“Sometimes there just isn’t a side to cheer for, something progressives fail to get because they think history is sentient and has favorites.”

— Sarah Hoyt

Hartmann's Journey?


Stumbling across this screencap from the current Strike Witches 2 episode, I found it curiously Kino-esque.

Sleepy Hartmann

One wonders if her legs talk.

Strike Trooper


My friend Dan is a member of the 501st. No, not that one (fortunately); the other one. It occurred to me, though, that there’s a cosplay opportunity here. Crossing the streams, as it were.

I’m not the first to think of it, although the execution leaves a bit to be desired…

Strike Trooper

Next time, please start with a femtrooper, preferably one built along the lines of Lynette Bishop or Shirley Yeager…

Dear Amazon,


Wow, these new pencils are versatile! But I think maybe I don’t want to hang out with the sort of people who buy them…

Stuff pencil-lovers like
More stuff pencil-lovers like

Actually, I’m not terribly excited by the new Sharpie Liquid Mechanical Pencils. Unless you apply a lot more pressure than you would with a standard pencil or gel-ink pen, they don’t work well when held at more than a very slight angle.

Things that are surely worse than coffee


I am not a coffee drinker. Growing up, I liked the smell, but the taste was always awful. I take my caffeine cold and sweet, and while there are ways to adulterate coffee to the point where I like it, they generally involve adding enough sugar and fat to turn it into a meal (I briefly acquired a taste for the Caramel Frappuccino, in the days when 60 grams of sugar didn’t earn a scolding from my doctor).

Still, I think I’d rather drink day-old truckstop paint-stripper coffee than dandelion, brown rice, or black soybean coffees, all available in Japan.

[dandelion root has apparently been used as a coffee substitute for a long time, but I guess I never knew anyone desperate enough to try it]

Old School


Now this is cosplay that separates the gamers from the noobs.

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iGrep


Just got a complaint from a user about a Perl script that wasn’t handling regular expressions correctly. Specifically, when he typed:

ourspecial-cat | grep 'foo\|bar'

he got a match on “foo” or “bar”, but when he typed:

ourspecial-grep 'foo\|bar'

he got nothing at all.

My surprise came from the fact that the normal grep worked, when everyone knows that you need to use egrep for that kind of search, and in any case, since the entire regular expression was in single-quotes, you don’t need the backslash. Removing the backslash made our tool do what he wanted, but broke grep.

Sure enough, if you leave out the backslash, you need to use egrep or grep -E, but if you put it in, you can use grep. What makes it really fun is that they’re the same program, GNU Grep 2.5.1, and running egrep should be precisely the same as running grep -E.

Makes me wonder what other little surprises are hidden away in the tools I use every day…

America versus Japan


If you go to Amazon Japan and search for “k-cup”, you will not find single-serving coffee makers and supplies.

If you go to Amazon US and search for “k-cup”, you will not find DVDs featuring extremely busty women.

If you go to Amazon Japan and search for “Kカップ”, you will find both, but you’ll have to scroll down a bit to see the coffee.

Clear Keep, XKCD


First thing that drove me crazy when I moved to Silicon Valley:

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“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”