I found out today that WebSense at work now blocks CodeProject, and gives the warning "potentially unwanted software". That's like a lawyer being cut off from his legal library because it contains potentially unwanted legal reasoning.

At this point in my work-life, there is nothing better than being able to tell the debugger "No! Don't step into all those properties! I don't need to know that string assignment is still functioning properly!"

Every morning on CNN.com, there's a fresh batch of predictions about what the stock market will do today, and why. They're almost always wrong, but it's rare, and therefore doubly amusing, to get two articles that say the opposite on the same day.

Recipe for a meltdown:

The primary culprits behind the market turmoil are sky-high stock prices -- and it's only going to get worse, writes Fortune's Shawn Tully.

Stock rebound may have legs:

Futures point to higher open as bank merger hopes, lower oil outweigh more mortgage losses and forecasts of weak housing sales.

Based on the way the market's been behaving the last few weeks, I'm going to pick "meltdown".

** spectacularly wrong!! **

On Peer Review

Meow. Chirp.

Kevin DuBrow is dead !

Man... for about six months back in 1983, the whole world was wild, wild, wild about that song.

And then this came along and was all the rage for the next six months:

And then Quiet Riot came back and was all like:

And then Slade goes "Oy, Mr Riot, quit pinchin me good songs! You're leavin us with naught but this crap..."

And Quiet Riot said "Eww, you're right. Sorry." And that was the last we heard from either of them.

• We were watching TV last week, and we noticed that the network's little corner overlay graphics were counting down the days until the 25 days of Christmas.
• Some stores opened as early as 4AM last Friday. Do people actually show up for those early sales, or are the stores just trying to convince us that people do? Why? Because the stores have such great stuff that people can't stay away, or to guilt those of us who don't show up early into spending more to make up for our sloth? I suspect the latter.
• Over the whole week, I don't think I saw a single TV commercial using Thanksgiving as the hook - it was all Christmas. Obviously, that's because people don't buy gifts for Thanksgiving and so stores have nothing to gain by trying to pretend to get into the Thanksgiving spirit.

Noah’s Ark vs. Math