Lately I've been obsessed with the idea that landline phones are so incredibly reliable when compared to cell phones. Obviously, their functionality is more limited: you can't play video games or send text messages or take photos with a landline phone. But dammit, landline phones always work. You can always hear the person on the other end; you can ( Read more... )

Blogging about Vasari has made me remember an odd tidbit of Italian nomenclature I first learned from art museums. It's kinda wacky and groovy ( Read more... )

According to this website, today was the 9th day of the month of Epip in the year 1725 of the Coptic calendar.

Thus saith Wikipedia"The Coptic calendar, also called the Alexandrian calendar, is used by the Coptic Orthodox Church and still used in Egypt. This calendar is based on the ancient Egyptian calendar. ... [T]he Roman Emperor Augustus ( Read more... )

I'm sure I'm not the only software engineer who can relate to this quote from Vasari concerning architecture. Engineering is engineering.Vol. II, p. 109, Antonio da San Gallo: Wherefore Antonio ... refounded all the building [the Church of the Madonna of Loreto], and, making the walls and pilasters thicker both within and without, he gave it a ( Read more... )

I'd heard once, way back in my Tolkien fanboy days, that Tolkien was once part of a club whose only purpose was to translate The Elder Edda (a.k.a. The Poetic Edda), and that when they finished the translation, they disbanded. The idea of a club with a built-in expiration date always amused me. (I love the line in Monty Python's skit about the " ( Read more... )

When you were a kid, did you ever have a crush on a cartoon character?

Uh, yeah, me neither.

( But if I had... )

Elessa Bennett glanced in the direction of a young man standing alone in the corner of the drawing room. "And who might that be?" she asked her companion ( Read more... )

laptop n.: a device for watching movies on trains.

FaceBook n.: a website for playing virtual Scrabble.

With a new year comes a new job for me (same employer, though). I'm very happy to have gotten this new job -- among other things, it's allowing me to learn and use ASP.NET/C#, which I'd never used before now ( Read more... )

I've never owned a Mac and I know I never will; nor will I ever become one o' them Penguin fanatics (though I would prefer to use UNIX at work at least); but, as a paying customer, I'm still entitled to complain about Windows' defects, right? Right. So, here are three for the Hall of Shame, verified on Windows XP (and possibly present on other ( Read more... )