l-dopa

So true:

They selected one of the hydrocarbon-powered ground transports from the queue which waited outside the airport. The fee was small enough that it was not paid electronically, but using portable dollar tokens. The driver conducted his car unit into the city; though he drove only at 100 km/hr, it felt much faster since they were only a meter from the concrete road surface. He looked over at Ann, concerned that the speed might alarm her; but she seemed to be enjoying the ride. A game girl, and intelligent as well!

~jeff

Oh, Homer, no. Perhaps the worst part is that the condition is listed as “used”.

~jeff

Excellent list of great movie endings — maybe a little spoiler heavy, though. If reading through it doesn’t make you want to rewatch at least five of these movies, maybe you’re not obsessive enough about your movies.

~jeff

The Grey Lady appears to like her tacos, as evidenced by this excellent round up of tacos up the California coast. Although, I have to say that one of their favorites, la taq, has always struck me as expensive and not as good of some of the other options out there.

~jesse

Fig. 1

Link.

~jeff

Excellent overview of SSH (secure shell) and SCP (secure copy) here — even if you’re a seasoned terminal jock, I suspect you’ll pick up a tip or two. The one thing I’d add is that in addition to Midnight Commander and WinSCP, Cyberduck is an excellent SCP client as well.

~jeff

Nice groove and an excellent setup — fast forward to 6:55 for the best part.

~jeff

Great collection of anecdotes about one of the most influential movies of the 80’s (and a personal favorite of mine), Richard Linklater’s “Slacker“.

~jeff

There’s a tremendously great article by Nick Southall over at Stylus magazine on compression in music — not mp3/data compression, but compression during the mastering process of the music’s dynamic range. Modern recording engineers do this to make the quiet elements stand out, resulting in an overall louder average sound and a “poppier” sound, but Nick makes a compelling and, in my opinion, absolutely correct argument against using dynamic range compression while recording or mastering.

~jeff

Don’t settle for sloppy, hand-drawn, amateur-quality warning signs — use what the pros use. This nifty online warning sign generator will assist you in generating helpful warning signs for your incredibly unsafe home or office.

~jeff

Another classic of the intarweb, the essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” by Larry Niven:

What arouses Kal-El’s mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably didn’t have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey. A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy-and would be, of course, by church and common law.

…geez, way to overthink it, Larry.

~jeff

Nifty tutorial on how to make those trendy abstract desktops. I’m stuck on step 5.

~jeff

If you watch this clip with the sound off, it’s downright hypnotic.

~jeff

Bad kitty.

~jeff

Are you writing a story set in 1811 featuring scalawags, ne’rdowells, and hooligans? You are? Wow, that’s odd. Good luck, and this is really going to help you out — it’s a dictionary of slang from almost 200 years ago:

RIDING SKIMMINGTON. A ludicrous cavalcade, in ridicule of a man beaten by his wife. It consists of a man riding behind a woman, with his face to the horse’s tail, holding a distaff in his hand, at which he seems to work, the woman all the while beating him with a ladle; a smock displayed on a staff is carried before them as an emblematical standard, denoting female superiority: they are accompanied by what is called the ROUGH MUSIC, that is, frying-pans, bulls horns, marrow-bones and cleavers.

~jeff