RT @carljm: PEP 405 is accepted - Python 3.3 will have virtualenv built-in!

@jacobian perhaps?

Make your site blazing fast. it is more important than you think.

Great for editing, inspecting, and QuickLook’ing archive files.

> Kansas City - James Massey, a married man in his late twenties, has set a new world record for continuous video game play. The record, set on a Friday evening, has inspired millions of espoused men everywhere.

> "Some guys are calling me a hero, but I was just doing what any man would have done." the world-record holder said. "This is my dream, it has always been my dream, to one day play video games for so long, all at once."

> The previous record, 11 minutes, held by Brian Hutchinson from Little Rock, was attained only when his wife accidentally locked herself in the basement. "I knew he was playing video games" his wife said, "but I wanted to rearrange some furniture in the basement. I thought it would look better if everything was shifted over a couple of inches." Furious screaming from behind the locked basement door eventually pulled Brian away from his video game at the 11 minute mark.

> Hutchinson commended the the new world-record gamer. "I don't know how he did it. I didn't think 13 minutes was even possible."

> James Massey credited his success to fearlessness and an iron will. "At the 10 minute mark, I thought it was all over. My wife wanted to put a new bed skirt on the guest bed, and she wanted me to lift up the mattress. I told her 'hang on a sec hon' and that gave me the opening I needed." After telling his wife to hang on, she was briefly distracted by CSI:NY and forgot what she was doing.

> "Once I passed the 11 minute mark, I knew I had done something really special." James said, "I was finally pulled away from my game when CSI:NY cut to commercial and my wife wanted me to get some dishes down from the top shelf for a potluck we were going to later."

> While many challengers will dream of one day besting James and his incredible achievement, playing for over thirteen minutes won't be easy. Many will try, but few will even come close.

Simplenote’s syncing engine available for use elsewhere.

How we Thursday:

@webology Both my wife and myself worked for Housekeeping Unlimited for a time. You should talk to Laurie Wilson.

Mac users: Is LaunchBar worth it? (It is on sale at ) #lazyweb

> So to encourage people not to engage in piracy, they’re going to force everyone to watch yet another annoying, time-wasting, gratification-delaying warning screen that can only be avoided by engaging in piracy. They’re purposefully making the movie-playing experience worse for honest paying customers.

Why must our government fail so hard?

RT @rogerjohansson: Yumyum. HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS:

Quickly create boxes with directional arrows.

What is going on and pro-tips on how to handle bytes and unicode.

@brad_frost If you’re still looking, have you seen ? I’ve not used it, but may be a good resource.

A good day at the KCAC open house.

> I could just generate the content on the body element:
>
> @media all and (min-width: 45em) {
> body:after {
> content: 'widescreen';
> display: none;
> }
> }
>
> It isn’t visible, but it is readable from JavaScript:
> var size = window.getComputedStyle(document.body,':after').getPropertyValue('content');
> And with that, I can choose whether or not to load some secondary content into the page depending on the value returned:
>
> if (size == 'widescreen') {
> // Load some more content.
> }
>
> Nice!

> It seems that beard intimidation keeps less adventurous women away.

One man gives an honest look at a difficult time in his career.

Cool new severe weather alert system available for Douglas County, KS, residents. I signed up and like its granularity.

As John Gruber said, “If this doesn’t make your day, you’re not hooked up right.” Caine’s Arcade,

Wow. What a boy! And what a dad, for supporting his son’s work.

I pert near cried.

> Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

> The mental condition of airline pilots is a relevant factor in their annual or bi-annual physicals. (FAA rules differ on the number of physicals required, based on the type of plane being flown.) But believing that the system is flawed because it didn’t predict the breakdown of one of 450,000 certified pilots is a myopic reaction.

> In many ways, though, this kind of incident was anticipated. The system envisions pilot incapacitation—physical, mental, or possibly, as in the campy movie ‘‘Snakes on a Plane,’’ a slithering foe.

> That is, after all, why we have copilots.

Just because something goes wrong does not mean that something is wrong with the larger system. Stuff happens. Deal with. With a backup plan. Like a copilot.

TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

> We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working. [...]

> Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

An interesting look at employment, productivity, and the modern age.

> The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. […]

> These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. […]

> I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm.

> Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but mooist robots. Just relax and let it happen.
> …
> MY WORLD NO LONGER MAKES SENSE!

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/50000/2000/100/152118/152118.strip.sunday.gif

> Can UX designers make a difference in the advertising field? Possibly. But I see it as a a quixotic endeavour, swimming against the tide of a value system that frequently causes the disempowerment of the user.

I generally agree with Cennydd’s post, but to me it is not about power, but respect. Advertising and consumption are a relationship, and in no relationship should someone expect to hold all the power. But they should expect to hold some and to be respected. When Cennydd says “disempowerment of the user”, I think “showing no respect for the user”.

Users can seem smug and entitled, but advertisers and old media are even more so. “It has always worked this way, so deal with it!” is not a helpful way of moving the industry forward.

> I realise that in pointing out that advertising is fundamentally sh**, I’m not being very helpful and I’m not exactly offering much in the way of solutions or alternatives. But I rail against the idea that we need to accept intrusive online advertising just because “that’s the way things have always been.” There are many constructs—advertising, copyright—that we treat as if they are immutable laws of nature when in fact they may be outmoded business concepts more suited to the last century (if they ever really worked at all).

So very cool. What a way to spend your money.

> At this point, we don’t trust America’s TSA, Britain’s Department for Transport, or airport security in general. We don’t believe they’re acting in the best interests of passengers. We suspect their actions are the result of politicians and government appointees making decisions based on their concerns about the security of their own careers if they don’t act tough on terror, and capitulating to public demands that “something must be done”.

Another on-the-money piece by Schneier.

Some of the history, science, and economics of the second most abundant element in the universe — helium.

RT @XControlled: Comic Sans. On a 350 HP aerobatic airplane. This thing is a flying contradiction.

@WranglerWestern I like a number of your jeans, but never stop making Twenty X Style 23’s. Ever.

Some level-headed thinking about zombies:

Lakeside @ Clinton Lake Dam

What a fun web app — Incredibox: a music maker.

> The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Companies do this. :(

This, my friends, is some classic LJWorld.com discussion. Enjoy.

"I am so fired" :

> When the pilot of a P-51D was unable to extend the landing gear to land on Sunday afternoon, his ground crew found some expert help -- they got former airshow pilot Bob Hoover, now 90 years old, on the phone to offer advice. Pilot Chuck Gardner was preparing to land in Mobile, Ala., after giving a 30-minute ride to a customer, but when he put the gear down, only the right main gear extended. Gardner knew he could probably manage to land and walk away, but not without damaging the $3 million airplane. Hoover suggested to "Yaw it really good," according to EAA, to force air under the gear door, then execute a series of positive- and negative-g maneuvers to unjam the gear, and it worked.

> The airplane, owned by Cavanaugh Flight Museum in Addison, Texas, was making a stop in Mobile on its way to Florida for the Sun 'n Fun airshow, coming up at the end of March. The passenger, Bill Barton, of Mobile, had paid about $2,000 for the ride, and he was a good sport about the incident. "It was actually a lot of fun… I got my money's worth," he told the local WALA TV news. Troubleshooting the gear problem added an extra hour to his flight.

I don’t think homeschooling is for us right now, but it may be in the next couple of years.

Shoot, son, this is bravery.

> But here’s one last idea: why doesn’t Chávez crowdsource the problem? He could simply open a gold window at the Banco Central de Venezuela, where anybody at all could deliver standard gold bars. In return, the central bank would transfer to that person an equal number of gold bars in the custody of the Bank of England, plus a modest bounty of say 2% — that’s over $15,000 per 400-ounce bar, at current rates.

> It would take a little while, but eventually the gold would start trickling in: if you’re willing to pay a constant premium of 2% over the market price for a good, you can be sure that the good in question will ultimately find its way to your door. And the 2% cost of acquiring all that gold would surely be much lower than the cost of insuring and shipping it from England. It would be an elegant market-based solution to an artificial and ideologically-driven problem; I daresay Chávez might even chuckle at the irony of it.

Working works. Long-term freebies do not.

Go, science, go! (I have long been a doubt of anti-whatever cleaning.)

> There was little evidence for an additional impact of new products, such as alcohol-based hand sanitizers or antibacterial soaps compared with nonantibacterial soaps, for reducing either gastrointestinal or respiratory infectious illness symptoms.

In short: .308 vs. 30-06 Sprfld is purely preference; .300 Win Mag can be a good choice; .338 Win Mag is unnecessary.

> MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.

> On the world economic front, thousands of rock-throwing rioters take to the streets of Athens and Rome to protest punishing new austerity measures under which they would no longer be provided free rocks by the government.

Boardwalk @ hearst state beach

Republished at [Art of Manliness](http://artofmanliness.com/2009/06/14/manvotional-george-washingtons-rules-of-civility-and-decent-behavior-in-company-and-converation/).

> 56. Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’is better to be alone than in bad Company.

I just installed @tpope ’s vim-surround plugin, only to learn that it’s a near-fatal overdose of AWESOME.

> You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

What happens when developers don’t neither talk nor listen to real users? This.

Good observations and five steps to help with the Stucture First, Content Always approach

A cool little playground with some nifty ideas.

> Collect, test, and experiment with interface pattern pairings of CSS & HTML. Pears is an open source WordPress theme, enabling people like you to get your own pattern library up and running quickly.

A payment service for web developers.

Quick way to generate styles and markup for buttons and forms.