July 2008
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!
Two things: a.) I could have sworn I was following markbean and was shocked to find I wasn’t (remedied), and b.) Happy Birthday to Me, Too!.
June 2008
fetherston: sarcasm is the easiest comedy
nstrich: right
nstrich: that's why everyone is so adept at sarcasm
MySQL performance tip: Prefetch using "IN"
Let’s say you’re iterating through a list of items to display, each of which requires a separate lookup, like a posts-to-users mapping.
Normally you’d do it like this:
foreach ($posts as $p) {
// Looks up e.g. 'SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ?', $p->user_id
$user = $p->user();
// Render some stuff...
}
But this will query the database once per post. If you’re showing 20...
“When you’re a kid you sign your papers on the top right hand corner. When you’re...”
– Dawn (via dawnowar)
“That’s also the basic idea behind pHome.us. Take you to the sites you regularly...”
– Jacob Bijani That’s exactly how you should market it, Jacob! It will net you literally tens of new users.
2008 Web Design Trends →
So what’s hot now? Pencil sketches, handwritten notes, card stocks, watercolor effects, collage art, script fonts, grungy and splatter ink backgrounds
Need to know if your site is going to make the “hip list” this year? Look no further.
Let me know when awkward, amateurish modifications to someone else’s professional theme are in. I’ll totally be the It Guy that year.
Here's an idea...
actually go into the tumblrs of a few of the favorites you follow, instead of hanging in the dashboard. It’s a nice change of pace, and a sometimes much more interesting, focused approach.
Obligatory plug: Tumblr Follow Mode, to quote a fan, “lets you catch up on your tumblr news by flipping through users’ full sites, instead of reading posts in the style-deficient dashboard”....
“Why do people fall for this? There’s no rocket science here: you...”
– Good Math, Bad Math : Perpetual Motion via Fuel Cell (Read the article. Mark Chu-Carroll saves me a bunch of typing regarding this)
Watch mspencer:
(via Water-fuel car unveiled in Japan | Video | Reuters.com)
From the story text:
The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car’s tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car.
Classically vague pseudo scientific explanation, the hallmark of the perpetual motion con. They conveniently...
"You have to treat your employees like customers"... →
Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”
First, They Came for Michael Medved. And I Didn't... →
This one’s going on my Top Ten Hit & Run Headlines list. Medved earned it, too.
Dear Lazy Tumblr,
If I change my tumblelog’s URL, what updates automagically and what doesn’t?
Thanks,
Tenterhooks,
Brisbane.
(Assuming you’re talking about using a custom domain with your existing account) – Been a while since I did it, but I’m pretty sure everything except hard coded references within your theme will be automagical. I’m sure Bill used theme variables, so the pain should...
A brilliant new scheme for measuring the... →
Productivity will be measured by column-inches of words. In other words, the company will assume that the more words you write, the more productive you are. Or, to put it another way, if you use many, many, many words to make whatever point you may be trying to make or fact you are attempting to report, you will be considered more productive than another writer who takes pains to be concise—that...
Picking Warren Buffett’s Brain: Notes from... →
“Good afternoon, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger…” my voice boomed out through the sound system with a half-second delay, making it almost impossible to remember my lines, memorized word-for-word. I continued: “If you were 30 years old and had no dependents but a full-time job that precluded full-time investing, how would you invest your first million dollars, assuming that you can cover 18 months of...
My Ding-a-Ling →
“My Ding-a-Ling” was a 1972 novelty hit record for Chuck Berry, and his only U.S. number-one single on the pop charts.
“[Obama] is focused not only on the policy, but also on the result—and the way he...”
– Squashed: Principles vs. Platform
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making...”
– A A Milne (via enquotations) (via thatguyben) – I had this on a bookmark, but haven’t seen it in years. Gonna be cool when I come across it, though.
“Bottom line: The days of cheap energy are over, folks. Gas may go down to $3.50...”
– Robert Reich’s Blog: Why is Gas at $4 a Gallon?
“We like our animals to appear smarter than they really are and our humans...”
– Alt Text: Secrets of the 7 Basic Blog Posts
Dropping Feeds
The Last.fm top five was amusing (to me) for a while, but my typical playlist is too random to give it any value for sharing.
Having my tweets in my tumblelog just reminded me that I haven’t been tumblelogging as much as I’d like. So now they’re gone.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-8) →
Audiocat
Trancenden
Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
The Kleptones
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr
Kangaroo →
The player takes the role of a mother kangaroo who is trying to rescue her son. She must climb through treetops, while disabling pink monkeys that attack the kangaroo with apples. Points are scored for defeating enemies, eating the fruit scattered through the levels, as well as for punching out hostile monkeys (or by punching either whole apples that are thrown at the kangaroo, or apple cores,...
Nice to see Colonel Sanders made it to Hill’s speech. No wait, that’s Ted Danson.
I’m going to go ahead and throw “noncession speech” out there as a term for describing Hillary’s little thing tomorrow.
Theory: Bezos paid Twitter to tank this afternoon so the inevitable “Twitter Out Uptimed Amazon Today” headlines could be avoided. Discuss.
Instant Messaging Proves Useful In Reducing... →
Instead, research showed that instant messaging was often used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face conversations.
(Emphasis mine)
IM is certainly lighter weight, but considering it less disruptive than e-mail shows what a pathological relationship most people have with e-mail. They treat e-mail as though it were a sort...
New favorite Edgar Allen Poe title: Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences
Bet those _Easy Crosswords_ proliferating at the newsstand wouldn’t sell as well if titled _Fill Boxes With Stupid Stuff Even *You* Know_.
WatchEach microrobot is shaped something like a spatula but with dimensions measuring just microns, or millionths of a meter. They are almost 100 times smaller than any previous robotic designs of their kind and weigh even less (via Microrobotic Ballet)
Asking to interrupt South Park to record Everybody Loves Raymond? Damn, Tivo. It’s like we don’t even know each other any more.
Lunch with HRC. I had the patty melt, and she had a buffet of blown opportunities to show grace in defeat. Bad math on the check split, too.
Remember: A shank is metal and a shiv is anything *but* metal. Mnemonic: “If it clanks, it’s a shank.”