Dark Chocolate Snickers

If Snickers ever comes out with a dark chocolate version, they can name it just by removing the first letter.

Licking Douglas Adams Addiction

The current US first class postage rate is 41c, which means the next rate increase will probably put it at 45c, or maybe 44c. Let's petition the Post Office to raise rates to 42c RIGHT NOW, just so they can issue a Douglas Adams stamp.

Crank Up Your Thermostat

For many years now, scammers have been telling us not to set our thermostats too high, because "Setting your thermostat higher doesn't make it get warmer any faster". Of course, we all (including the scammers) know this is a lie. Here's why: thermostats are often located in drafty hallways. When the heat turns on, these hallways get warm quickly (convection heating), and the thermostat turns off EVEN THOUGH THE REST OF THE HOUSE REMAINS COLD. Of course, the overheated hallway's heat eventually passes (via much slower conduction) to the rest of the house, at which point the heat finally turns on again. This process repeats, but the house is heated much slower than if you'd just cranked the thermostat to begin with. This winter, crank your thermostat to keep your house warm. And maybe crank it just a couple of extra degrees just to show the scammers that their stupid little lie never worked.

Hugh Laurie: American Folk Singer?

On the British comedy series "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" (you have to use the quotation marks as Steven Fry often points out), Hugh Laurie often pretends to be an American folk singer, with ludicrous and humorous folk songs. Although this is always played for laughs, his 4th series tribute to Steffi Graf is really quite amazing. After hearing it, I think Hugh Laurie would make a better American folk singer than most REAL American folk singers. Of course, most Americans hear Hugh Laurie's American accent from that House show, but I think he missed his calling.

Why Blogging Sucks, Part II

A good card for people who blog (including me) would be: NO ONE GIVES A RAT'S ASS WHAT YOU THINK!!!

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

When I first started blogging, I decided that one of the features I wanted was the ability to time-delay posts-- in other words, write a post one day, but not have it show up until a few days later (I wouldn't want to unleash these pearls of wisdom to the world TOO fast ::GRIN::). I eventually ended up writing a Perl script that uses Google's gdata API (the Perl script itself mostly just calls curl -- the only real challenge was figuring out how to do labels, since Google's API doesn't mention these) and using the Unix at command for scheduling. This appears to be working (I'm actually writing this post on December 1st). The sad thing is that I enjoyed working on this blog-delay code more than I enjoy writing blog entries... It's sorta like the kid who likes the box better than the present, sigh!

Songs of Flatland

The perfect song for a 3-dimensional being entering FlatLand would be Take My Breadth Away.