Indistinguishable from Jesse

I wrote two thirds of the items on Top 21 Signs You May Be A Terrorist, today's list on Keepers of Lists.

I ate dinner with a student from my crypto class named Ishani. As we were walking toward the food court, she told me that she is from Sri Lanka and survived the tsunami by holding onto a tree.

The first homework problem in my crpytography class was to break a cryptogram. After looking at the other cryptogram helpers on the web, I created the JavaScript Cryptogram Helper. It lets you paste cryptograms, highlights all instances of the selected letter in blue, and shows a table with letter frequencies to facilitate frequency analysis. The UI was inspired by Teppo Pihlajamäki's Flash cryptogram game.

Internet Explorer no longer lets me drag bookmarklets. When did that change? I can drag http: links, but not javascript: links.

(Internet Explorer's support for bookmarklets has declined steadily since IE 5.5. IE 5.5 supported 2083-character bookmarklets. IE 6.0 only supported 508-character bookmarklets. IE 6.0 in XP SP2 only supported 508-character bookmarklets and counted spaces as several characters.)

I saw a UCSD student wearing a "Make cows, not war!" shirt from Cowparade Prague. It made me think of the phrase "guns and butter" from economics.

After I bought a textbook from eBay's half.com, half.com offered me $10 off my next purchase. The fine print said that if I accepted the $10 off, Reservation Rewards would then charge my card for $9 a month indefinitely.

eBay, which invests heavily in helping legitimate buyers and sellers trust each other, is now directly associating itself with and promoting a scam.