From teevee.org comes this little gem, explaining the final episode of Lost in terms of the famous adventure game Zork: LOST> look crate Inside the wooden crate you see many sticks of dynamite, encrusted with nitroglycerin, packed in straw. Arzt says, “Do you know what happens to dynamite in tropical weather? It sweats nitroglycerin. Nitroglycerin is the most unstable chemical known to man.” Suddenly, Arzt explodes. (Via Don’t Back Down)
The weekend the San Jose Mercury News ran an article titled Well-aged joints survive in midst of same old suburban sprawl (warning: annoying registration required). When I told a younger colleague that I wanted to write about famous joints in our area, he went through his mental checklist with a baffled look. Did I mean state prisons? Nah. Dope? No. Body parts? Heaven forbid. The notion of a well-aged watering hole and eatery eluded him. But that’s the first definition in my dictionary for the word “joint” — a place that might have looked in place in the 1940s, a…
Oh to be a kid again. With the school year nearing the end, our kids’ school has “spirit week” right now: Monday: Pajama Day Tuesday: Crazy Sock Day (see below) Wednesday: Wacky Wednesday Thursday: Decade Day (come dressed from your favorite decade) Friday: Sports Day Now if we could only get this going in the “crazy” working world for adults, we’d really have something.
The Yahoo! Messenger 7.0 beta is now being featured on Yahoo! Next. If you haven’t visited Next yet, it’s worth a look. All the new software and properties are featured there, most of which are currently out in beta form. Other than Messenger, I recommend playing with FareChase beta — I’ve used it to buy airline tickets for a couple trips and it has some unique features for a travel application.
I spent today at the SDForum Web Services Conference in Santa Clara. SDForum put together quite a list of speakers from a variety of companies. I try to go to the monthly SDForum web services SIG, plus whenever engineers from both Yahoo! and Google are speaking, I don’t want to miss it. The day included four keynote speakers, five panels and one lunchtime talk. I thought the best talks were: Adam Bosworth (VP Engineering, Google) stressed the value of “simple sloppy highly-scalable protocols with single common formats” that can alter the world. He referred back to HTML/HTTP and is now…