Indistinguishable from Jesse

David Farber's hobby (in the xkcd sense): twisting common phrases. My favorite Farberisms:

• A hand in the bush is worth two anywhere else.
• Don't just stand there like a sitting duck.
• He's cornered on all sides.
• I could count it on the fingers of one thumb.
• I haven't gotten the knack down yet.
• I read the sign, but it went in one ear and out the other.
• It's burned to shreds.
• It's more than the mind can boggle.
• It's the old Paul Revere bit ... one if by two and two if by one.
• Just remember that, and then forget it.
• Let's shoot holes at it.
• My mind is a vacuum of information.
• No loaf is better than half a loaf at all.
• You're blowing it all out of context.

These almost make the original clichés and idioms sound ridiculous, don't they?

I didn't like the existing Wikipedia userboxes that say "This user contributes using Mozilla Firefox" because they use a non-standard Firefox icon. (There are strict license restrictions on userbox images, for reasons I haven't tried to understand.) So I created a more specific userbox, using the "Minefield" icon, which happens to be more free than the Firefox icon.

For fun, I created a few more userboxes for my user page:

• This user goes to eleven.
• [In Soviet Russia] Wikipedia uses HIM!

Feel free to include them on your Wikipedia user page :)

<vlad> check out gecko's awesome new gfx capabilities
<vlad> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382613
<vlad> I think we should call it a feature
<vlad> "background: funky;"
<gavin> sweet
<luser> -moz-spirograph: awesome

There's a screenshot on the bug, but for the full effect, you should load the animated testcase in a current trunk build of Firefox. If you're not using a current trunk build of Firefox, now is a great time to try it.

I feel especially geeky today. After reading Monday's xkcd, I thought "using 'Meanwhile:' at the top of a panel isn't quite appropriate when relativistic speeds are involved".

A Google search for "leave" still reflects the time when most porn sites had "age verification" on their front pages. "Age verification" often took the form of the text "You must be 18 to enter" followed by "Enter" and "Leave" links. The "Leave" link would often lead to a site appropriate for young kids or to a sex-education site.

Even today, when few new sites follow this practice, "Leave No Trace" and "Leave It To Beaver" are beaten by Yahoo, Google, Scarleteen, and Disney.

I wondered why Google's algorithm continued to make this possible despite tweaks to prevent Googlebombs such as "miserable failure". I came across this comment by Google engineer Matt Cutts:

[The algorithm change] really does have a very limited scope and doesn’t affect a large fraction of queries. The intent of the algorithm is to minimize the impact of “true” Googlebombs, which occur when someone is causing someone else’s page to rank for stuff that they wouldn’t want to rank for themselves. The algorithm could detect phrases such as [leave] as a Googlebomb in future iterations, but it doesn’t right now and I don’t think that Disney would care much either way.

Googlebombs were slightly embarrassing, but I imagine that abandoning link text would have hurt search quality a lot. I'm impressed that Google was able to come up with an algorithmic way to distinguish Googlebombs from other link text.

I've been a fan of Enigma, especially the songs "Mea Culpa" and "Sadeness (part II)", for over a year. Today, I found out that "Sadeness" is part of a three-part movement (along with a song called "Find Love") and listened to the other parts for the first time.

Wow. I didn't know it was possible for music to be pornographic.

Costco membership: $25.

24 large chocolate chip cookies that are almost as good as my mom's: $6.

4 bottles of Martinelli's sparkling apple juice: also $6.

Getting back at jX for weeks of referring to the apartment I'm sharing with Colin as a "gay lovenest": priceless.

Bill Clinton's biggest mistake was not his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. His biggest mistake was firing Joycelyn Elders.

If he had listened to Joycelyn, though, maybe he wouldn't have made the second (more embarrassing) mistake.