sotto.org

Wanting to write about the minutiae of life and those things that I find interesting comes in fits and spurts. I’m in one of those blue funk moments where I don’t give a shit. I know from experience that it’s usually short lived, but I’m bored with blogging at the moment, and I’m tired of [...]

My top two language pet peeves are petty, but they drive me batty nonetheless: 1) People adding “st” to the end of words usually adverbs e.g. “Amongst the trees…” or “Whilst whistling a tune…”. If you ever use those words in front of me, I will throttle you immediately. And no, being British is not [...]

I think theyblinked will be the first person I know who works at the behest of M$ that I actually, truly like. Godspeed my friend. There but for the grace of Hasso Platner go I.

American Idol is proof positive that Tyler Durden was right.

We’ve all been raised by television to believe that one day we’ll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t.

The corollary to that is television also leads us to believe we deserve to be.

Good discourse from Mark Pilgrim encapsulating the blogging ambivalence I, and others no doubt, have felt on and off for the past three years.

Does anyone remember what we did before the internet was around?

The technical term for yuppie navel gazing , I’ve discovered is omphaloskepsis, which means the contemplation of one’s navel as an aid to meditation. The actual medical definition of that condition in Latin (forgive me, my Latin is rusty) is Omphaloskepis Yuppis, which in grammatical form uses the ablative of self-absorbed fucks.

I was reminded of one of my favorite movie lines from the mouth of Tyler Durden, conjured anti-hero of Fight Club. That movie in general and those lines in particular resonate because I think it is a sound bite that tries to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the American Gen-X male and posits that they have [...]

Now that I am truly busy on work projects, more so than I’ve been since those heady dotCom days of yore, I stand in awe of my fellow open-source developers who find the energy and drive to still code after they’ve put in the long hours at their day job. Kudos bars and all that.

What would Jesus drive? A strange coalition of religious leaders and environmentalists begin a campaign of shaming people and car companies into buying and building more fuel efficient cars. I highly doubt those religious leaders include any of those prominent on the religious right like Falwell or Robertson however. For what it’s worth, I see [...]

If I haven’t said it before, I will say it now. Legacy platforms and programming languages
created in the 70s really suck. You know who you are.

As tomorrows anniversary looms, I feel more and more torn between adding to the effluvia of 9-11 sentiment, or keeping it to myself. Wanting to say something pithy and wise about those events, but thinking deep down that I really have no more to add to the conversation that probably hasn’t already been said by [...]

Forbidden thoughts about 9/11: It has taken almost a year for the American public and the media to even broach the subject of inappropriate thoughts about September 11th. An article that finally comes out and says out loud what poeple may have acutally been thinking deep down. After the initial reaction of shock and [...]

Tantek Çelic was the development lead for the Tasman rendering engine used in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. Besides his impressive credentials for building one of the most compliant browsers currently on the planet, he’s mostly famous for discovering the box model hack, which allows you to perform CSS parser trickery on [...]

It is a rare thing to have good friends. It is an even rarer thing to have good friends that fuel your passion for ideas, or foster within you an intellectual curiosity that, when added to your own devices, propel you above and beyond what you would normally fashion on your own. The downside [...]

A memorial page for Eugene Kan, written by his close friend Yaroslav Faybishenko.

Happy 4th of July. We are going to go see the fireworks in San Francisco this evening at Fisherman’s Wharf. There are supposed to be two simultaneous firework shows going on from separate barges, so it should be very cool.

The document that started it all (9mb file). It’s incredible to actually see that [...]

The World Cup takes on a completely different feeling when you work for a European company. They’ve been replaying various matches on ESPN2 in the cantina during lunchtime, which is interesting and quite fun. The media center on campus will be open this morning at 4:30am for the Germany/US match. If the US wins however, [...]

I upgraded my aging video card (a Voodoo 3000 from the now defunct company 3dfx) to one with an nVidia chip and I have been geeking out on video games for about a week or so. The games which have so far been occupying most of my time: Jedi Outcast, which is a first-person shooter [...]

Jaqui Saburido was a Venezualan student burned and horribly disfigured in a car fire after a drunk driver crossed over a lane marker and smashed into the car she was traveling in. The only words that I can come up with to describe her story and struggle to return from such a devastating injury are [...]