I will be impressive if i can finish writing this post by the time that the mac n cheese is done cooking. That is what Becca tells me.

We are starting our vacation today. Five days off from work - adding up to a total of 9 days of carefree fun and awesomeness. It all begins today. I will have pictures when I get back. But you don’t care. I know. It’s OK.

We will be staying in various locations all around Colorado, and bringing Becca to an amusement park which is really her dream. Camping, and hiking is included, some hot springs along the way are also likely. I think we are also spending a night in Arches National Park in Utah. It will be excrutiatingly hot, no doubt. But we have AC in the car finally! Yay!

OK, I hear the water starting to boil.

See you in a week.

Wooo a ooohh oooh. Who just correctly guessed Trajan Pro Regular for the logo of a site on the first try? That would be me.

It’s crazy because I havent even used that font recently, it was more of a reflex recognition. It’s a very distinct font and totally appropriate for some designs, though it is seen fairly regularly, and lacks the diversity of weights a proper type-face should have. Also, it’s one of those strange “Small Caps” faces, which is a neat effect, but a little limiting for such a graceful face.

That was all I had.

Also, the depths of functionality provided by TextMate is pretty remarkable.

I waiting for a PDF to rasterize in Photoshop right now, so I thought I would take a second to say that I feel very focused today. Last week was a little fuzzy at times. Creativity isn’t always like a fauceet that you can switch on and off, so it’s good to know that at least today things are going to actually gel on the designs that I am working on. It feels good.

Also, I finally have a working internet connection at home.

Dear Sir/Madam

I am glad to inform you about our new provision held in Hungary, in the heart of Europe. Since being in leading position in a company you have to know that the unimpeachable guise of an important person is not only proposed but also requisite nowadays. Our overture gives you the possibility to change your look and makes you more confident than ever.

Self-assured outlook starts at exquisite personal hygiene so not only a healthy but a dazzlingly lustrous denture can be the most indispensable key to the perfect complacency. If you are not totally satisfied with the plight of your teeth then I would like to draw your attention to our service.

The dental clinic we recommend offers to you one of the most developed medical and dental technique in Europe. Besides being the best in profession and speaking fluent English in the clinic all treatments cost 50-60% of the English ones including the cost of travelling, too! The perfectly trained dentists of ours are ready to treat you in any time by using the very best technological equipments like cirkon oxid or bego technology. It is important to accentuate that special private wishes are able to be accomplished easily and 3 years of fully comprehensive guarantee is given after all treatments.

If you avail yourself of our services you almost surely have to wait for the final curing up to one week on a par technical support and treatment takes place in one edifice - meanwhile you are able to visit and come to know some parts of Southern Hungary where you are able to enjoy the spa of Harkny and the excellent collection of wines in the region of Villny or more. This is not only a medical journey.

This is a help-and-enjoy opportunity.

Lovely wonderful coffee, in the morning it is an elixer of vitality. One summer I lived by myself and started drinking coffee regularly. I had chronic heartburn for half of that summer and I kinda thought it was the coffee that turned my stomach into a boiling tar pit. But I have drank coffee regularly for most of the 2 years I’ve been out of college now and I don’t get heartburn very often.

My only conclusion is that it must be related to eating junk food all the time, cereal sandwiches and microwave dinners were probably the culprit in my health problems during that first summer on my own. Now that I have a wonderful wife to cook meals for me I dont seem to have any problems with heart-burn.

This was weird…. why did I write this?

Here’s how you can scientifically determine the odds of getting shot in the stomach when using hammer to remove bullet casings from live rounds.

In case you dont feel like repeating his experiment to test the validity of the results the probability is about 1 in 100 that you will shoot yourself. Which is pretty good actually. Making it’s an activity that compares favorably to say, base jumping, or holding a golf-club up during a lightning storm.

Here’s to those brave souls that make an effort to collect the statistics that warn the rest of us away from uneccesarily dangerous activities.

Two chat-bots are prompted to ask each other questions to start a conversation. The initial questions were provided by humans, but the discussions that ensued make the chat bots seem surprising cognizant. The two pieces of software are designed to imitate human conversation, and I would say they manage that quite well.

It’s easy for people to forget there is a vast and complex script behind these programs. When the bots sound the most like a human the illusion is thinnest. It seems like I was able to regain perspective on the character’s true nature when their dialogue sounded the most like an authentic human, rather than like some obscure oracle.

Alright, I’m conviced that there is an art to writing a clever and clear headline. But the challenges of getting this one all the way to publication must have been arduous. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070503/ap_on_re_as/skorea_high_wire

Read the headline very carefully, ignoring the actual content of the article.

AOL is testing a new homepage design, but a close comparison of a competeing portal will reveal just how much inspiration is necessary to kick AOL into a design update. Not that I particualarly love the new Yahoo portal design, but it’s still a little better than what came before. And probably one of the most worthy solutions to the intentional information overload on those sites.

Speaking of big media companies redesigning their sites. Apparently MTV redesigned their site and launched yesterday, resulting in an immediate service outage. The big story in this though is that MTV had just launched a brand new all flash based site last year. Heavy use of flash seemingly makes sense for what people expect from the MTV brand (loud, active, lots of video). I never visited their site before, but I just find it interesting that they so thoroughly decided to throw a curveball at their users and switch back to a HTML site. You cant please everyone, especially when you are a big name online destination, but seriously, that’s a pretty good problem to have.

Honestly, who was the genious at Adobe/Macromedia who decided to build the Flex Builder 2 IDE on a Java Application (Eclipse). Has anyone ever had a good experience with a Java based IDE on any platform? I love coding in an IDE, the debugger is the single greatest thing ever. But, having the program crash all the time, and have it become permanently inoperable after the latest crash has just made me wonder why they didn’t take the time to create a tool for developers that was actually usable. I mean it’s mainly just a text-editor, why was it necessary to put me through the torture of running my IDE in a JVM!?

This one is more of a documentary about the man and the process, but it reveals some interesting facts about the study of global climate change. All I can say is that the entire issue of global warming is debated, digested, and decided by people who rarely realized just how big and complex the world’s climate system is. Sometimes a complex system can have one weaknes that will bring the entire thing down. And sometimes a complex system can have so many different elastic aspects that they may cancel each other out in the end. Also these factors we look at for our clues to the future simply may not be relevant to the problem we think we face. Personally, I doubt that the world we were given is not resilient enough to handle the changes we can induce. But, I sincerely doubt I have the knowledge necessary to make any qualified judgements.

The references in this article are probably one-sided and may be misleading, but if it’s true, awesome!

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/print_item.asp?NewsID=188