt that much to swap the names around? This is ridiculous.
Does RMS have a Gmail account?
Random funny image I remember saving from ages ago:
Google wants me to “Invite Richard to Gmail”.
Bill Gates on Speech recognition: A history
There’s a summary here, by Matthew Paul Thomas who wrote the famous 48 hours of Ubuntu list.
