Just another WordPress site
While searching for nutrition information for my carnitas soft tacos so I could fill out my daily fitday.com food log I came upon ChipotleFan.com. They have a great nutrition information calculator — something Chipotle.com lacks. My tacos = 912 calories.
But the best part is the Find your Burrito Soulmate feature.
There are 40,960 ways to get your meal at Chipotle. The person who gets the exact same meal as you is your Burrito Soulmate.
Eric Lippert of Fabulous Adventures in Coding has a funny writeup in his logs about questions people have asked google (in the form of a search query) and ended up at his site.
How can I tell if I’m a centaur?
Is the lower half of your body that of a large, hooved quadruped? Is the upper half human? If you answered “yes” to both questions, odds are good that you are a centaur.
My google search logs include all sorts of stuff that is somewhat obvious given my posting content. Lots of people want to know about pudding/jello wrestling, megatouch, rance, etc.
I’ve been reading the How to be Creative series by Hugh Macleod entry by entry for a while now. There is some really tremendously good stuff in there. It applies to everyone that aspires, not just creative-career artist types.
He’s put the whole thing together in one long entry here: [link]
I’ve subscribed to Satan’s Laundromat RSS feed for a long time now. It is a photo-blog based in Brooklyn. The author (artist? photographer) has a knack for finding sublime images in rough and forgotten neighborhoods on the fringe of the city. Lots of urban decay, etc.
Turns out via today’s entry he spent the weekend in jail. Arrested during one of Bloomberg’s fascist mass-arrests of harmless bicycling protesters.
The tale he tells is really awful. 16 hours in a make-shift jail, followed by another 14 waiting for paperwork. Read the whole thing. [link]
Technical note: Because his RSS feed doesn’t include images I use a NewsGator plugin called FetchLinks that goes out and downloads the full content of the page every time.
When I saw the crazy leprechaun guy disrupt the men’s marathon I immediately recognized him as the same guy who ran on track at Silverstone last year.
During that F1 race, the producers of the TV program were cautious to not go too deeply into the guy, they showed the clip a few times, but didn’t announce his name or cause or anything.
Contrast that to NBC’s coverage. They showed the clip a hundred times, said the guys name over and over, tried to read his sign, read the text of his sign from last year.
Isn’t that exactly why people do stuff like this in the first place?
Now I guess NBC’s biggest goal was trying to determine that the guy wasn’t a “terrorist”, but just an ordinary-average mentally deranged man. [sarcasm] It seemed their “proof” was that he was promoting the bible, you know the Christian one, therefore, not-a-terrorist. [/sarcasm]
Ian has posted some good pictures of his latest two week stint in Hong Kong.
My favorites:
The whole lot here.
If you’ve run into someone being referred to a cargo cult programmer, this is where that comes from:
During the Second World War, the Americans set up airstrips on various tiny islands in the Pacific. After the war was over and the Americans went home, the natives did a perfectly sensible thing — they dressed themselves up as ground traffic controllers and waved those sticks around. They mistook cause and effect — they assumed that the guys waving the sticks were the ones making the planes full of supplies appear, and that if only they could get it right, they could pull the same trick. From our perspective, we know that it’s the other way around — the guys with the sticks are there because the planes need them to land. No planes, no guys.
The cargo cultists had the unimportant surface elements right, but did not see enough of the whole picture to succeed. They understood the form but not the content. There are lots of cargo cult programmers — programmers who understand what the code does, but not how it does it. Therefore, they cannot make meaningful changes to the program. They tend to proceed by making random changes, testing, and changing again until they manage to come up with something that works.
Here’s the wikipedia entry on Cargo cult: link
I like this detail left out of my copy paste job: “They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in control towers.”
This all comes through Eric Lippert’s Fabulous Adventures in Coding
Piano Salesman: If you see a potential customer eyeing a piano, estimate their age and calculate what year it was when they were 18 years old. Play a big hit from that year on the piano they’re looking at. With a lot of preparation and a little luck, you might play the exact song they were listening to when they lost their virginity, got married, or drove their first car. The emotional resonance will overcome sales resistance and even open their wallets to a more expensive piano.
Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.
lots more here: Tricks of the Trade
[via Boing Boing]
Ian sent me this link to a fascinating article in New Scientist by Alexander Yuvhenko on his tale the night Chernobyl exploded.
Also note the creepy photographs taken on motorcycle rides through the area: Ghost Town ride
Want a little extra boost on IE download speeds and are not afraid to disobey the HTTP protocol conventions?
» Increase the number of simultaneous connections in Internet Explorer 4.0 and above.
By default the number of simultaneous connections to a HTTP 1.0 server is 4, to a HTTP 1.1 server is 2.
To change these limits, use Regedt32 to navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
On the Edit menu, add the following REG_DWORD value names:
MaxConnectionsPerServer – The number of simultaneous requests to a single HTTP 1.1 Server. The default is 2. MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server – The number of simultaneous requests to a single HTTP 1.0 Server. The default is 4.
NOTE: Increasing these defaults is a violation of the HTTP protocol, and should only be performed if absolutely necessary.
[via JSI]
Additional note to those behind a proxy: Make sure you have Use HTTP 1.1 through proxy connections checked on in Advanced IE config.