Grazing life.

May
29th

Fri

Yet some would thrive on budget cuts and scares;
They are solutions to the problems faced.
See how it works for constant VMware
Which offers lower costs with each replaced
Big, bulky box of hardware, fixed in place.
The VMware solution breaks them down
In manageable pieces. In the space
Where single-server platforms once would frown,
Now sings a happy choir — like a cloud —
Of virtual machines: A mighty mass
To rearrange, reallocate un-cowed
To fit the task at hand; no more — no less.
The very likeness of efficient cash
That virtual investment makes a splash!

— 3 Sonnets on Virtue … and Virtual Computing

Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise” (via NeilCicierega) — a whole world you may wish you did not know existed

May
27th

Wed

As a society, we desperately need non-custodial adults who teens can turn to for advice.

— apophenia: when teachers and students connect outside school

May
25th

Mon

[…] he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.

— The Atlantic Online | June 2009 | What Makes Us Happy? | Joshua Wolf Shenk

May
13th

Wed

Jon: “Heather, there isn’t that much to do. It’s going to be fine.”

This reminds me of the book I want to write about remodeling. It would go, “Nothing will be fine. Now go re-read that first sentence. The end.”

— The Armstrong Bathroom Makeover Catastrophe | dooce®

The American Dream should require hard work, but it should not require 80-hour workweeks and parents who never see their kids from across the dinner table. The American Dream should entail a first-rate education for every child, but not an education that leaves no extra time for the actual enjoyment of childhood. The American Dream should accommodate the goal of home ownership, but without imposing a lifelong burden of unmeetable debt

— Rethinking the American Dream | vanityfair.com

May
12th

Tue

Ben Chrisman Wedding Journal

Two Studies of a Baby with a Bottle, Rembrandt van Rijn

May
11th

Mon

Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

May
10th

Sun

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he’s ever heard of onto C to create C . The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer. Skynet’s motives for performing the service remain unclear but spokespeople from the future say “there is nothing to be concerned about, baby,” in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer overrun.

— One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages