What's special about the number 62710628778699693?
Be the first to figure it out, and I'll buy you a $25 gift card at Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Really!
This contest is open to everyone. That means the three people who read my blog on a regular basis, but J. Random Blog Reader who found my blog looking for "helium shortage", that means you, too! Send your answer to :
Contest expires the very last instant of 2006, anywhere on the planet!
UPDATE: Craig asks, "This isn't something like the VINs of the last two cars you own added together, is it?" HE WINS! No, just kidding--I'm not that lame. When you figure out why this number is special, you'll recognize it immediately.
UPDATE 2: The prize has been claimed, and the contest is over! Both Joe and Craig sent me the correct answer, and what the hell, they can both have a prize! I'll wait until the end of the month to reveal the answer, but feel free to speculate in the comments.
If you're like me, you have fond memories of Xsnow, but you're stuck on a non-X platform, for now. Thank goodness I can still bring the holiday magic to Firefox with the Tinseltown theme. HO HO HO!
My plans for tonight fell through. I have two alternate choices: be productive, do a little cleaning, and maybe catch a late movie. Or, get drunk and catch up on season 3 of Battlestar Galactica.
I don't need a blender, and it's still "Buy Nothing Day", but if I had $400 burining a hole in my pocket, I would be sorely tempted to get a blender that can turn golf balls into powder.
My favorite software activity is deleting code. Nothing makes me happier than removing complexity and cutting a function's length in half, all the while making it easier to understand.
Maybe that activity is more precisely stated as making code simpler--boiling things down to their bare essentials. It's Newton coming up with "F=ma", it's Einstein deriving "E=mc^2". It's the best feeling I can have as an engineer.
Someday, I hope to write a very concise but very clear regular expression that runs the universe.
Commenting is definitely busted--it just happened to me! If you post a comment, and hit "post", and it brings you back to the comment box with your text still in the text entry field, you have to try again. (You'll also see your comment on the left if it worked.)
I would be mad, but then again, they did warn me when I opted-in to the Beta Blogger, so I guess I have only myself to blame.
Update: It's pretty boss. It's a slick editor, better than Blogger's default. And the you can publish to several blog types: Blogger, Blogharbor, Blogware, Livejournal, Squarespace, and Wordpress. Nice.
I'm pretty angry right now. Okay, okay, so I was reading comments on a website that's bad for my health. (I won't name names, but it rhymes with flearepublic) I ran across another uninformed, poorly reasoned, and hateful "California sucks" screed. So, as an antidote, I post James Wolcott's "Red State Babylon". From that link:
If the blue states are sinkholes of moral decay, as right-wing pundits insist, how come red states lead the nation in violent crime, divorce, illegitimacy, and incarceration, among other evils?
It's interesting because I was under the impression that aviation software operated under a QA standard of 100% coverage, measured at the assembly instruction level: every machine instruction must be executed. That's got to be tough to hit, given the instruction stream most C++ compilers generate.
With the help of twofifty.org, I'm working my way through the 250 top films, as selected by imdb.com users. I'm making good progress--so far, it's 162 down, with 88 to go.
My plans for tonight fell through. I have two alternate choices: be productive, do a little cleaning, and maybe catch a late movie. Or, get drunk and catch up on season 3 of Battlestar Galactica.
