Monthly Archives: September 2006

In defense of 'like'

Defective Yeti gets all, like, defensive about "like":

    In truth, like has a fairly well-defined a widely understood meaning when used in conversation. It signals that the facts being related are guesswork and hyperbole, or that the dialogue being recounted is a paraphrase at best. It serves as a warning to the listener: Caveat Emptor.

    Really, "like" is more than just a word -- it is practically a auxiliary verb that puts the entire statement into a new tense. Call it the "Past Approximate." If someone tells you they once ate fourteen eggs in one sitting, you recognize that is a boast; if someone says they ate, like, fourteen eggs, you know instinctively that the number was probably closer to five.

Start Your iPods

What delights does this Monday morning bring ?

  1. Spoon - Talk A Walk
  2. Alison Krauss & Union Station - Bright Sunny South
  3. Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins - Friday The 13th
  4. Cat Power - Speak To Me
  5. The Cure - 17 Seconds
  6. Yes - And You And I
  7. The Futureheads - Meantime
  8. Son Volt - Creosote
  9. A Tribe Called Quest - The Business
  10. The Anomoanon - Asleep Many Years In The Wood

A pungent mix...

Adventures in projection - updated

One of my current tasks at work is an auto-update feature for one of our products: check for updates, if there is one, download and install it. The downloads are pretty big, and they take a while even on a fast connection, so I decided to add one of those little time-till-completion estimators on the download window - you know, "12.3MB downloaded, 3:21 minutes left". I'd never done one of those, so I had to come up with an algorithm to do that calculation. This is the story of what I did at work today.

(warning, geeky stuff ahead)
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The Big Question

I do love me some wacky-font conspiracy sites. Happily I've found another good one. And this one asks The Big Question:

    Is the Hole of Holy Father a Vagina?

I told you it was big!

Hoax Buster will set you straight on this and other important questions - such as "Why was the Bible written?"

    The Bible, a highly edited collection of independent papers is a hoax. The God who's word it claims to be is itself a hoax, not God at all but rather the sun god. The actual collecting and editing was done under the authority and direction of the Roman emperor, Constantine the great. Therefore we can say that he is it's author. The actual writings originated from faulty translations of hieroglyphic writings the bulk of which came from El Amarna. The two super stars of the Bible, Moses and Jesus are one and the same person, a not Pharaoh [sic], Amenophis IV. The Bible was written as a manual for the ministry of a religion originated by it's author Constantine, Christianity. The purpose of the religion was to shift the tax burden from wealthy Romans to the lower classes. This was accomplished through the smoke an mirrors of tithing, pretending that God is taxing and not the government. When we follow God's money to it's final rest we discover who God is, his most royal taxing authority, Constantine the great hoaxer.

There's tons and tons more!