It’s Friday afternoon at the end of a hectic and horrible week. Time for something a little fun before I head down to the pub to begin my official decompression. I know: how about videos of cats doing silly things?
Jul142006
Archives
Jul142006
The Benefits of Reducing…
It’s been a while since I encountered any notably bad copy in the course of my day job as a proofreader. I was beginning think I’d jumped the gun by creating a whole blog category for material that seemed to be on the wane. Then this morning I encountered the following gem, which isn’t technically “egregious corporate-speak,” but certainly does have a problem:
This self-guided overview… focuses on the benefits of reducing re-key of data and order accuracy.
That sounds great, doesn’t it? I can certainly see how reducing order accuracy would generate all kinds of benefits…
ADDENDUM: Here’s another example from the same document:
The Query Operators section [of this document] is useful in providing guidance on getting better search results; particularly valuable when searching.
Yes, I can see how it would be…
Jul122006
Sunset in Manhattan
Awesome image courtesy of Astronomy Photo of the Day:
As usual, click the picture to embiggen. Click here to read scientific goodness about what you’re looking at. Looking at this makes me wish I was right there, with a big slice of thin, street-vendor pizza folded in my hand and the warm summer evening in front of me. Yeah, that’d be good, the sort of scene that would make me feel young and full of possibilities. Hell, in that kind of mood, I probably wouldn’t even gripe about the humidity…
Jul122006
Barnard Hughes
I was saddened to learn this morning that the veteran actor Barnard Hughes has died at the age of 90. He had a long career, stretching back to an uncredited role in a 1954 movie I’ve never heard of, Playgirl, but most people will recognize him from his more recent work playing various crusty old men with soft hearts.
Jul112006
Cool Discovery Video
I’m a week or so behind the curve with this item, but these days I seem to be running late all the time anyway, so what’s one more item on the overdue list?
It seems that when the space shuttle Discovery lifted off on the Fourth of July, it carried a new feature: webcams attached to the nose and tail of both solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. (For those who aren’t up on their spaceflight trivia, the SRBs are the skinny rockets attached to the sides of the thing that provide the initial lift-off boost; they separate a few minutes into the flight, after they’ve burned out all — well, most — of their fuel, and drop into the ocean, where they’re recovered to be used again.) While I suspect the cams are part of the post-Columbia paranoia protocol, intended to document any potential damage during the launch phase, they have the positive side-effect of providing some unprecedented and seriously cool video of a process we’ve all seen 121 times now. Click the image below to see Discovery throttling up its own on-board engines and pulling away as the SRB separates:
Just like a Viper peeling off on the old Battlestar series, isn’t it? Makes an old geek’s heart swell to see reality reflecting fantasy like this…
Note: more images and videos from the current mission can be found at NASA’s Web site. If you’re into this sort of thing…
Jul102006
Another Opinion on Supes
I’ve found a new blog that belongs to Tom Richmond, an artist for MAD magazine. Like most young boys, I used to be infatuated with slapstick, grossness, and the general disrespect of one’s elders, so naturally I mis-spent a lot of my youth reading that silly rag; not surprisingly the movie parodies were always my favorite “articles,” and I find I can still remember punchlines from many of them.
Jul102006
TV Meme
A new meme, courtesy of Roberson’s Interminable Ramble (Roberson being the author of Paragaea, that wonderful fantasy adventure novel I mentioned recently ). The gimmick is to bold the titles of television series of which you’ve seen at least three episodes, and bold and italicize those for which I’ve seen every episode. This should be enlightening… or frightening…
Jul092006
Book Stuff
For any who may be interested, I’m continuing to add titles to my LibraryThing catalog, a few at a time as I have the opportunity and whenever the damn thing is working. The site frequently seems to be overwhelmed by server requests; I’m guessing the owners were unprepared for a flood of new memberships resulting from a mention on Boing Boing. I’ve got 200 books up there now. At the rate I’m going, I should have the entire Bennion Library up for your perusal by this same time next summer…
In the meantime, I’ve found something rather interesting (and somewhat related), a vast collection of statistics about books and the book industry. Here are some items that grabbed my attention:
Jul072006
Readings in Supermanology
Assuming that you’re not all sick to death of thinking about Superman and ready to move on to other topics — like pirates, for instance — I’ve found a trio of articles that should give you adequate distraction from work on this Friday morning.
Jul062006
Rob Zombie’s House: The Video
Ah, the wonders of the Internet… here is the complete MTV Cribs segment I mentioned in the previous entry: