ya right, i don't believe it #

funniness from al3x - al3x also supports equal opportunity fucking up - hah.#

via boing boing is dennis kucinich gues t blogging on lessig's blog about air port security - "It seems to me that the Bush Administration, with its moral obtuseness, its inconscience on matters of civil liberties, and its craven attempts to demolish the Bill of Rights has prepared for the American people a one-way ticket of sorts. When it comes to the quality of our democracy we are traveling on a road to nowhere. Airline security is, as we have learned, a deadly serious business. The traveling public deserves assurances that they and their loved ones will be safe in the air. But when does security in a democracy morph into something profoundly anti-democratic. This is a discussion we need to have. And the answer, as Gilmore knows, cannot be simply "search me?"!"#

via matt jones is stefan on google as a command-line portal - "I suddenly thought, fuck, this is like yahoo, except that instead of inducing link-blindness with endless feature clutter, Google has just taken the universal search box idea to an extreme. Google now is (or is well on the way to being) a goddam portal. and then you think about a bit more, and you realise what that search box really is: Google is a bad unix shell. A one line, no history, no file completion, no filesystem, /bin/googlesh, shell*, into an OS with a limited set of moderately useful utility commands. More like the interface you'd get on an embedded device like a coke machine, but a shell nevertheless."#

when you forget yourself and enter the simple mammalian brain that is what it is doing, rather than what it is worrying about them things go just as planned because you can't sabotage yourself, because there is no longer a "you"#

the back scratching of the blogosphere. the blog world is like a giant circle back rub, it's like an orgy of the sense and acknowledgment - this is a good thing though, because really there's so much interesting out there that anything that helps you find it is a good. mmmkay#

if i got a letter like this i think it would turn my blue sky black and i would cry for a week because breaking up is so hard to do baby, and i loved you, why'd you do it? i'd freak out and be upset like i was 12 then i'd sit around in my room until next semester drinking orange juice and writing terrible poetry - i wonder how the actual recipient will take it?#

first IE on Mac, then IE in general, now Outlook Express Microsoft is getting smart - it already won and now it's trying to trim the fat and focus what will make money, whether it will be a new thing (based on subscription likely) or the "advanced" versions of the older stuff. - although, Entourage is still going strong, in fact today it can work with Exchange#

james on contributions - "I got a new one - a letter stating that I "must not care anymore" and was "letting the other side win" - because I hadn't given more! Yeesh, in what Universe will that make me feel like donating again? Hot tip - if you want my money, don't berate me for not giving more! Who does the market research for these people anyway? Whoever it is, they need to go, and they need to go now."#

good software scratches itches#

accordion guy critiques britpop - " Britpop in the early 90s, in this humble DJ's opinion, could be split into two major categories: Shoegazer bands -- with guitarists and very earnest singers who sounded and look very sad. I blame British cuisine. Manchester bands, who built danceable rock on top of a patter from the drum solo in james Brown's Funky Drummer. The Manchester bands could further be subdivided into synthy and non-synthy, each with their holy trinity. On the non-synthy side, you had the holy trinity of the Inspiral Carpets, the Charlatans and Blur while on the synthy side, you had the Soup Dragons, EMF, and Jesus Jones." - hah#

this is SHOCKING but work safe!#

leslie writes about her dating life and how unlucky you would be to date her right now - "I'm at an interesting stage in my dating/relationship life. I am now able to talk about my former partner without (too much) bitterness, I can go out and have fun with friends, but once I start to feel an attraction, I instinctively push people away. I know I'm not ready for a relationship due to two reasons: I haven't had enough time to work out the problems I was responsible for in my first marriage, and so far serious relationships have eaten my lunch. I've been unceremoniously dumped by people who were having affairs twice. I don't have enough strength to go through that again- or at least, not at this point in time." - i have a hard time dating people because i'm so selfish and only care about myself, so the whole relationship is a big lie#

check out this motorcycle - hah#

brendyn writes about the struggle to find meaning in the universe - if you believe in God then there's your meaning, if not... we'll you're just part of big mechanical/chemical/electrical machine anyways - this post, by the way, has something similar with "Freddy vs Jason" (not it doesn't suck) - "When I stay up late, it's usually to accomplish something that I'd been working on for a few hours. Either that, or I'm an undiagnosed insomniac. *Place your bets.*"#

Artists and Webloggers, "torn between arrogance and self-loathing" from Just a Gwai Lo#

this might be satire - "I spit upon my Instapundit permalink. I shiver at the touch of his wretched Instlanches. And I especially mock and deride his 74,000 daily visitors. That's right. His tens of thousands of visitors is so pitiful it makes me laugh. For there millions our there, millions and millions who will soon see the power of the blogosphere... but only when this obstacle is removed. Instapundo delenda est! The Enemy must be destroyed, and then true democracy will come to the blogosphere."#

lancer arthur. i really hate posts like this because they are so good that I wish I could quote ever second paragraph, but i will have to pass and say that it's great and i feel the same way about somethings and heres a good bit - "Everyone who is gay probably needs therapy, though not, as some might assume, to deal with the fact that they're gay and try to be un-gay, but rather to deal with the fact that the whole world seems to want to hate you and there's not a god damned thing you can do about it." - and - "it's my life, my real one, and not some fake, humorous, coy online life where you imagine what I am like but I am not really like that. You do realize, don't you, that you don't know me at all, right? That even though I share a lot of my thoughts and opinions and, yes, even my dreaded feelings with you—you don't know me. And I know that you don't know me because I don't know me either."#

a beauty pagent#

charles miller makes a good point - "It's tempting to try to make it impossible for people to write bad code. It's also often a waste of time. It's OK for people to be able to write bad code in situations where they should know better. As such, making the constructor package-private and adding a comment is sufficient. Anyone working in the package should know better with that much signposting. Anything more is obfuscation." - if you can't trust the other programmers to follow rules then you have a bigger problem, sometimes it's much much easier to just make some guidelines rather than trying to go out of your way and set something in stone#

new lwn weekly edition - nothing really worth mention except this article by chromatic from the Development Section#

screenshots from Tales of Symphonia#

don park on everquest - "I couldn't believe how bad it was even after all this time. Windows popping up every where, weird keyboard and mouse controls, confusing map, text colors too dark to see read, the list goes on and on. All the 3D UI lessons learned by the game and simulation industries over more than a decade seemed to have been thrown out. Manual was pretty useless also and, even worse, there was little free online information about EQ. Everyone was selling information, equipment, and items instead. Pretty weird, I must say."#

this is horrible. i am afraid#

people are still writing window managers? i thought every moved from window managers to email clients to rss aggregators and blog tools?#

via dan hon is an essay from Dan Beste about Europe's abysmal future - " We can't discount the possibility that in fifty years the EU and most existing national governments in Europe will be gone, replaced by a new Fascist dictatorship, which among other things chooses to make the investment in a modern military and which hopes to use it in yet another round of world conquest. And we might not be able to interfere before this point, because France has nuclear weapons. Even though Europe won't have the ability to threaten us using conventional forces for the next few decades, they do have the ability to threaten us with nuclear conflagration."#