I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep when I suddenly felt a sharp jab in a sensitive spot.  My wife had injected me with something.  She said I should just go back to sleep, but the pain was spreading throughout my body.  I was very angry and said I’d go sleep on [...]

I had a coworker from Germany. She had quite a neatness thing; she kept her books wrapped in plastic bags, and when she borrowed books from me she returned them wrapped. She did extensive genealogical research on her coworkers including me.
The company sent a bunch of us to Germany for a trade show. [...]

I went to some kind of discount warehouse store to get some batteries and pencils.  These were on shelves in a big room that looked more like a college library than a store.  In the middle of the room were a bunch of tables, and lots of people were apparently studying.  Few people appeared to [...]

Boing Boing reports that King George the W has now signed an executive order to DHS for the creation of a “Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives”.

Seen in a manual for a consumer electronic device:
Do not connect incompatible products.
Wow, it never would have occurred to me that incompatible products might be… well … uh… incompatible!
I’ve always been amused by the airbag warnings on car visors:
WARNING: Death or serious injury can occur!
This is generally followed by a direction to read the [...]

I strongly recommend against seeing “Ultraviolet“. It’s supposed to be a science fiction live action comic-book style vampire movie. They got the “comic” part right, though not intentionally. It’s like a bad mashup of The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Blade. I think it’s the first vampire movie I’ve seen in which [...]

From a meeting at work:
A jumble of PowerPoint slides

Looks like it’s almost a done deal, unfortunately.
“Our support for the Patriot Act does not mean a blank check for the president,” said Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who voted to pass the bill package.
What an incredibly hypocritical statement. “I voted to take away privacy and freedom from all US citizens, but I [...]

In a discussion on Slashdot a few weeks, someone wrote:
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
No, it’s an economic problem, thus the solution is an economic one. As long as it costs essentially nothing for the spammer to blast out a hundred million email messages, he or [...]

Some time back I set up a new server machine running Fedora Core 4 x86_64, with Postfix as the MTA, and with the Mailman mailing list manager. I have a very slightly nonstandard Postfix setup, with recipient_delimiter set to a hyphen character (”-”) instead of the default plus character (”+”), in order to ease [...]