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Feb 28 | Across the Olympic finish line
It’s great now that video replays are common we can all share in snippets of the wonderful Olympics (never mind the fact that the only US licensed provider of live streaming and video from the Olympics is NBC).
Dec 13 | Quarant-ine?
There are some things about languages that really catches me off guard - the last time I felt this way was when people suggested to me that the Tower of Babel was the origins for the word “babble”: it turns out likely not to be the case, but still it had my head whirling for a bit.
Now as I was reading about how the Channel Island of Sark is about to abolish feudalism (and also how a one-man invasion attempt in 1990 was stopped by the volunteer constable) and I came across the following interesting fact:
quarantine (to isolate an item, person, for the purposes of control of unwanted disease) has its origins in the French number for forty (quarante) with a reference dating from the 1500s describing the “period of 40 days in which a widow has the right to remain in her dead husband’s house”.
Jun 22 | What’s Happening?
“The Happening” lends itself to a series of unfortunate puns (like “what’s happening? There’s something terrible happening!) and the acting falls truly flat on its face: I’m not a big fan of closeups and repeated sequences of Mark Wahlberg telling everyone to shut up, not to mention the fact that Zooey Deschanel, after a pitiful presence in The Hitchhiker’s Guide, continues to be as boring as ever.
However, there is something worthy of note that the BBC picked up on in a completely unrelated report on “One Planet” called Bees and disease in which they report on the real and undeniable truth that bees are strangely disappearing from their hives.
Mar 14 | 3/14: Pi Day
In honor of π day, listen to comedy/parody musical duo Hard N Phirm’s Pi:
When ink and pen in hands of men
Inscribe your form, bipedal “P”
They draw an altar on which
God has slaughtered all stability
No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint
And yet to see you all at once we only need the point
Flirting with infinity, your geometric progeny
That fit inside you oh so tight
With triangles that feel so right… more
Jan 5 | Obama Ron Paul 2008
…because we are not a collection of Red States and Blue States, we are the United States of America; and at this moment, in tthis election, we are ready to believe again.
Oh boy.
Did you notice the similarity in fonts and colors? I also found, purely by accident, that Ron Paul 2008 uses the font AGOpus for their campaign (download here).
Jan 3 | Mobile edition and hosting
Just a plug - rioleo.org is now available in mobile form for viewing on smaller screens and browsers.
Also, if you’re considering hosting, I’m offering an unprecedented promotion: get your setup fee waived (a $49.95 value) or $50.00 free and a free domain (a $9.95 value) when you sign up for DreamHost using promo code rioleo.
Dec 19 | Recent Notable Auctions
Item: 1297 Magna Carta
Sold for: $21.3 million, December 2007
Made famous for: being the Magna Carta.
Oct 27 | PayPal Security Key
As an avid eBayer and a frequent user of PayPal, online security is often on my mind, what with scammers and phishers become more and more intelligent and craftier with their techniques in trying to dupe your everyday user to give up their credit card numbers (and for others, like myself, who continue to get random emails in their inbox with emails not destined to them, but some of which actually contain valid credit card information).
Aug 23 | Links
Estonia suffers Web War One: how botnets crippled Europe’s foremost wired country.
Jul 26 | On a sleepless, API code-filled night
Will you won’t you join the dance? Normal programming resumes the 7th.
After spending the entirety of yesterday night going over the eBay Developer’s Kit, poring over the indecipherable examples and complicated code, I realized one thing, one precious tiny thing:
API Developers are very stingy with code.
Either that or there is the general assumption that everyone knows API.