While I was out for the evening walk tonight, I ran across something unexpected. At the top of the hill by the Jubilee Auditorium, there were a dozen or so people just sitting around on the grass and benches, all facing the same direction. As I passed by, the reason became obvious; they were art students doing drawings of that area (the Alberta College of Art and Design is also nearby).

Of course, they were all facing the sidewalk I had to walk down. It feels strange walking away knowing that there are a dozen or so young people, mostly women, watching your buttback as you fade into the distance…

How can you go through life without knowing what the shirt of the day is?

Mmmm, chocolate milk…

(Found via Corii’s LJ)

And I thought I was a cynical kid.

(I think I actually remember seeing the real Six Million Dollar Man ads like this in the backs of comics as a kid.)

Search engines are sources of endless fun. Who would have expected that a search for technical help resolving long pauses in SSH would also turn up erotic fan fiction stories within the first few pages?

This may very well be the first program that’s honest about what it actually gets used for (check the screenshots): gnaughty

At first glance you might think the Stones were back in town. Or that someone’s celebrating a late Valentine’s Day. But no, this is apparently the design for a set of urinals that will be installed in a club at JFK airport in New York.

As if there weren’t enough reasons to be embarrassed in public already…

(Update: They’ve scrapped the idea.)

Gentlemen, behold! TOAST!

(From an old MPEG file from the dawn of the Internet I found in the dusty corners of my hard drive, converted to animated GIF.)

It was unseasonably warm today, but not *that* warm…

Right now you cannot get a steak and cheese sub at the Subway near where I work. Or any of the other locations I’ve been to recently (you can’t throw a stone without hitting a Subway around here for some reason). Why? Well according to a little sign they have posted, it is because there is insufficient beef because of import restrictions due to the recent mad cow scares.

Insufficient beef. In Alberta. Wait a sec, they are using Canadian beef, right? Why yes, all beef used in their subs is 100% Canadian beef, the sign assures us. But it’s still considered imported because it’s packed in the U.S.

So, we raise cattle here in Alberta, ship them off to the States to be slaughtered and packed, and then import them back here before putting them in our sandwiches.

…

This is probably some side effect of franchising and their supply chains, but something still seems wrong here…

To protect FIDO, we always made sure that there was an engineer standing just a few paces from the rover who was responsible for making sure the rover never did anything that would cause it to damage itself. This was quite often Terry Huntsberger, one of the principals on the FIDO project. […] If Terry noticed something dangerous about to happen, he would hit a red button on the back of the rover that would cause the rover to immediately stop moving. This was called “spanking” the rover, and it happened VERY rarely. Still, I must admit that it was comforting to me to know that Terry was always out there, watching every motion of the rover. If we made a mistake, we might feel pretty stupid about it, but Terry would stop us before it was too late.

It’s hard to mentally adjust to the fact that there isn’t anyone standing behind Spirit wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, ready to spank the rover if we do anything wrong.

(from a journal at NASA)

Well, it finally happened. I got up early, prepared for the day, walked to the office, and now I’m sitting here by myself because I forgot it’s a freaking statutory holiday.

I’d have myself tested for Alzheimer’s, but I’d forget to go pick up the results…

(Though to be fair it’s ‘Family Day’, one of those artificial holidays that exists only so the province meets the minimum federal holiday requirements. It’s not exactly much cause for celebration.)

(I’ve mostly converted over to Firefox at work already, but fired up IE to check on Windows patches.)