When communicating over a noisy voice channel, like a two-way radio or a poor phone connection, it's useful to using a spelling alphabet to make key words extra clear. While many people on the phone use the first English name that comes to mind ("P as in Peter, H as in Harold, O as in Olivia, N as in Nancy, E as in Eve"), the lack of a standard ( Read more... )

I made it to eight panels at this year's Conference on World Affairs at CU. Back in college, I would skip most of my classes during CWA week and listen to at least 20, but recently I just pop in for a few interesting talks. Some interesting notes:
( Hurricanes! )

This is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks. From vsmallarray, the charts and graph project of Dorothy Gambrel, artist for catandgirl and donationderby.

Update February, 2011: Somehow this post has become the most popular one on my journal for comment spam, so I've disabled comments.

I have nothing against drag queens, but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one. My son, on the other hand...

coworker: what time zone is our Jira server in?
me: EST
coworker: as long as I know that Lawrin is not submitting bugs in the future
me: She is, but you can fix them in the future too!
me: And while you're in the future, bring back some fresh maple syrup
coworker: I'm afraid I don't get that one
me: The server's in the future in Maine, so while you ( Read more... )

LOCATION: The music counter at Black & Read, a store selling used books, movies, CDs, vinyl, board games, and porn. Stacks of jewel cases line the counters. Several signs hang in the store advertising a 15%(?) off sale for used RPG books and board games until mid-January. The need for this sale is demonstrated by several stacks of books on the ( Read more... )

mackys asks What is a reasonable estimate for the ACTUAL value of the mortgage-backed "junk" securities that $810 billion of my tax dollars bought?
The answer to that question has fluctuated every few days recently, so note that everything I say could be wrong soon.

First, a timeline.

1. US Financial System: OMG! We paid way too much for all these ( Read more... )

North, South Carolina is in the center of the state, south of Columbia.
West, Mississippi is in the center of the state, just east of I-55.
West, Texas is in east Texas, between Dallas and Waco. Note that "West Texas" (no comma) is frequently used to describe the area of the state near El Paso.

Edit 2/3/2009: Northwest, North Carolina is in the ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

From Section 1.3.4 of GATE's manual: After several hours struggling with badly written documentation, Fatima manages to compile the stubs and create a JAR file containing the new resources... She saves this and the version that she ran GATE on into her Oracle datastore (set up for her by the Herculean efforts of the Cyberdyne technical support team ( Read more... )