“If I go down under, does my ass automatically become an arse or do I have to fill out some paperwork?”

(from http://www.reddit.com/info/6nz1k/comments/c04ehte)

The company I work for has just started asking people to work on Anzac Day to meet a delivery date for a client (a large British Company).

Since Anzac Day commemorates (in part) the sacrifice of Australian soldiers commanded by incompetent British generals I find this quite ironic.

• A variable called data_hash2
• A variable called stuff
• A class called SingletonFactory

I don’t know about you but IMHO an image editing program in which I can’t easily find out how to draw a circle has failed the usability test. A sane program would have a toolbar button with a circle on it.

In GIMP you have to do this (from http://www.rru.com/~meo/gimp/faq-user.html#circle):

How can I draw a circle with the GIMP?

Use the elliptical select tool, hold down CTRL key to constrain as circle, fill the selected area with new color, right click on selected area, choose SELECT, SHRINK, shrink selection by whatever number of pixels you want your circle width to be, right click again in selected area, choose EDIT, CUT. Voila, one beautifully antialased circle.

Oh, and extra lose points for making me look that up on Google, rather than putting it in the online help.

When I first saw this I thought the roof of our office building was getting rusty. It turned out to be thousands and thousands of Bogong moths. I wonder why they cluster at the edges of the roof tiles?

…the ideal Xmas present.

Australian Federal Election: http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/4095

Cricket World Cup: http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/2698

Transformer robots that turn into the Millennium Falcon. What’s not to like.

I find that adding the following to my /etc/hosts helps a bit

127.0.0.1 www.joelonsoftware.com
127.0.0.1 discuss.joelonsoftware.com
127.0.0.1 my.reddit.com
127.0.0.1 reddit.com
127.0.0.1 www.bloglines.com
127.0.0.1 www.smh.com.au
127.0.0.1 digg.com

I’m filing this technique away for my next project postmortem…

From http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/boston.bombscare/index.html

At a news conference after the hearing, Stevens and Berdovsky stepped to the microphones and said they were taking questions only about 1970s hairstyles.

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, “We’re taking it very seriously.” Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.
Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, “That’s not a hair question. I’m sorry.”