January 2012
3 posts
I would respect urban cyclists so much more if I could go a day without almost being knocked down by one on the footpath.
Path - http://path.com - looks really, really slick. Shame it’s so late to a crowded party.
June 2008
1 post
“Liberal morality doesn’t focus on harm reduction and fairness arbitrarily,...”
– Unfogged, Dirty Disrespectful Outsiders
May 2008
2 posts
“Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way [Apple’s...”
– Fast Company
April 2008
4 posts
“I’ve always had the theory that if you created an ANTLR grammar capable of...”
– Me
“CreateDebate, founder Bryan Orme informs me, “is a social networking site...”
– Valleywag FTW
March 2008
1 post
“It’s one of those irregular verbs. I have a religion, you have a...”
– rodgerd, with apologies to “Yes, Prime Minister”
February 2008
3 posts
Ang: I want a word that wraps up career/study aspirations
Ang: I would rather travel and ___ __ than get married and have babies
Charles: Shag supermodels?
Charles: Oh, sorry, I thought I was filling that in for myself.
The Naming of Cats
Charles: One of the Giants players is called Plaxico...
Charles: Doesn't that sound like he was sponsored by a pharmaceutical company as a baby?
Adnan: I don't know, I wouldn't mind calling my kid Pfizer.
Charles: "Son, we called you Pfizer because without them, you'd never have been conceived."
Don W: Well, it's better than being called Ansell. "You're their fault."
“The [Microsoft]-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like...”
– Fake Steve Jobs, Monkey Boy’s three-legged race
January 2008
1 post
“Maven is the EJB2 of build systems: over complicated, over engineered and...”
– Graeme Rocher’s Blog: Why Grails doesn’t use Maven
November 2007
3 posts
“[Trolls’] own online activity tends to be dull and disruptive, but they...”
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, BoingBoing Comment Moderator
Neologism of the day
Schroedinger’s Tits: Tits that are only visible if you are not watching. Therefore, they exist only as an uncollapsed waveform. And no, you don’t want to know how this came up in conversation.
To the stranger who was so kind to bang on the Atlassian office Window on Friday night, enquiring as to my reasons for being so late at work at a time normally reserved for more social pursuits: You may rest assured that I am more than happy with the balance of work and leisure in my life. In fact, I can’t think of a time when I was getting quite as much fulfillment out of both as I do now....
October 2007
2 posts
“First and foremost, anyone running for or holding national office must be forced...”
– Introduction to Mother Jones report on the realities of getting out of Iraq.
“…an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one...”
– John Mueller, A False Sense of Insecurity
September 2007
5 posts
That is illogical, captain.
Watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I realise that it is impossible to watch Leonard Nimoy in anything without thinking “Dude! You’re SPOCK!”
“…I think the Internet is causing most of the problem now, because now that...”
– Drew “Fark” Curtis, interviewed on Breitbart.tv
“One last point worth noting here: Early adopters probably aren’t the only folks...”
– John Paczkowski
Random diabolical idea of the day.
If I was a spammer, I would be going through my database of email addresses and searching for them on social networking sites. From there, I could generate another database of “known friends”, names (and potentially, email addresses) I could use as from addresses in my emails to increase the chance they might be read.
August 2007
9 posts
Post-Apocalyptic Upgrades
James: You guys are on the road to Spring 2, right?
Charles: Yes. We're pretty much at the end of the road, surveying all the wrecked cars behind us
Charles: The closest visual metaphor I can think of is the end of Mad Max 2.
Vidya: You have such a shameless web presence.
Charles: I'm everywhere.
Charles: Ubiquity is the new privacy.
“But there is only so much art can do against injustice, and the blues, from...”
– Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
How to get your company’s name in the news. One: pick something that people do when they’re skiving off work (Windows Solitaire, eBay, MySpace, and now Facebook). Two: Make up some ludicrously large dollar figure out of thin air. Three: issue a press release.
“I saw a tourism ad for Canberra the other day. At first I thought it was a...”
– Some livejournal comment.
“Yesterday’s article, “Players now have to face laser threat” should have...”
– Correction, Sydney Morning Herald print edition, Wednesday August 15, 2007.
“What we really need to do is start selling pipes with ‘this is not a painting’...”
– Me, just now.
De rien...
Charles: de rien
Vidya: Whatever that means.
Charles: I think it means ‘it's nothing’, but given how long it is since I studied French, it could equally mean ‘I'm a giraffe.’
Vidya: I do like the latter better.
Charles: I don't. The ceilings here are too low for giraffes. I'd have to move.
July 2007
3 posts
Email Bankruptcy
I just deleted approximately 10,000 emails. Most of them were unread. Most of them were spam. I officially give up. If you want to get in touch with me, use instant messaging or SMS.
“Q: Why did the Chicken Cross the Mobius Strip? A: To get to the other”
– Slashdot comment
“Thanks so much for the link to Keith Olbermann on the Lewis...”
– Letter to the editor, crikey.com.au
June 2007
3 posts
“Although terror detainee David Hicks has been back in Australia for a few weeks,...”
– The Chaser
“Listening to his arguments, I had the feeling that he was clutching at so many...”
– Kevin Marks finds a nice turn of phrase to disagree with Andre Keen’s proposition that the Internet is killing popular culture.
“Why would Apple announce [updated MacBook Pros] today rather than wait until...”
– Daring Fireball
May 2007
14 posts
On Evil…
Justin: It's... it's the devil and the devil's sidekick!
Justen: What is?
Justin: JBoss!
Justen: …
Justin: It's two evils rolled into one big mega-evil.
“When [Gloria] Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work...”
– New York Times, Meet the Life Hackers
Shouting into a Vacuum
The most glaring omission from Tumblr is any indication of who’s linking to you, how many hits you might be getting, and where they might be coming from.
“So lately I pop in one of those brand-spankin’ expensive Blu-ray movies,...”
– Wes Felter. I have similar issues with those cinema adverts that tell you how fun it is to go to the movies, and of course, those anti-piracy ads on DVDs.
On Phones...
Candi: I thought that geek boy would have [a mobile phone] that did everything short of making lunch for you.
Charles: Well, when the iPhone comes to Australia...
Candi: Yeah, that's more like it.. nice and predictable.
Charles: If Apple started selling lobotomies, you'd probably find me looking on their website saying "Ooh, that looks nice, but it's a bit expensive..."
Man tries to kill his girlfriend by leaving her in a car across a railroad track. Train sends car flying. Girl survives. Car hits man as he runs away. Man not so lucky. (I don’t care what the Associated Press says, that has to be an urban legend.)
Security Theatre
Having a big helicopter flying over George Bush sending out a Mobile Phone Death Ray makes for a great feeling that someone, somewhere is doing something to stop bombs going off. But telling everyone you’re doing it months in advance means that any potential terrorist has more than enough warning to just choose another trigger.
Pedantry
There’s an easy way to work out whether to say “Bob and I”, or “Bob and me.” Read the sentence to yourself with the other person removed. You wouldn’t say “This has been a bad week for I”, so why would you say “This has been a bad week for Bob and I?”
“[Harland ‘Colonel’ Sanders] appeared in several B-movies, mostly...”
– IMDB