wellness, perchance

I still have that damn cold, but I've heard that alcohol is a great antiseptic, and I'm currently experimenting, trying to figure out what the required dosage might be, using the participant-observer methodology. In the meantime, it's been (mildly) interesting exploring what it's like to be a stupid person. In the event that I survive, I'd like to thank the nice folks at Girardet and Bendistillery.

So I've got a few more links to dump. If this turns out to be a posthumous post, or the last post before they shipped me off to the State Home for the Extra-Special, well, this probably isn't much of an epitaph. Oh, well. I tried. Honest.

• Whomp Power has yet another take on the Great Hops Apocalypse of 2006.
  
• It's like a bird, but made out of butter. Mmmmm.... butter.....
  
• BBSpot asks Which OS are you?. I turned out to be PalmOS, same as Snabulus. Which isn't so bad; I wrote a few k3wl Palm apps back in the day, and it's good to have the occasional reminder to not assume an int is at least 32 bits, plus coding for a Palm (the last time I did it, anyway) is like coding for a Mac circa 1986, so it's like deja vu all over again.
  
• BBSpot also asks what programming language I am, and I am C++, which is basically true, except for the occasional Java foray, and the too-occasional longing gaze at Ruby. Oh, and Objective-C is niiiice too.
  
• Speaking of Objective-C, AAPL is tweaking the language for MacOSX 10.5. They ain't sayin' just how just yet, but here are some clues.
  
• What, you haven't already given up on Orson Scott Card? Masochist...
  
• More evidence that the Daily Show is just as useful, or just as useless, as the traditional evening news.
  
• NEC has a shiny new chip that supposedly can play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Wake me up when that hits the market. Until then, I'm boycotting both, just to teach the bastards a lesson about the usefulness of industry standards.
  
• Turns out that being an unlawful combatant has a bright side: You get to have all sorts of fun drugs. On the other hand, if Dubya commits the country to another stupid war based on some random assclown's bad acid trip, I will be very, very unhappy.
  
• At least we're fortunate that our Glorious Leader is an artistic soul at heart. Here's his rendition of John Lennon's Imagine.
  
• A bit of nautical fun with spare change up in the San Juans.
  
• A bit on Web 2.0 security risks.
  
• New near-IR pics of the asteroid, er, dwarf planet Ceres.
  
• The very latest from the eternal cult of Amiga.
  
• And the latest coolness from Saturn, in case you aren't sick of all that coolness just yet.
  
• Meanwhile, in Japan, it's giant jellyfish season again.
  
• A few not-so-recent Guardian pieces about difficult British topics: food, dogs, and the Boer War.
  
• One great fringe benefit of having OSDL in town is that we figure in people's naming schemes. The latest example: Portland 1.0 is supposed to be the Grand Unification of GNOME and KDE. So we'll see how that turns out in RL, but I like the name, anyway.
  
• Some fun with Google code search.
  
• Looks like Hans Reiser may be an evil murdering scumbag. Don't give the guy any sympathy just because you like his filesystem, any more than you'd give OJ extra sympathy because of what he did on the football field.
  
• I know lots of guys who will drool themselves silly over this. You know who you are, so I won't name names.
  
• And I knew all along that those rubber duck derby events were a terrible idea.
  
• And last but not least, today's crop of cute semi-cuddly-wuddly echidnas: catching some rays, strolling on the beach, nibbling on some ants, also eating ants, avoiding people, hanging out with the French, and eating ants. Oh, and waddling about on video, of course.