Recently, Daniel Jalkut was doing that thing that has, sadly, become pretty popular in modern blogging: announcing his hot new product before telling us what it’s for. (Did this start with Segway? I’m sure there are some prior examples that I can’t think of.) Anyway, it turned out to be Black Ink, a really nice looking Cocoa-based crossword puzzle program. It started out pretty buggy, but has gotten a little better. It costs $25, which probably isn’t too unreasonable, but I can’t see myself spending that much on a game that I’ll only play now and then.

A few years ago, I received a plain brown box in the mail. It came from my ISP, Speakeasy, and contained a nice Speakeasy-branded mug. There was nothing else in the box, and no explanation as to why I’d been sent the mug. I logged into their IRC servers and asked about it. I found my logs of this conversation today while looking for something else:

Ruben Navarrete, Junior, is a syndicated columnist who frequently writes about the problems of Hispanics in America. I often agree with him, either entirely or to a limited extent. Sometimes I think he’s nuts. Today, I’m pretty disgusted.

I know that most people know how much email addresses suck, but I found this message in Mutt while looking for something else, and I thought it was a nice illustration.

I am now fulfilling my long-time dream of using almost exclusively $2 bils as spending money.

In case you, like I, wonder what a “natural George” or “Sherlock” is, this will help. (Well, it won’t help with Sherlock. Apparently the dictionary is out of date.)

My new phone arrived today. My first impressions are that its menu interface is very slow, that its construction is unimpressive, and that it feels like a brick compared to my RAZR.

Today, I saw some SQLite failures occur when a process had consumed all its open filehandles with session databases. My first thought was that there was a circular reference preventing destruction. After an almost comical amount of struggle to get Devel::Cycle to work, and then an actually comical amount of struggle to get Devel::FindRef to not choke on DBI connections, the problem turned up. I’m pretty sure that I wrote the offending line. I feel fairly silly about it now, since it is a pretty clear one-line red flag. This is a close approximation:

John C. has been giving me a very slightly hard time about my new phone habit. Honestly, I hate getting new phones, and I wish I could just get one that would last until it fell apart. Then I would re-buy the same model and use that. If possible, I’d buy in bulk. This is what I do with shoes.

You defaced the ABE.pm wiki yet again, removing information useful only to a handful of people. You bypassed the security, which consists of requiring that users have internet connections, and hacked the software by creating a page called “DaRkNeSs” containin the line “HACKED BY DARKNESS” repeated 43 times.