HD1s Personal weblog

I'm going to come up with a graphic for this, but makezine reports that you can be identified by the germs you leave on a keyboard. It doesn't look like the authors have actually performed the studies they outline in their abstract, but I don't have access to the entire paper.

Lifehacker says that reducing the amount of detergent I was using until I was using a mere 1/8th of the recommended amount. Everything from towels to t-shirts came out smelling fresher and more comfortable. and goes and links to the New York Times to lend more credence to their views. The article does contradict what mummy likes to make us do, which is to prerinse dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. Personally, I prefer putting my knives in blade-down, so I don't get cut when removing them, but that's just the way I am.

Wise Bread publishes seven laws of negotiation. Life is nothing more than a grand negotiation. Don't believe me? Sure, everyone's life isn't as exciting as the characters on Spooks or 24 -- I'd like to posit that nobody's life is as exciting and nobody's negotiations are that critical -- but, even if your role is not to save the world from nuclear disaster or London from drowning, it's still negotiation. The top 7 is:

1. Come prepared.
2. Be polite.
3. Don't make the first move -- I do disagree with this one, as the first number presented is an anchor, so it should be in your favour and often-times unrealistically so.
4. Time it right
5. Get Creative
6. Flash the cash.

Boris Johnson thinks the way to secure the 21st century for Britain is to mandate the teaching of Latin, a language spoken by noone aside from a bunch of old guys who sleep with children in churches. So, in the honourable gentleman's opinion, the way to claim the 21^st century for Britain, is not to teach Hadoop, Bigtable, and nutch, but to focus on the classics. Grand, Boris, grand.

I've enhanced the blog metrics script. It now does hostname lookups using BIND. Yes, realistically, it ought to be using Net::DNS, but that's left for the future. Another future enhancement is an actual graph illustrating what page gets the most hits. I'd also find it useful to know how many people come to my blog from my ATOM and RSS feeds versus Google.

I noticed the No Agenda shownotes would not show up in iTunes. Turns out that mevio has a bug in how it handles Apple's podcast specifications, specifically, the summary tag which is:

shown in a separate window that appears when the "circled i" in the Description column is clicked. It also appears on the iTunes page for your podcast. This field can be up to 4000 characters. If is not included, the contents of the tag are used.

Handed the chap a 20 bill, and got back 15. Walked in to a noisy bar and got the bartender's attention. Ordered a glass of wine. Here's where the stars get lost: a glass of wine is 6 ounces and made of blown glass, lead crystal, or hock glass. The glass this was poured in was 3 ounces AT MOST, and disposable. Also, they charged an exorbitant amount for it ($6) and the wine wasn't very good either, but I suppose that's normal for this sort of pub.

The crowd's where this joint holds its own. People are EXTREMELY friendly. I chatted up almost everyone, which is normal, but getting everyone to respond in a friendly manner is not. No one was in a bad mood, everyone I talked to was a great conversationalist.

They don't serve food, drinks are overpriced and underserved, but the crowd is grand.

The New York Times magazine has a guide to better teaching. I have several friends who are employed as teachers or professors. While the list is geared to grade school students, building a more talented pool of college entrants will make the professors' lives easier too.

This is U2s Everlasting Love. Probably the best version of the song I've heard.

One of the callers on George Galloway's radio show read out a poem, which I thought apt for our times, so I'm reproducing it here: