USA Today has a nice little website to let you pick a stance out of a set of choices to see which of the theoretical candidates we get to vote on in November. This is obviously not scientific, but it’s still interesting because they based the choices on quotes from each of the candidates while they’ve been campaigning.

I wasn’t too surprised by my results. I think for progressives, it has become a sad cycle of having to pick the least conservative of the two options available. We haven’t had a good progressive candidate since I’ve been able to vote.

Oh, and by the way, this site uses Flash. If by chance you’re one of those people who brag about disabling Flash in your browser, don’t bother.

Great discussion on 5by5 about the classic movie Goodfellas. Dan and John devote a good 3 hours to the subject.

If nothing else, this just validates that Coach is the hippest character in the Left 4 Dead franchise.

I still read Slashdot daily in my RSS reader… for now. While the articles linked to usually contain interesting information, the comments are another story. Comments have always been a big component of Slashdot, but the way they work now feels more like a relic of the past. There have been several blogs which are noteworthy for adhering to the idea that comments do not belong on a blog. If you want to reach out or react to content on the web, there are so many ways to achieve that now that blog comments should be segregated from the blog content and channeled through the appropriate social network.

Whether Slashdot decides to do that is not the point of this post, but that they need to do something different. The content on Slashdot has not decreased in quality, but I think that the comments have. I present three specific articles that I think aptly demonstrates how terrible they really are now.

Near the end of the year I have been doing some housekeeping at work during the quiet days of December. I was about to install mongodb on a development server for a new project, when I noticed the server was low on disk space. The culprit, an Oracle database I had installed near the beginning of the year. This made me laugh out loud when I realized that our team had not been using at since May. After the initial amusement had worn off, I suddenly realized something:

I had forgotten to how to uninstall Oracle. The temerity!

This blog post is to capture a support article which helped me fix a problem on my MacBook Pro. Google still brings it up as the first result, but Apple seems to “misplace” the page when I visit it. The page in question was live at the time of this post, but I’m going to capture the relevant information here in case Apple misplaces the page again.

It’s that time of year again. Happy Festivus!

That must have been some kind of doll.
She was.

It’s weird to think that Fellowship of the Ring came out 10 years ago this month. I can vividly remember how excited I was to see the movie, and how I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest when I saw it on opening day. This teaser trailer has got me just as excited, possibly even more so because I know what kind of quality to expect in December, 2012.

It’s truly a shame that these guys no longer produce videos. Check out their individual sites here: Duane Brando