Still going through my old posts and I remembered this song. It's kind of been my unofficial theme song for the last decade and a half or so. I can never remember how many "please"s are in the title.

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Oct 6

Solo en Tí

Oct 6

Mashups Fo' Life

I am a sucker for any and all mashups no matter how terrible they are and a lot of them aren't terrible.

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Oct 6

Typographical Oddities

While wading through all these old blog posts, I keep running into mangled Unicode characters. I've had this problem ever since I started blogging in 2000, but I never knew the source of the error.

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Oct 6

Rituals

I miss reading Barking Up the Wrong Tree. I used to read it a lot more when Google Reader was still alive. Now I'm lucky if a bunch of people share links from it to Facebook.

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Oct 7

OS Timeline Updated

A chronology of desktop operating systems from 2001-2015

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Oct 7

Know from Whence You Came

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

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Oct 7

serious geekery revisited

I just ran into this old post about idioms rewritten in computer (pseudo)code. It occurs to me that I've learned a lot more Ruby since then, and I decided to rewrite some of the pseudocode into actual code.

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Oct 8

Brainfuck

Literal brain-fucking. o_O

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Oct 8

Breakfast at Tiffany's reboot

Not sure what prompted this dream, but I dreamt of a totally alternate version of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" where George Peppard's character (and by extension, Truman Capote) was really a CIA assassin (maybe it's just the fact that he was Hannibal in "The A-Team"?)

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Oct 8

failure is not a pathology

I'm actually skeptical that the culture of self-esteem and participation trophies and "everyone is a winner" is a significant problem (although it's not constructive). Kids are smart enough to figure out how things really are. I think one of the major problems in our culture is that we don't talk about how to deal with failure enough, because clearly only losers have to deal with failure.

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Oct 9

The End of Flash revisited

Remember when everyone thought that Steve Jobs was insane by not allowing Flash on iOS?

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Oct 9

Seeds

what didn’t you do to bury me
but then you forgot I was a seed

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Oct 12

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

On the 36th anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the first song my iPod played this morning was "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish".

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Oct 13

Bitter Taste Preferences and Everyday Sadism

Bitter Taste Preferences and Everyday Sadism will be the name of my next band.

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Oct 14

The Internet of Things at the Mercy of Corporate Black Hats

In the wake of Volkswagen's attempt to evade emissions standards:

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Oct 15

Reminiscing about the Days before Shazam

I still remember this specific episode when I finally figured out what song Dario G had sampled for his track "Sunchyme".

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Oct 16

Lemmings vs. Zombies

After reformatting this old post about a client-side JavaScript remake of Lemmings, I just realized that Rick Grimes' plan in S6E1 was basically like a game of Lemmings, but instead of funnelling Lemmings to the exit, they were funnelling walkers away from home.

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Oct 19

Random Songs from the Weekend

These are the songs that have been stuck in my head all weekend

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Oct 19

Walking around the 99¢ Store

I've been walking to the 99¢ Store during lunch lately just for the exercise and to pick up miscellaneous and sundry items, and the music they play at this store makes me feel like I'm in a time warp.

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Oct 19

Songs Whose Titles I Never Knew

Honestly, I never thought I'd be the type of person who'd feel OK with singing my heart out in front of a bunch of random people in a public setting, but you really can't beat free karaoke.

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Oct 19

This is the Way the World Ends

…

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Oct 20

The Protracted Death Throes of Flash

Flash is dead. It just hasn't stopped moving yet.

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Oct 20

Fake Grammar Rules

I don't know/remember who to blame for teaching me the bogus rule that you can't use "whose" to refer to nouns that are not people, but I find myself constantly second-guessing myself when I do use it.

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Oct 20

and

in Firefox

I guess I haven't written HTML in a long time. I only just learned about the <details> and <summary> tags.

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Oct 20

List Manipulation

I am amused (because I am a weirdo) by how common the paradigm of manipulating lists is in computer programming, specifically, the need to separate the first element in a list from the rest of the list.

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Oct 20

Unwrapping Nodes with Nokogiri

I learned a lot about the Nokogiri gem (used to parse and manipulate XML and HTML) when I wrote a script to download all my FriendFeed posts.

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Oct 20

The Human Brain and Cooking

This is an old TED talk but I heard it for the first time this past Saturday. The theory is that the reason why human intellectual capacity disproportionately surpasses the intellectual capacity of other species is because we learned how to cook.

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Oct 20

Markdown Implementation Lock-In

For a while, I was thinking about fleeing Jekyll for some other static-site generator.

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Oct 21

Screwing around with Custom Liquid Tags

I've spent some time screwing around with creating custom Liquid tags.

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Oct 23

Warlords of Draenor

I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft, averaging like a couple of hours a night at least. I sort of stopped playing towards the end of Mists of Pandaria because (1) AK took a break to play FFXIV and battlegrounds just weren't the same without him and (2) I met ﾐA彡

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Oct 23

The Benghazi Committee is a Fucking Joke

Things might have turned out differently if Fox News hadn't spent the last three years screaming "Benghazi" at the top of their lungs and turning it into a punchline, but this ridiculous committee hearing is just the sad, pathetic denouement that I expected.

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Oct 23

Revisiting Logo

I was trawling around the WayBack Machine's archive of Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror because he had changed his permalink style sometime between 2007 and now, and I stumbled upon this old post about Logo (and Processing)¹.

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Oct 23

Pyrimethamine and the Treatment of Toxoplasmosis

I will admit, I haven't really been looking too closely at the antics of Martin Shkreli, founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who is famous for buying the rights to the drug Daraprim (generic: pyrimethamine, used for the treatment of toxoplasmosis in patients with AIDS) and jacking up the price from $13.50/pill to $750/pill.

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Oct 24

Old Projects Still on Github

I am kind of amazed that some old blog engines that I used to use still have code up on GitHub.

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Oct 26

Sialolithiasis

(I'm going to use tic douloureux either as a band name or my next user name.)

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Oct 26

Warning to the Rich

Just remembering the beginning of the second reading from September 27, when ﾐA彡 and I starting going back to church.

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Oct 26

Bacon and Cancer

The WHO announced that bacon, sausage, and other processed meats are on par with cigarettes and asbestos.

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Oct 26

Rice and Arsenic

Speaking of cancer risk, rice—especially rice from the U.S.—is full of arsenic.

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Oct 27

Very Pacific Dreams

I dreamt that ﾐA彡 and I lived in post-apocalyptic Southern California after the sea level had risen 60 meters after catastrophic melting of the ice caps. The U.S. had collapsed, California was (once again) it's own sovereign state, and the center of global power had moved to China and to South America.

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Oct 27

That Which Doesn't Kill You Will Eventually Give You Cancer

Everything that doesn't kill you outright will eventually give you cancer. That's just life.

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Oct 27

Hotline Bling

So by now everyone knows what the noun "bling" means.

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Oct 27

Perfect Soundtrack for Eternal Longing

It just occurs to me now that Adele would've been the perfect soundtrack for my life from late September 1995 up until very late September 2014.

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Oct 29

Everything Causes Cancer

Crazy headlines like these might make you want to throw up your hands and just start smoking cigarettes and inhaling asbestos…

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Oct 29

Heart Attacks are Still a More Likely Cause of Death than Cancer

Realistically, if you eat a ton of bacon, sausage, or Spam or eat an entire porterhouse steak every night, you're probably not going to die of cancer. Coronary artery disease is probably going to get to you first. (crossposted on Facebook)

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Oct 29

Zombies and Othering

Imagining a grim meathook dystopian science fiction story where some terrible virus causes people to shuffle along like zombies and not be able to talk and generally be out of it, but they aren't actually undead, they're just sick.

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Oct 29

TB test

So it's kind of embarrassing that the first time I ever heard of the LAM-ELISA test was because of the unsolved murder of Elisa Lam.

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Oct 29

Apparently Approaching the Stationary Phase of Moore's Law

Without some new breakthrough in physics, it seems unlikely that the original formulation of Moore's Law will continue to hold. This is certainly not the first gloomy forecast.

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Oct 29

Molecular Version of the Myth of Sisyphus

Christopher S. posted this animated GIF on Facebook and I knew I'd seen it somewhere before….

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Oct 29

Auvi-Q Recall

I never prescribed Auvi-Q because I don't think they were ever covered by Medi-Cal managed care plans, but I thought they were kind of cool. They're kind of like Siri talking you through a scene from "Pulp Fiction".

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mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

Oct 2015