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Now that I can log into soda again, I’ve been catching up on some of my favorite newsgroups. Presented here are some of the finer snippets, à la a non-numeric Harper’s Index:

• Favorite description of a world leader:
  

  I suspect he’s not working on cheap power for the people, so much as petaJoule buckets of sunshine for sale to other nations and groups, for eventual delivery to various locations in the US. –Mike Andrews

• Favorite euphemism for said buckets:
  

  “Instant sunshine”–Shalon Wood

• Other new words:
  

  The “Ohnosecond” has been suggested for that moment of realisation that comes from firing off a recursive file-delete in the utterly wrong directory — though I’d rather like to suggest the “Sphinctosecond” to reflect that brief arse-tightening sensation which inevitably accompanies the realisation that Things Have Just Become Not What They Should Be And It’s Your Fault.–Tanuki

I’ve switched the backend of this site to WordPress, and will be migrating older posts in my Copious Free Time. New posts should hopefully be more frequent, as I have added a new category (“sartorial”) for other ideas that have crossed my mind. Actually, that’s not the original category, but it replaced “frivolous” after a moment’s thought.

Update: for the moment, the older posts are still accessible.

Each time I have made a change to my site I wondered how to handle updates; some snippet of recent news, projects I’m working on, and so forth. That would soon lead to questions of how to archive the older information as well as to make it somewhat accessible for later reference.

Eventually these things called weblogs started to appear; they seemed the instrument of choice for amateur journalists, as well as for trendy hipsters who could sip their lattés and record their every passing mood (usually “angsty”). More to the point, they provided ready solutions to most of the above questions. While I felt a need to avoid falling victim to the herd mentality, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I put up my own.

So, here I am. I hope to collect a few of the more entertaining rumors, as well as the occasional essay. Topics should cover technology in education, geopolitics, some market issues, and the culture wars of science and religion.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
— Thomas Jefferson, 1800

Mood: bemused.