"After you, Alphonse"

Today's NYT xword puzzle featured, among other references from the 19-aught's, the comic strip "Alphonse and Gaston". This comic strip appears to be for the French what the Little Black Sambo was for African-Americans. Of course, it's still cool in America to poke fun at the French (e.g. Borat in Talladega Nights -- hilarious!). What I find most disturbing about the comic is that "Their routine 'After you, Alphonse.', 'No, you first, my dear Gaston!' entertained readers for more than a decade" [Wikipedia]. People are simple.

More Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

I was playing with the Wordle app used to generate the Most Common Crossword Answers visualization, and made this from some of the lyrics to Radiohead's 2+2=5 from Hail to the Thief. Try #2 (well, really 3, but 2 is not worth mentioning...):

http://www.wordle.net/

Even more:

http://www.wordle.net/

Most Common Crossword Answers

"Most Common Crossword Answers" by Jonathan at http://www.wordle.net/

donate to wikipedia

You should feel very bad about yourself as a human being if you benefit from Wikipedia as much as I do and have not yet donated to it :).

cupcakes

I like cupcakes. They are almost as good to look at as to eat, and looking at pictures of cupcakes is almost as good as looking at cupcakes:

where I'd approximate

(Note that the goodness of eating cupcakes is slightly decreased by the way they make my stomach feel post-eating ... I ate a cupcake for breakfast ...) So, this blog post is not completely worthless; by my calculation it is at least .375 times as good as eating a cupcake. Yum.

Photos from the "Cupcakes Galore" photo set by the Bleeding Heart Bakery on Flickr:

"Dreamsicle Cupcake" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert

"Many Lovely Organic Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert

"Gluten Free Organic Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert

"Turtle Cupcake" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert

"Chocolate Decadence" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery, by Bill Lambert

"Time to Make Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery

"Big Gay Cupcakes" from the Bleeding Heart Bakery

Photos from the "Cupcakes" set by 4GoodnessCake on Flickr:

"More Cupcakes" by 4GoodnessCake

"Tri Colour Cupcakes" by 4GoodnessCake

"Coconut Ice" by 4GoodnessCake

"Noble Beast"

Picture from Amazon

There's an article about Andrew Bird's new album "Noble Beast" in the NYT magazine this week, and NPR is streaming the entire album here. Here's my favorite video: sheecahgoh.

some anti-microsoft humor

"There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30GB Zune players globally..." [slashdot]. I read on msnbc (remembering that ms stands for microsoft) that the bug was related to '08 being a leap year, which seemed kind of crazy. According to this site, the code containing the bug was the following:

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
   days -= 366;
   year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}

which just seems like the most retarded piece of code ever. If it were me, I would have just used / and * or / and % even, but perhaps they were worried that that would be slower because it is maybe repeating some of the computation [I just tested this (I am bored -- everyone is sleeping but me), and the while -=, += method is over twice as slow as the /, * method]. So, way to go Microsoft.