(Of course that phrase comes from this headline.)
MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas is spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars urging suburban commuters to “Dump the Pump,” brave the heat and take the T, yet the transit boss continues to drive to work from Ipswich to Boston in the cool comfort of his T-owned SUV. . . .
As for driving to Lowell to promote his Dump the Pump campaign, Grabauskas said taking the commuter train there and back to Ipswich would have taken too long. The message of Dump the Pump, he added, is to encourage people with less demanding schedules to take the T.
--Boston Herald via Instapundit
Ironically, it's illegal to be an unlicensed tour guide in Philadelphia.
Wal-Mart employees overreact(?) to nude photos. Left out of the story, though it makes a huge difference to how one should react, is the age (and how old the looked) of the subjects of the nude photos - also the context. Four-year-old in the bathtub? 21-year-old (who looked 16) sprawling on a bed?
Drug war hype leads to a lot of unreasonable math. Unless you realize believe 104 pounds of marijuana could have a seven-digit street value.
It's been six years now, but the same three of us routinely worked late: a sys-admin, a QA lead, and a sustaining engineer. (Me, officially "Senior Software Engineer," but I think the other three Java developers also had that title. It's not that I wasn't interested in design, but that I was very interested in making sure things actually worked and that bugs were actually fixed; I also aggressively believed that if there were some code change I hadn't finished by the end of the day, it would probably be more efficient for me to abandon the new/revised source code and return to the existing code the next day with the gist of where I'd been going and without spaghetti. But that's just me.)
Of the other two, one formed this band and the other does a lot of open source work with Mozilla.
Unrelated (this sort of fits the non-technical part of the theme of the post, though not the subject line), my Concord roommate's birthday is today, at least according to Friendster. I haven't used Friendster in years and we hadn't been in touch since 2004, but it was fun to see the name in the Friendster auto-email.
I appreciate opponents who don't make you go all the way to a routine mate, but wow: There were stretches of this game (extended entry) in which I thought my position was way worse than the other guy's position is as of the end.
At least once I thought, "should I resign here? Well, there's this... we'll see what happens." Then things inexplicably happened, not even blunders per se.
I scoffed at his 6th move when I saw it -- but his 10th move and follow-up expose a deep flaw in my 7th-9th moves. The exchanges on move 12 just make a bad situation worse (lose a pawn instead of just two tempos), and yet his 17th move onward just showed a complacent lack of purpose. My counterplay seemed to come out of nowhere.
[Event "Online Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2008.07.07"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Akira S."]
[Black "Matt B."]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1586"]
[BlackElo "1598"]
[TimeControl "1 in 3 days"]
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. g3 e5 7. Nf3 Nc6 8. Bg2 Bg4 9. O-O Qd7 10. Bg5 Nd4 11. Bxf6 gxf6 12. Nd5 Nxf3+ 13. Bxf3 Bxf3 14. Qxf3 Qd8 15. Nxf6+ Ke7 16. Nd5+ Ke8 17. Qc3 Rc8 18. Qb3 b5 19. f4 h5 20. fxe5 h4 21. Ne3 Qc7 22. exd6 Bxd6 23. Nf5 Bc5+ 24. Kh1 hxg3 25. Qxg3 Qxg3 26. Nxg3 Bd6 27. Nf5 Rxh2+ 28. Kg1 Be5 29. c3 b4 30. Rad1 bxc3 31. bxc3 Rxc3 32. Ng7+ Kf8 33. Ne6+ Ke7 34. Nd4 Rxa2 0-1
The diversity in U.S. baby names has exploded since the 1950s. Back then, a quarter of all boys and girls got one of the top 10 baby names, according to Laura Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard" (Broadway, 2005). In recent times, the top 10 names account for only one tenth of all baby names
--Yahoo! News via Reason
(link below also via Reason)
The West Village (NYC) has one less lesbian bar.
Was just talking to a friend last night about how skyrocketing property values have meant that young gays can't move into the Castro (or to a lesser extent Provincetown, Boystown, etc.), yet greater social acceptance has meant they don't necessarily feel the need for an enclave.
If a Korean pop star is attractive enough, she doesn't necessarily need to wear pants to throw out the first pitch at a baseball game there.
Sacha Baron Cohen strikes again.
Barack Obama's acceptance speech will be the same night that college football kicks off. Brilliant scheduling by whichever Democratic party planner didn't catch that.
I knew I'd seen that typo before.
This related Google search has just one hit, but one was enough.