finding a solution

the above was a link from Dave Winer's weblog, and you can find it by scrolling down to the Tuesday Oct. 3 section (linktext: "a colorful bug report"), not far above the picture of Gandhi. ::chuckle:: (oh, for those who don't know, Dave Winer is THE founder, main programmer, and head visionary of Frontier Userland and Manila.)

okay, so you ARE in fact teens (many of you)... but does knee-jerk profanity give people a good impression of you? sure, they'll still hear you -- how can they not when you're raining curses on their heads? -- but they'll also come to the conclusion that you're generically foulmouthed, have poor impulse control, and have a tendency to write the first d*$n thing that comes to mind... not a good first impression to leave people with. (you don't care? you should. you never know when people you send ad hominem attacks to will post your e-mails on the web. so sue them. lol)

so anyway, let's be clear here: it IS possible to get results without resorting to scatological prose. programmers are people too, and there's no real reason for instantly flaming them as jerks and assholes just because one is initially inconvenienced by some buggy new feature or other. in my book, civility is a virtue. of course, you're entirely welcome to not read my book...

why text rules, reason #31

Oakland (Heredia) beat the Yankees (Clemens) last night, 5-3! but that's not the reason. it's this -- here's the stuff you won't get from just watching on TV, courtesy of The NY Times' Buster Olney (article here):

Clemens pulled the bill of his cap a little lower than usual in the first innings and held his glove high, so that if you were standing at home plate with a bat in your hands, his face was almost obscured, all except for the eyes, like a burglar wearing a ski mask.

His stuff was good but not great; his four-seam fastball was 94 to 95 miles an hour, and his slider was breaking sharply. His splitter moved benignly, however, horizontally rather than vertically, and this made it harder for him to finish off left-handed hitters than he would have preferred.

for sure, this is the kind of sports writing you won't see just anywhere; only in a classy publication like the Times (makes me wish the Chron's writers were as lyrical). oh and the reason number isn't as random as it seems... it's Gil Heredia's uniform number. ;-)

yo yo yo. check out this cool picture of SF city life, that Laura drew. and this is definitely an exception that proves the rule... because, while text rules, there's that other little truism about an image and a thousand words' worth of stuff... ;-) and Laura has this remarkable gift of being able to perfectly capture a moment, or characterize someone, in a drawing. wish i had that kinda talent.

childhood memories

a while back, Abraham wondered about the oddly engaging quality of one's earliest memories. last night, in a completely random way, i found myself in a couple of IM conversations about early childhood memories -- with Giancarlo and Anna -- which happened to take place simultaneously but separately. i reprise them here:

{ net.casting }
^