“A multiculturist would bring bring marshmallows to a suttee.”

— Timid1

Red Light Revenue


How well do those red-light auto-ticketing cameras work? This well (emphasis added):

"On top of this, many tickets are never paid, partly because failure to do so does not result in a suspension of license but also because 67 percent of tickets were mailed to people making legal right turns on red."

Dear Blizzard,


I know, I know, you had to cut some corners to get Cataclysm out the door on time, and I’m sure you intend to fix all (most) (some) of it as soon as everyone gets out of the hospital. And some of it is hard, like quest phasing, or getting armor to fit onto werewolf bodies (the Bravo Company headband is particularly bad, I must say), but some of it should be easy, and can be done by liberal-arts majors who would be happy to have a job working with prose above the level of “would you like fries with that?”.

So, for the lengthy and generally quite entertaining Azuregos chain in Azshara, please find someone who knows the difference between “route” and “rout”, and “discrete” and “discreet”. A good interview question is to ask them about the difference between “affect” and “effect”, and if you don’t understand the answer, hire them.

Also, “lost on the throws of love”? What is this, a wrestling game?

Dear California high-speed rail supporters,


Go ahead, explain the benefit we’re getting from this. And then start running.

Tar. Feathers. Some assembly required.

Dear Yahoo!Finance editors


The following sentence in Laura Rowley’s article on the student loan crisis should have been caught and fixed:

Indebted grads are also less likely to go to graduate school, delay getting married, having children and saving for retirement.

Sadly, I suspect that this is the “fix”, and the original was clearly written in English.

Bad captcha


Text-based captchas have gone from distorted words to random strings that once appeared somewhere online, often distorted to the point that multiple letters overlap completely. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to hit the “give me another one” button on popular systems, because the first several choices were impossible.

Today’s new low: “ryōhei,”. I haven’t tried to type this in Windows recently, but on a Mac, it can’t be done from the standard US English keyboard. You either have to look “ō” up in the Character Viewer, or switch to the Extended keyboard definition and remember that you compose it with Alt-A.

Stone Clouds still not dead!


Once again, WoW gets the blame, but Eric has updated the site for the first time since July to say that he’s on the last page of the first issue.

Dear Developer,


When you send me a SQL statement that updates a 600,000-record table based on a join to a 900,000-record table, please make sure there are indexes involved. Also, please don’t test on a toy database.

Send help!


They're everywhere!

The invading forces haven’t reached my cube yet, but my folding screens and cardboard roof can’t hold them off forever!

(now, this one can invade any time…)

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