n. Often adduced as the reason or motivation for
expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being
that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP had
features for reading and printing Roman numerals, which were
installed purely for hack value. See display hack for one method
of computing hack value, but this cannot really be explained, only
experienced. As Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain
jazz: “Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.” (Feminists please
note Fats Waller’s explanation of rhythm: “Lady, if you got to ask,
you ain’t got it.”)
Here’s a table with how much caffeine various products contain (it’s American, but a lot of things are the same here)
Diet Coke 12 ounces - 46.5
Coca-Cola classic 12 ounces - 34.5
I guess that might be one of the reasons why I gravitate towards diet coke. That and coca-cola can just be too damn sugary sometimes.
I’ve been doing some artwork for the back page of The Journal (for the short story contest). The first one came out today, unfortunately it was printed in black and white, while I was told to design in colour. Anyway, I posted the colour version here if you want to see it.
The Oscar nominations are out for this year, and there aren’t a whole lot of surprises, at least not for me. And I’m happy to say that there’s no possibility of musical winning best picture this time around. There are always movies that you saw that don’t get any nominations, yet you think they were fantastic. I saw a fair numbers of movies this year, thanks in no small part to Bittorrent. I really liked Buffalo Soldiers, but it’s not much of an Academy movie. There was also American Splendor, which managed to pick up a screenplay nom. And City of God, which managed to do quite well for itself. I don’t know about Sea Biscuit for best picture, I just found it a bit cheesy. Johnny Depp got a best actor nom, that’s good news.
The Pope hosted a breakdance party over the weekend. Yup, papal breakdancing. I really don’t know what to say, other than wishing I had found it yesterday. You know those times when you want to make up news and create photoshopped graphics but then the news event actually happens? Yeah.
Hah hah, I’m tired… whooooo!!! The paper is done. It may be good, it may not be… it was a long day/night though. We need another graphics person, so it doesn’t have to be me.
Here’s a good little utility that displays your unread mailcount (in all boxes) in the menu bar. Handy if you’re hiding the dock.
An article in the New York Times magazine on the death of indie film. Or the rise and fall of indie or whatever you want to call it. You can only make so many indie films before become part of the industry. A gem of an indie film that’s made made on a shoestring budget will appear again — they always do. Indie film directors like to make movies. If the people with money like the movies, they offer the directors some cash. They still make movies they want to see, but they have money to do it with; you just don’t get a heartbreaking story attached to the making of it. Real indie directors make documentaries.
Art Garfunkel got caught with dope on Saturday, around 12:20pm on Saturday. It’s good to know that our old hippie friends can ride around in their limos getting high. He commented, “If I was on a raft about an hour west of England, I’d be gettin high and it would be like yeah.”
Read some sex advice from cowboys:
Tom, 59
A male friend of mine is having a hard time making his girlfriend come. What’s your advice for him?
First of all, he should give her to me. Because, goddamn, I’d lick her cross-eyed.
Larry, 47
What’s a no-fail seduction line?
I dunno. Probably “Let me show you my fingers.” [Holds up two remaining fingers on his left hand.]
Check out the glowing bunny, I want glow in the dark everything! I guess there’s been a kerfuffle over GloFish recently. I’m sure that they don’t really pose any health hazards, besides who eats aquarium fish? Other than college students and young children, I bet there aren’t that many. And as for those particular groups, I’d be more worried about a lot of the other substances that they may ingest.
Paper is done for this evening, whoo. Could have gotten out of there earlier with a full quota of working computers. Layout and graphics managed to share three computers the entire time. It was a late start overall but it filled itself up. Old writers, new writers, lots of Freeman, graphics, odd cover, space filler (find the bald guy). Three cheers, despite the sick people. I may or may not have been responsible for their sickness. I had to enjoy being sick at the paper last week. Bed time should be now. I think all of the kinks are worked out with the new design, i failed to redo the search template on my last venture. There were a few other templates floating around too. The game of editorial foosball was a brilliant idea. We played with pad and pen, if you got scored on, you had to write a cover idea on the pad. The game resulted in the cover and three quarter pagers, mayone only two, i can’t remember.
Not so much bored as meaning to be working on other things but failing to do so. Thus I have redesigned the website. Or made a new title graphics and changed a bunch of numbers in the code. You can call it either. I figured it’s cold enough outside and I’d rather look at warmer colours. The blues and graphic made it seem cool before. Most of the pages should be converted, probably have to adjust the comments template still.
A guide to setting up your mac. Look at point 5, moving your /Users directory. There’s a complicated way, although not too bad, and the easy way. Guess which one is better.
One issue of the paper has been finished for the semester. I was sick feeling, so it wasn’t as much fun as usual. We got out of there around 4:30-5:00 with only one minor fuckup that got fixed in the morning. A lot of the overtime was due to the lack of nero and windows insistance that the files had to be copied to a local directory. I wouldn’t have wanted to burn a coaster and waste $0.50 if the server accident;y went down. Or the other 15 or 20 minutes that I waited for shit to load across a network. Blargh, stupid wizards. I slept, got up and went to some class. School time again.
Some links:
All my fonts - someone took the time to make a graphical display of fonts by myself or with brian years ago. Something I’ve been meaning to do but never got around to.
Vivisimo Clustering - “automatic categorization and meta-search software” an interesting alternative to google.
Pauly-boy ate some brownies:
In a yearend interview Thursday with CPAC, the parliamentary public affairs channel, Martin confided he’d never smoked pot but said his wife Sheila once made some brownies “and I must say they had a strange taste.”
That’s right, they had a strange ‘taste’ (article).
Hello all, back from the voyage to Quebec City, it was a lot of fun and not as cold as I expected it to be. I will have some photos to add to the gallery at some point, but I’m unable to post them. I discovered that the Internet is still not working at my house. And no one is picking up the phone at jerk housemate’s house. Maybe he went for a surprise vacation out of the county or something.
Bad discoveries of the day: I’m going to have to take six courses next semester to make up for the one I dropped last semester, at least I won’t be editing the paper in the last half of March, so it should be nice and manageable. How comes science students need to take 20.0 credits and arts only need to take 19.0? Oh, are degress are just as valuable they say. Well, mine’s worth at least a grand more. Unless they’re just making room for at least two course failures. I’m not bitter. Discovery number two: spotty swollen throat. Cause: bacteria or virus. Bacteria would be nice, because the penicillin I got should kill it and make me better. I had a virus with the mono back in the summer and it meant my throat just kept swelling and I eventually needed an anti-inflamatory.
