One of my favourite mixed metaphors—which I had somehow internally misattributed to David Johnston—was this one, from University of Waterloo registrar Ken Lavigne:
Admissions is a crap shoot, and this year we won in spades
This week, Peter Lewis of Fortune may have topped it:
Apple is making applesauce out of the old canard that Macs are a lot more expensive than Windows computers.
What kind of applesauce do you get from a canard, anyway?
Keith put together an impressive, impassioned commentary on September 11, five years later.
As part of my job, I perform technical phone interviews (“phone screens”) for our group and a couple others. The basic phone screen is more about breadth then depth, touching on C, Unix, object-oriented programming and some data structures and algorithms over 30 to 45 minutes.
During this process, I’ve learned a few things, including:
According to Fox Interactive’s new math 1 + 2 – 2 = 2:
When you use the Kelley Blue Book to price your used car, you go through a series of steps: Year, Make, Model, Value Type (Trade-In, Private Party, Retail), Trim and Condition.
It’s pretty straightfoward, but there’s one usability blunder that bugged me:
This screen is a waste.
If there’s only one possible trim, well, just select it for me automatically and save a step. Thanks.
Researchers in Antarctica have analyzed ice cores going back 800,000 years, 150,000 years further than before.
The news isn’t good:
“Ice cores reveal the Earth’s natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range,” explained Dr Wolff.
The “scary thing”, he added, was the rate of change now occurring in CO2 concentrations. In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.
“The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years. We really are in the situation where we don’t have an analogue in our records,” he said.
When you log in to Friendster, just below the fold is the People section. The first—and default visible—tab is “Local Singles.”
Except it isn’t.
Update: it gets worse:
Apparently MySpace is using the the same algorithm as the Diebold voting machines:
Here are a few Hertz discount codes I have lying around. Most of them aren’t really that special, but I figured writing them down here will benefit someone, and I won’t have to keep a few scraps of paper lying around.
These coupons are expired but may be worth trying:
I’m not sure of the status of these (2007-08-14):