Hugh Hollowell

(via Andrew)

I bet he does.

I have the best landlords ever. I really do.

However, for the last two weeks, the painters have been painting the house, so five times now I have gotten out of the shower only to see a painter, on a ladder, outside my bathroom window. Yesterday, I had to pee in a jar in my closet because they were working outside my bathroom window. In fact, outside all of my windows.

I will be soooo glad when they are done. On a positive note, the house is now much prettier.

If you are a nerd (or just work in an office environment), there are some awesome, mostly easy to accomplish pranks in this list. For example:

10. The Wrath of Rotation
A simple but quick and always amusing prank is putting the screen rotation hotkeys to uses Microsoft never intended. Just run by a co-worker’s desk, reach over and hit Ctrl-Alt-up or down to rotate their monitor orientation. If you have some alone time, you can one-up it by also going into the Control Panel and setting their mouse to left-handed. They’ll spend 10 minutes with their head tilted sideways trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Find the whole list here: The 25 Best High-Tech Pranks.

In what has to be a contender for the happiest website ever, the makers of the washlet tell you how you can have “an oasis of happiness” in your bathroom.

Last night Renee and I went out with some friends to eat Indian. My friend John recommended Royal India on Capitol (warning, music plays when you go to that link). Very good call. The food was good, staff was polite and the conversation was first rate. Entree’s ran about $15 a person.

When I was deciding where to go, I put a cry for help out on Twitter. I got several recommendations (including John’s), but this morning my other friend John pointed out this spreadsheet of Indian restaurants in the Triangle, complete with price ranges and whether they have a buffet, by Justin Wehr.

In the public school I attended we were told, for calculation purposes, to limit Pi to 3.14.  Most hand calculators will go to eight digits 3.14159265… Being an irrational number, it actually goes on forever, without end, even if as of yet the computers have only carried it out to about a trillion numbers. (Here is Pi out to a million digits.)

Ever since it was first identified by the ancient Greeks, memorizing pi has been an obsession for enthusiasts, and is now a regular feature of Pi Day, which is tomorrow, March 14th. (3/14 – get it?). All over the world there will be contests to see who can go for the most digits memorized, the current record holder being Akira Haraguchi, who memorized Pi to 100,000 decimal places on October 3, 2006.

Having the mathematical skills of a stick, but being above average in English, I early on discovered piems, which are mnemonic poems designed to help you calculate and remember pi. In piems, the number of letters in each word represents the digit in that place in pi. For example, to memorize the first 15 digits,

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course,
after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!

How =3, I=1, want=4, etc.

As you might expect, given the restrictions, most piems are not very good examples of poetry, and most have no real rhythm. I do like this rather lyrical one, carrying pi to 30 points:

Sir, I send a rhyme excelling,

In sacred truth and rigid spelling,

Numerical sprites elucidate,

For me the lexicon’s dull weight,

If nature gain, not you complain

Tho’ Dr Johnson fulminate.

While no longer technically the longest, perhaps the most ambitious undertaking in the piem department belongs to the poem Near a Raven, by Mike Keith.  The title and author credit all are part of the mnemonic, as are the two final lines.

Poe, E.
Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap – the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
“This”, I whispered quietly, “I ignore”.

Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
Inflamed by lightning’s outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
That inimitable lesson in elegance – Lenore -
Is delighting, exciting…nevermore.

(Go read the whole thing here)

If you want to compare the poem to Poe’s original, it can be found here.)

Perhaps one of the most used quotes out there is “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing“, by Edmund Burke. Or is it?

In an effort to track down the source of this oft attributed line, Martin Porter, back in the winter of 2002, tracked down hundreds of variants and linked to hundreds of sites, but could never reach the source. His conclusion?  Burke never said it.  It is a “pseudo-quote”.

It is generally believed to be an adaptation from Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770): “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.“

On Twitter you only have 140 characters to work with, so every one of them counts. If posting a url in a tweet, best practice is to use a url shortening service. But which one?

Laura Lee Dooley has anticipated your question and done an exhaustive comparison, with a chart and everything, of most of the major URL shortening services, such as tinyurl and so on.  I am a fan of tr.im myself, which came in a strong third.

Many of my recent conversations, with both friends and new acquaintances alike, have turned to spiritual topics. Several of those conversations have ended with the other person thanking me, and then they say something like “There was nowhere I felt safe talking about this stuff”.

I know just what you mean. I can relate to not having a safe place to question things without fear of being bulldozed over for having doubts or asking honest questions. In most places we can talk about faith, tolerance for other views is a lot like sex in high school: It gets talked about much more than it actually happens.

After querying several friends, I decided to try to create such a place. A place where you can ask hard questions, a place where we can disagree and still be friends, where we can learn from each other, a place where we can put aside labels like Catholic and Pagan and Liberal and Conservative and… well, you get the point.  A safe place.

On Tuesday, March 3rd at 7pm, that place will be The Royal Bean at 3801 Hillsborough St in Raleigh, across from the entrance to Meredith College.

That night we will have about 2 hours of Coffee & Conversation. Safe conversation. This is not a “Christian” thing – this is a human thing. I don’t care if you are a skeptic, a pagan, a hellfire preacher or a Presbyterian, all views are welcome. Just come with an open mind and a willingness to listen to each other.

The topic that night will be ‘What is God (as you understand God) Like?’. It will be open conversation and discussion… this is not, God forbid, a lecture or a sermon or a Bible study. There is NO agenda other than a conversation. I hope you can make it.

If it looks like you will drop by, please shoot me an email at hughlh at gmail dot com and let me know, so I can save you a seat.

Update: Several folks have asked if this is going to be a regular thing. The short answer is, I don’t know. It sorta depends on who shows up, on how it goes and if anybody thinks it was a good thing. In other words, we will play it by ear.