Friday, 03/29/02

I have achieved total, though perverse and perhaps ill-advisable mastery over the Perl symbol table. Hooray!

(Update: Five minutes later I figured out a better way to do the same thing that didn't involve the symbol table at all.) 01:16PM «

Wednesday, 03/27/02

Yesterday I ate a hot dog I really shouldn't have. There were two of them, one from a brand-new package and one from a package that had been there a while. They were the same brand, but they weren't the same color, and they didn't taste the same. My friend Ted, in the same position, would have called up several local friends to make sure they knew what to tell the paramedics in case of emergency, but I just felt a little sheepish.

As far as I can tell I wasn't adversely affected, until this morning, when I ran across this list of ways people misspelled Britney Spears to Google, all of which got picked up and dusted off by its spelling correction widgetry. "Gritney Spears" is my favorite, but "Brinie Spears" is a close second. I laughed and laughed, until all of a sudden I wondered if the hot dog might have done more damage than I realized. 09:52AM «

Friday, 03/22/02

I learned today that Carrie Akre's last name is pronounced "'ock-ree", and not "acre", as I have been saying it for the approximately eleven years since Thom loaned me a Hammerbox CD. Jiminy cricket. 03:53PM «

Friday, 03/15/02

Today I learned that Neal Stephenson wrote a second novel (in 1996) under the pseudonym Stephen Bury. I made this singular discovery as I contemporaneously acquired said novel from a fine local used bookstore with an outdated web site. 01:42PM «

I had a dream last night in which I invited a friend back to my place, with great trepidation because I so dislike where I live. To my surprise and relief, when I opened the door and stepped inside, my massively over-cluttered mildewy house in the middle of nowhere was a cozy downtown apartment, with walls covered end to end by packed bookshelves. It was perfect. 12:02AM «

Monday, 03/11/02

Yesterday I had to put in my contacts before I could find my glasses.

More fun with the un-archived NYT corrections:

A chart last Sunday showing comparative statistics for Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip misstated birth rates and child mortality rates. In Israel, there are 19.12 births annually per 1,000 people, not 19.12 per 100. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there are 35.48 births per 1,000 people, not per 100. In Israel, 6 children in 1,000 die before they are 5 — not 6 children in 100. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 25 children in 1,000 die under 5 — not 25 in 100.

[...]

A recipe on Feb. 24 for marinated sardines misspelled the name of the New York restaurant from which it is adapted. It is Craft, not Kraft.

[...]

The Age of Dissonance column on Feb. 24, about birthdays, misstated the context of Samuel Johnson's phrase "the triumph of hope over experience." It referred to second marriages, not to life in general.

09:09AM «

Saturday, 03/09/02

Today is bumppo.net's birthday. The OpenSRS record only goes back to 1999, but it existed for a year or two before that under Network Solutions. Sadly, those records are lost, so no one knows precisely how old bumppo.net is. I wonder if there's a way to find out. 08:50AM «

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