Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Month: October 2005

  • Poopdeck Pappy on Children

    Quotes from Popeye, the Robert Altman film starring Robin Williams: Children. They’re just smaller versions of us you know, but I’m not so crazy about me in the first place, so why would I want one of them? … Children. They cry at you when they’re young, they yell at you when they’re older, they…

  • Wife 1.0

    Install Instructions for Wife 1.0 (sort of): He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is spawning processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that it is to be expected due to the nature of…

  • Good Experience

    Audobon Society Seafood Lover’s Wallet Card. From this is broken: Why is it that when making what I perceive to be a long distance call and input the 1 plus the area code, I get a recording back saying that I don’t need to input those numbers. “The 1 and the area code are not…

  • Open Office: Turn off Java

    Open Office tip from a slashdot discussion: Go to the Options and uncheck the Java option (Use a java runtime environment). After this, OpenOffice.org start like a breeze…

  • Intelligent Design Calls Itself Science

    Cog at Abstract Factory on the Intelligent Design (ID) Controversy: ID calls itself science. ID calls itself science. ID calls itself science. And therefore, ID must be judged by the criteria of science, not philosophy or theology. And as science, ID is absolutely the pits. It is a fundamentally non-scientific argument that calls itself scientific…

  • Why Can’t Rats Vomit?

    This article pursues the evolutionary reasons why rats don’t vomit. Is it beneficial for rats to be unable to vomit? As of yet, no empirical research has been done on whether the inability to vomit benefits the rat in some way. Davis et al. (1986) provides some interesting speculation on this topic, however. Remember that…

  • Reading Blogs is Like Watching Memento

    Eric Meyer on RSS feeds and poor navigation/organization of weblogs: Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it’s as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento. If conference presentations about weblogs…

  • The Oatsian Aesthetic: Oates vs. Morrison and Oates vs. James

    One literary parlor game seems to be figuring out what’s wrong with Joyce Carol Oates’ fiction: Matt Cheney on Joyce Carol Oates: Once upon a time, I thought Oates’s prose style was carefully, skillfully crafted to seem careless, to capture the tumble of characters’ thoughts and their visceral reactions to the world. But, in her…

  • Thank You All the Time

    Julia Turner on the etiquette of thank-you notes: The thank-you note, however, is a difficult form, only slightly less tricky than the villanelle. The smallest notecard can seem a yawning canvas and reduce even the best writer to adverbs and redundancies. (“Dear Aunt May, Thank you so very much for the exceedingly beautiful socks, which…

  • Egress for PDAs

    Egress, a RSS Feed Reader for Pocket PC PDAs. Cost $12. Cool.

  • Open Office’s Market Share Dwarfs MS Office 2003!

    Gary Edwards, in talking about the new 2.0 release of Office, has this to say about market share: For example, Microsoft claims that the Open Document doesn’t work with “the reality” of the installed base. But the fact is, you can run an Open Document application on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP,…

  • The Limits of ISBN-based Searches

    Anirvan Chatterjee Bookfinder weblog recently wrote me a private email explaining why ISBN-based book searches have their limits at online booksellers: Isbn.nu and many other similar sites take an ISBN (i.e. an SKU), and report back on the lowest price for books with that ISBN at various locations online. But books are complex, and have…

  • Rumsfeld and Bird Flu

    Whoops! Rumsfeld stands to profit when the feds buy more flu shots to ward against bird flu. But should this really surprise me?

  • How to Buy Used Books Online

    I just spent the last weekend ordering a ton of used books from half.com (and one or two from amazon). Here are some things I learned about ordering used: Half.com charges cheaper shipping costs (2.79 as opposed to 3.50). If you buy multiple items from the same seller, that per item shipping charge goes down…

  • Feeling Old Again

    Philipp von Weitershausen has written a book about Zope 3 and several plone tutorials . And he celebrates his 22nd birthday this year. Suddenly I am feeling very old… Seriously though, when I was college-age, I was spending every bit of free time I had reading classic novels, writing stories and chasing the women/watching films.…

  • Families in Literature

    Uma on Extended Families in Literature : What do these extended families do in fiction? Many things. They are signs of the complex accidents of circumstance that have produced our families, and our selves; they teach the things that parents do not, and often the very opposite of what parents, and life, have taught; but…