I'm in ur b00k, stealing ur w0rdz

Caught.

Excerpt from Atonement, by Ian McEwan...

"In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise. But mostly she was a maid."

Excerpt from No Time For Romance by Lucilla Andrews...

"Our 'nursing' seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains."

As more and more books are transferred to electronic media and sucked up by the gigantic information vortex that is Google, it's going to become mighty easy to find plagiarism. I have a feeling we'll see a lot of this popping up in coming years, with many long-dead and long-revered authors being revealed as cheaters. (Via Slog).

Snow in Seattle!

w00t! It's white outside.



The view from my window. OK, well, this picture is actually from the LAST notable snow day I was around for in Seattle, not today. It was back in 2004, and we sledded down a closed section of E. Harrison St. on cardboard boxes. We then let the lizards play with a snowball, which seemed to confuse the poor little desert creatures.



Anyways, it's snowing here. Time to get some hot chocolate going.

At bat: Theleft ... fielder.

The title of this post will make absolutely no sense to no one except myself and one other person on the face of the earth. OK, so does anyone out there remember Earl Weaver Baseball? It was a great game for the Commodore Amiga from the late 80s, and it had a great synthesized voice that announced the players, as in

At Bat: Jose Canseco.

except that, in this case, it invariably pronounced his name as "Joe's Can-sicko" unless you changed the "Phoneme" entry for him.

And while I'm on the subject, does anyone have a link to a good web interface to a voice synthesizer? I'm thinking of a cheesy old-school one like the old "SAM" program for the Commodore 64; I would love to find one.

Other random tidbits:

This post covers the issue of exactly why some cities' lame efforts to attract creative people and young professional are so lame. Sadly, I find my list of desired locations to live as I prepare for the job market rather small and limiting, precisely because I'm afraid of finding no neighborhoods that I can genuinely enjoy living in, and trying to cultivate these synthetic little urban petting zoos designed to trick plastic-frame-wearing hipters into thinking your town is a mecca of creativity and fun just doesn't cut it.

Here we have a story of a man who was banned from his gym for grunting while lifting weights. The horror! Someone actually exerted themselves during a workout! If they ever pulled this at my gym, I would cancel my membership. Immediately.


Finally, I have lived on pumpkin pie as my Thanksgiving dessert of choice, which has left me ignorant of the sweet potato pie. I'd love to try some sweet potato pie, even though I won't be able to take it on a plane, apparently.

Thanksgiving

Damn you, Sony! (UPDATE: Don't bother: the killjoys at Amazon have removed the comical PS3 review this link once pointed to. Sigh.)

The parents are in town, and Jenni is currently preparing a delicious feast for us all, with which I assist here and there. (She's been very hardcore about this - everything is from scratch. It will be to die for, I assure you.) Anyone out there looking for some Thanksgiving dinner? Drop me a line. We've got plenty of bird to go around.

Mocking grammar for great justice

Yes, it's true: People don't know how to use apostrophes. (Please give me credit for not saying "apostrophe's".) My personal favorite: the grammatically challenged Emily Dickinson plaque. They also don't understand that quotation marks are not used to accentuate. Now all we need is a catalog of unnecessarily hyphenated instances of the word "today". <-- (correctly quoted)

Today's news in privileged college kid hiphop

The Yale/Harvard rivalry gets profoundly lame. Besides, these guys could never hold a candle to computer science rappers.

Condos, condos, condos

Apologies to all zero of my regular readers for my recent absence. Won't happen again, with any luck. Anyways, behold Vertigo: the most hideous condo development in Seattle, a block away from me. This monstrosity used to be a relatively quaint old apartment complex before the bloodsucking developers got their hands on it. There's a poster out front for it with some terrible slogan on the front, something like "In your game of tag, this is base". Between this, the Cha Cha, and the 5,392 other hideous condo developments going up in our neighborhood (which are all guaranteed to crumble after the mortgage is paid off, of course), is this the end of Capitol Hill? Will it turn into Belltown?

Addendum: a LiveJournal entry from a former occupant.

Been busy ... another grab bag

I've been busy lately with UW Industrial Affiliates meeting and workshop submissions, and haven't had time to blog the night away. A few notes of interest ...

The Cha-Cha Lounge here in Capitol Hill is being demolished to make way for a 96-unit condo development, according to the Slog. Agggggh. Just what we need here - MORE cheesy condo development. At least I'll be able to get a place dirt cheap when the market stagnates next year and the developers get left holding the bag.

This one's a little late, but ... a sexy mental patient costume? Huh?

Geek craft of the day: a hard drive belt buckle.

Today's sounds: Beck, The Information.