October 2010
30 posts
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Seriously I can't be the first person to have this...
Why isn’t there a registry for the unwed? For the perennially and terminally single? Why are All-Clads and Wüsthofs and Cuisinarts the exclusive domain of the breeders? Because I like fine cutlery too! There should be a website for me! Maybe let’s call it homealone.com? And you just log in, take a simple entrance exam, confirm you’re going to die alone, then setup your one-time...
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Oh, I get it now!
Today’s rally in D.C. was like an elaborate Halloween costume, an occasion for hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise always approach the gravity and seriousness of national politics with nothing but the utmost solemnity to take a load off and pretend for just one day that they think it’s all a joke.
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Worrisome trends!
On Thursday the World Wrestling Entertainment Corporation announced that Connecticut voters will receive free t-shirts for showing up at the polls.
Today the President of the United States formally jumped on the coattails of a rally organized by the Viacom-owned and MTV Networks Entertainment Groups-operated Comedy Central.
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Oh shit my roommate just BROUGHT IT.
Langer: So Facebook bought another NYC startup today.
Brainland: Which one?
Langer: Drop.io.
Brainland: Oh that's the one with the guy.
Langer: Yeah, Sam. They bought it basically just to get him.
Brainland: So you're saying Facebook is like the Yankees?
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“(This is one of those things that I say and have to include a disclaimer about...”
– Nerdshares: Can we talk about THAT Christine O’Donnell story? (via dwineman)
TL;DR: this is really good!
CHUAGPQ;FS1: “Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man; and the ignoble that which subjects the man to the beast?”
—
...
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Hey hippies!
It’s been like ten years now since the last time we went over this and it looks like y’all need a refresher (a decade’s a lot of bonghits amirite?!).
All together now: there are only so many ways to slice up a pie that leaves one piece bigger than 50%.
So to the 4.8% of the Illinois population that thinks “patchouli” is the same thing as...
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Things that are fun!
So when you run a network it’s generally a good idea to associate subdomains with all your boxes (like, your web servers, databases, caches, load balancers, etc.) so that when shit goes south and you’ve got a hot shard (lol!) that you gotta restore from backup you don’t have to be all like `$ ssh langer@178.14.12.ohshitwhatsthelastoctetUGHWTF`.
And so as a result pretty much the...
“America is now the ‘PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN’ nation. Even...”
– Alex Balk
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From the vault, circa Aug. '08
langer:
In the end there’s only one meaningful rubric by which to judge the personal lives of public servants: it’s not about whether you are or aren’t a hypocrite, but whether or not your secrets have so tormented you that you’ve forsaken your natural capacity for sympathy in exchange for a compensatory desire to punish and persecute those in whom you see yourself.
It shouldn’t have mattered...
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Rally To Restore Divisions
All summer long we heard liberals correctly argue that to deny Muslims the right to build a community center in downtown Manhattan would be to willingly hand a recruiting tool to extremists who imagine the West to be the sort of place that denies Muslims the right to build community centers.
And yet this weekend liberals will gather on the Mall in our nation’s capital to collectively laugh...
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WatchSo maybe you have a “real job” or something, one where your boss can totally see your screen and so all your procastination has to come in furiously alt-tabbed five-second Facebook spurts, one where you’re “too busy working” to find the time to watch a pretty important twenty-minute video about all that’s at stake for the future of this country in next...
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Superchunk, “Learned To Surf”
More...
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Being contrarian again!
Seems like you can’t go five minutes anymore without yet another hand-wringing commentary hitting the internet in which the author Gloomily Foreshadows The Impending University Apocalypse wherein everyone suddenly wakes up to find themselves in debt up to their eyeballs with college degrees that turned out to be completely shitty investments. And it’s all getting pretty boring! Because...
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The further annals of FML.
Last night I left the office on the late side, lit a cigarette, and walked up Mercer St. towards the N/R. When I reached the corner of Mercer and Prince I raised my Winston to my lips at the precise moment that some balloons hanging from a nearby storefront caught a breeze and swung towards me. Burning ember met thin rubberized circumference of compressed helium and a balloon popped in my face,...
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Very funny, I LOL'd. ★★★★★
Marco showed up at Peter’s last night wearing an Instapaper t-shirt with a “read later” button silk-screened across the chest. Tiffany walked over at one point and pressed it. Marco threw up some jazz hands and yelled, “saved!”
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First, go read this. →
Then, go find your local NPR affiliate and open your wallet.
“Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help...”
– Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos from his now-famous Aug. 22, 1994 job listing.
We were remarking this morning in the office how funny it is to look back and remember the Amazon that began as “that place that sells books on the internet” and compare it to the Amazon that eventually...
Onward!
Biz Stone and Chris Hughes recently took different and equally valid routes towards the very reasonable conclusion that Malcolm Gladwell is a stooge, but I think one important point went unsaid: social media emerged as a powerful tool in the activist’s toolbox at the same time that it highlighted certain infuriating shortcomings, since while on the one hand it empowers activists and...
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“The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the...”
– Robert Reich: The Perfect Storm
Haiti: Nine Months Later →
jumoblog:
Last week, the Jumo team traveled to Haiti, where Partners in Health generously hosted us for an up-close look at the work underway and the challenges at hand—challenges difficult to comprehend from afar.
We wanted to share a few takeaways that you likely haven’t seen in the news.
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Together In Concert!
So this is one of the best things to happen to me in a while: I started a new job today! At Jumo!
I’ve joined up with a superbly talented and passionate team that’s working to make it easier for people to change the world (!!!), and I’m just so enormously excited to be playing a part in such a good cause, and to be doing so around so much energy and talent. And it goes without...
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Linguistics
A very wise man I once knew would get absolutely irate whenever someone “axed” him a question. “You know how to say ‘assclown’, right?” he’d yell at the top of his lungs. “Well goddamnit just say ‘assclown’ and leave off the ‘lown’ you fucking philistine.”
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Something something modern world
Smoking a cigarette on my fire escape, listening to the ballgame on the TV in the living room but watching the picture through the neighbor’s window, sharing this somewhat novel but ultimately pretty banal moment on my personal Tumblr® Tumblelog™ with a 3G-powered 4G iPhone.
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Mimesis.
Calling ‘The Social Network’ sexist is about as incisive as pointing out that the latest Michael Moore documentary has a liberal bent.
It’s a movie about computer programmers.
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