I have to admit, I’m rather looking forward to the new Thor. There’re a lot of oddities surrounding the concept, but it’s the comics – it’s not like they paid much attention to the traditional Thor in the first place, so why not alter conventional thinking even further? Thor (“Þór,” among others, hereafter anglicized because… [...]
A quick tool to unescape HTML
If you follow me on Google+ or Twitter (or LinkedIn), you’ll have seen a lot of posts from me lately, mostly reposts of older articles, in a giant flood of content. I apologize for that – I guess I’d not really thought a whole lot of the social media impact of all of the data [...]
Repost: Welcome to the New Inquisition.
CNN posted Stopping ISIS today, containing some horrifying imagery: basically, ISIS filmed a man being forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam, and then beheaded him. I suppose that somewhere the god of irony is weeping tears of stone. God knows I’m weeping real tears. Is this really what we’ve come to? A religious movement, ostensibly [...]
Repost: Avail, a language for ‘articulate programming,’ released
The Avail team has announced the first release of Avail, an “articulate programming language,” which attempts to offer a somewhat natural expression form for solving programming problems. While other languages, such as Perl, have tried to do some of the same things in providing an English-like parsing structure, Avail uses a very human-readable syntax to [...]
CSS and Aside Text
I am having some difficulty with CSS and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it. So I’m putting this out there in the hopes that someone with CSS expertise can look and say something simple, like, “Hey, dummy, why not…” The problem is “aside text.” This is an example of “aside text.” Aside text [...]
Repost: Music that moves you?
I hate to admit it, but one of my favorite songs right now is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which I first heard on American Idol. What… a… song! The lyrics are freakin’ STUNNING. Amazing piece of work. The relationship between sex and God explored artistically and respectfully. Other music that stands out among the madding crowd, [...]
First World Problems
There was a tweet (captured on imgurl, of all places) that said: “Muslims view ‘Islamic’ terrorists the same way most Christians view the Westboro Baptist Church…” A lot of comments suggested otherwise, with justification. The thing is: would an Iraqi Christian rather be faced with ISIS, or a moron from the Westboro Baptist Church? It’d [...]
Ah, the happiness of new beginnings.
Welcome to my new site; it’s not a new url, but everything’s been rebuilt from the ground up. Well… I say it’s been rebuilt, but that’s not quite true yet. It’s in the process of being rebuilt as of this posting, more accurately. I haven’t migrated over any content, and I haven’t even finished configuring [...]
Repost: Brandon Sanderson might actually understand people
I’ve been reading Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, trying to finish it at last after having abandoned it fourteen years ago or something like that. I abandoned it because the books were becoming repetitive, and because Robert Jordan created characters who were plastic and immature even then; his fondness for corporal punishment was [...]
Repost: Java 8 Streams: filtering and mapping
I’ve been making some progress with my Java 8 streams and lambdas explorations. I’m still not anywhere near an expert yet, and chances are that the literati would see my attempts as childish and ignorant, but that’s okay. How else do you learn? What I’ve been working on is a tokenizer. I’m feeding data from [...]