Hopscotch - by Levi: I don’t usually go into the “part comic, part writing” thing (as evidenced by the fact that I no longer read Everything Jake.  But something about Hopscotch calls to me (in a way).  It’s probably the great art that isn’t in plain old “black pencil on white” that catches me the most, but the narrative is also starting out very good, although many of the plot elements that I’ve seen so far are very reminiscent of other things I’ve read.  There are only 3 or 4 (issues? episodes? postings?) on the site right now, but from the look of it things are off to a good start.

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I guess it comes from being a bartender… (hat tip to Jacob)

Jungle Juice
Congratulations! You’re 162 proof, with specific scores in beer (100) , wine (100), and liquor (147). You are a true alcohol connisseur. You not only know what drinks are best for parties or dinner or cocktail bars, you can make most of them as well. You don’t mess around with the cheap stuff–only the good stuff will do.

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You know, it’s interesting.  I notice this from time to time while I’l out driving around, and I think I can construct a formula to demonstrate it.  In most cases, the probability that a driver will use their turn indicators for turns or lane changes is inversely proportional to the purchase price of the vehicle.  I.e., prob(signal) = 1/vehicle.(purchase price)

Not a day goes by when I don’t get passed by some jerk in a Lexus who can’t be bothered to use their blinkers.  I mean, it’s not like it takes that much effort.  Maybe a pound of pressure on a lever that’s already at your fingertips.  And it keeps people from accidentally smashing into you because you’re too damn lazy to do it.

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Lateral Science - The Young Man’s Book of Amusement: This is awesome. Just check out a few highlights:

• Valuable Transformation - Gold plating charcoal
• A more powerful Fulminating Powder
• The Leyden Phial - “…a painful jarring sensation is felt at the joints of the fingers, the elbows, shoulders & chest,…”
• To Recover a Fly after being drowned several hours
• Galvanic Experiments on the Dead Body of a Criminal

Everything a young man needs for hours of (thoroughly educational) amusement!

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I finally broke down and registered ecto. For only $17.95US, it really does everything I need it to do. It also has a bunch of features I don’t really need, but it’s nice to know they’re there.

Now if I can just figure out how the “HTML Tags” actually work, I’ll be in business. Maybe it’s in the tutorial or the documentation; I should read those.

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OK, I’m going to start by saying that I found this article because it was part of Jeph’s news post on Questionable Content.  But you should definitely read it; it’s awesome. The article is a description of using the Socratic Method to teach binary math to a classroom full of 3rd-graders.  Philosophy rules.

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Some day, I need to start getting out of the house more.  if only so I’ll have something interesting to post.

I mean, let’s look at what I did today.  I got home from work around 8:00 (work was pretty uneventful; I watched about 12 episodes of Red Dwarf, and read some email).  I watched this week’s episode of NUMB3RS, read about a chapter of The Arrow of Time (actually a pretty interesting book on theoretical physics and temporal theory), and fell asleep some time between 10 & 11.  After I finally got up (some time around 18:00), I did hack a bit on my webserver, setting up a “fake” .mac server.  It works pretty well inside my home LAN, but I suspect that I’ll primarily use it for putting stuff from work onto my box at home; with my measly 384k upload from RoadRunner, downloading anything from the WebDAV space would probably take about 100 years.  After that, I came back to work.  I’ve watched Hellboy and about half of Fight Club so far.

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I finally got bored enough this morning to go through my iTunes library and listen to all of the free songs I’ve downloaded since October.  And to tell the truth, all of them have merit of some kind.  Although most of them aren’t my style of music, each of the first 15 has been good enough that I didn’t stop the song in the middle (or delete it)…

I may have to start drinking Pepsi or something, so I can get some songs that I want off of iTunes.  Because there’s very little chance I’ll actually pay for them myself :)

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So I decided to watch all of the James Bond movies again, in order.  It was mainly a spur-of-the-moment decision, just as I was walking out of the door tonight on my way to work I grabbed Dr. No.  Apparently I’ve been missing a lot by watching DVDs on my crappy TV; even on this tiny 14" LCD, I get an infinitely better picture on my laptop.  Which makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing out on.  I guess I need to watch a few [S]VCDs on my laptop, to see if there’s any difference.

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On the plus side, I installed the new Linux kernel (2.6.11) some time within the last 48 hours,  and it looks like the bugs in 2.6.10 with growisofs and DVD burners was fixed; k3b seems content enough to burn ISOs again.  Which is nice, because I was tired of typing the stupid command by hand in a root console window.

Now if I could just find enough time to actually burn all these ISOs.  My hard drive is getting pretty full…

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