G4 iBook. With Panther. And a new slot-loading CD drive. For cheap. Kind of. More feedback (and trolling) on Slashdot.
(Aside: Ah, so here’s where the Slashdot Mac troll finds its roots; a Kottke blog of ages past.)
Kessel Run
Han Solo: “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”
The two issues here are:
- “Parsecs” are an earth-construct: the distance from the sun which would result in a parallax-second arc from earth’s orbit — about 3.26 light years. Such a term should be completely useless a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
- Han is using “parsecs” as though it were a measure of time rather than distance. The Star Wars Technical Commentary section on Units of Distance has this to say: “The Run involves travel through or past an unnavigable region; taking a route of shorter distance requires a good ship and skillful pilot.” Right.
There’s a lesson to be learned here: when writing science fiction, study your science before writing the fiction.
define:google
Scarcely had I recovered from the thrill of using Google as Calculator, now we have Google as Dictionary. (Via ev.)
SubBug
A stray ladybug balloon appears to crawl through the slots of the arched concrete ceiling at Metro Center station.
Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.
Yankee Flipper
Squirrels bugging your bird feeder? You need a Yankee Flipper, the motorized rodent-proof avian-feeding solution!
Listutorial
Listutorial – for well-styled HTML lists. I’m trying a horizontal nav list for my inside pages now, and IE/Win still breaks it. Unbelievable.
(I’d like to reiterate to my beloved audience that if you’re still using Internet Explorer, it’s time to GARB.)
Clutterification
Who else recoiled in horror at Inq7’s new front page? I completely missed the redesign, since I bookmark the “mobile” interface (which, incidentally, does not work on my mobile device, a Sony Ericsson T300 with a plodding WAP browser).
The horror starts right at <table width=1000... and gets steadily worse from there: ghostly floating logos, nested tables, spacer gifs, inline javascript by the bandehado, disunited ad-boxes cluttering up every section, <font> tags, a patchwork of lines and gray boxes along the bottom… This site tries to be all things to all people — especially the sales department — and it fails, sacrificing usability and structure in the process.
Was it a good thing, perhaps, that they didn’t hire me last year?
No Concealed Weapons
History of the Barong Tagalog, the Filipino national costume. It’s what I’m wearing in this photo.
Creamy Catastrophe
It’s an old story, but strangely disturbing: Milk machine flies apart, injuring 6. Read the last sentence.
Doom Buggies
And speaking of Disney, if you love Disneyland as much as I used to as a kid, check out Doom Buggies, a fully detailed fan site about the Haunted Mansion ride. There’s even a documented tour, with secrets.
Update: And a Pirates of the Carribean fan site too, also with tour. Hours of fun.