“I think of it as competing for beer money; this keeps me steady on course. My purpose is to make what I write entertaining enough to compete with beer. Not to be as great as Shakespeare or as immortal as Homer but simply to write well enough to persuade the cash customer to spend money on one of my paperback reprints when he could spend it on beer.”
— Robert HeinleinUm, thanks?
Got a package from Amazon today, that wasn’t the one I expected this week. And wasn’t something I ordered. It had a standard receipt, with no hint of who bought it for me, or why. Equinox present, perhaps?
It’s the classic Basic Machines and How They Work, by the Naval Education and Training Program Development Center. Good stuff, so thanks to whoever.
The one I’m waiting for? 8 feet of birch veneer edging, of which I need approximately one-third of an inch.
Torchlight 2 review
“No time to write, must get back to playing.”
Apple's QA department: the customer
As usual for a new release, Apple is demonstrating how not to do QA. This time the results are more hilarious than crippling, since they made a huge fuss about dumping Google Maps for their own solution, “the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever”.
Yeah, about that…
Swordplay
Note to self: when planning to spend 5 hours a day for 3 days swinging a sword and shouting, in an indifferently-ventilated garage where the air approaches body temperature, remember that water, iced tea, and cheeseburgers are inefficient methods of restoring electrolyte balance.
Dear CAS Hanwei,
Katanas are held in their scabbards by friction. I should not have to tell you this.
Random associations
The “emptying trash” sound on a Mac somehow gets Konya wa Hurricane running through my head. Often.
"the song probably makes more sense if you don't understand Japanese"
Jeffrey Friedl, author of Mastering Regular Expressions, found his book in an odd place:
