House of the rising Moonglum

So there I was coming home on the El the other day with a friend of mine, and I couldn’t help but stare at the shirt of the guy standing behind her. In huge letters, a certain word was clearly emblazoned across his chest. Unfortunately since he was standing right next to us, I wasn’t able to show my friend without attracting his attention as well, so she never saw it. The person sitting next to us did though, which it good because I’m not sure I would have believed it otherwise.

Apparently, University of South Carolina’s mascot is the gamecock. This has to be one of the most understated wikipedia entries ever. “While the men have traditionally been the Fighting Gamecocks and the women were previously the Lady Gamecocks, this distinction was discontinued in part to help eliminate gender bias in their athletic department.” Because that really gets rid of any gendered connotation in that name. I am still shaking my head about that one. You have to have more collegiate pride than me to walk around with that shirt on.

We’re not on the Gold Standard any more. We’re on the Columbian Gold standard!

Lifted shamelessly from Daily Show.

The trib did a cool story on how Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast. I love how top secret their base of operations are.

I think I may have to start trying NetFlix out. We have a blockbuster one block from us, which we use regularly, but I’m thinking the advantage of the queue is too good to pass up. Anyone have thoughts? Cost/benefit? Do you watch more than the three movies per month that it takes to beat Blockbuster on cost? Or is that missing the point?

It makes sense. What with the saxophone and all. You can’t really get any more 80s than Shooting Shark. But I noticed that Revölution by Night briefly was the #1 selling album (very briefly I imagine) and wondered why. So I started looking around, and wiki claimed that Shooting Shark was one of the most requested videos (again, probably only briefly). So of course I had to look for it. I would also like to mention that I am sitting at home, totally drugged up, trying to get over this cold as quickly as possible. Suffice it to say, when presented with this video, it all became clear.

This has to be one of the best 80s videos ever. On par with Total Eclipse of the Heart. The 80s were amazing. ly bad.

Wow. They actually posted the answers in public as well. I was not expecting that. I don’t think that this will get the FCC off their back, or make the people who are mad at them happy. But in general it makes me happy, because it indicates a willingness to talk about the process at the store, and acknowledges that they are forging new ground here and can be making mistakes. This gives me hope that they will actually be able to learn from their mistakes.

OMG, looking through a brief description of Grand Central in Snow Leopard (that is: the multi-core programming tools provided by apple in the next generation of Mac OS X), their description of the implementation of work units (they call them blocks) makes it appear as if they are closures.

“What’s really powerful about blocks is that they enable you to wrap much more complex functions—as well as their arguments and data—in a way that can be easily passed around in a program, much as a variable can be easily referenced and passed.”

Sounds like a closure, no? Too cool. Anyone need a mac programmer?