kampers.net

“I have nodded and looked into their eyes and hummed sympathetically as people gave their reasons and made their excuses and generally offered up, as if they were golden ingots of profound wisdom, the handful of two-penny nails with which they plan to board up the windows of their hopes for themselves, their families, their country and the world.”
—Michael Chabon, in a Washington Post op-ed about Obama and the “Phobocracy” #

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
—Koz in #rails-contrib after I mentioned that I’d headed into Rails’ routing code a couple months ago to add a new feature, then got scared and went home #

“If I’d wanted building blocks for rolling my own, I’d have gone to Home Depot and bought a 1 and a 0.”
—Ian Dees, in a post comparing distributed version control systems #

“RKelly is a ruby implementation of Kelly. Kelly is a fictional project that I made up so that I could name my project RKelly.”
—Aaron Patterson on his new Javascript parser

Suggested taglines (from I’m a Flirt, Thoia Thoing, and Dollar Bill):

• Let me remind you that I am the king of dot-r-b…
• Tell me, what’s Ruby without The R?
• I roll from Chitown to Cali, yield your block, I bless the day that Ruby met Smalltalk…
• Vacation in Japan while you wish for Bennihana’s, on the way to pick up Matz, he strips down BasicObject… lambda#call ya’ll, lambda#call ya’ll, lambda#call, ya’ll… #

From bryanF.’s photostream. #

Ticketmaster surcharge to buy one ticket to the Beirut show at the Avalon this week: 54%. Want to have a paper ticket sent to you? 138%. #

“Favorites from Plimpton’s list of objects thrown by Rangers fans: soup cans, persimmon, eggs, a folding chair, and a dead rabbit.”
—The Weakerthans #

“You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
—Ray Bradbury (via) #

From Iain Tait’s photostream. #

By purchasing a ticket to an event, or completing this registration form in order to be able to purchase a ticket to an event or to bid in an auction, you indicate that you consent to Ticketmaster sharing your e-mail address and other information with those involved in the event (e.g., venues, teams, artists’ representatives and fan clubs, promoters and leagues), and that you consent to those involved in the event using your information to contact you by e-mail or other means to send you marketing or other messages or using or disclosing your information in other ways. Please contact them directly to learn about their policies. By completing this registration form, you also indicate that you consent to Ticketmaster contacting you by e-mail or other means to send you marketing or other messages and using and disclosing the information you submit, as described in the Ticketmaster Privacy Policy.

Translation: if you want to go to see your favorite band, we’re going to sell your email, phone, and address to anybody remotely related to the show. They’ll sell your email address to whomever they want.

I have a special “ticketmaster@kampers.net” address set up, just to see what happens to it—about a year ago, I started getting everything from personalized credit offers (from real banks) to Viagra spam there.

If I ever take a break from working on Roses & Hello, starting a legitimate Ticketmaster competitor is next on the list. #

I look back on these projects with a certain mystified satisfaction; I’m glad they were done, but it is as though they had been accomplished by somebody else, for the particular furies and fevers that impelled them have long since evaporated.

Little in life comes naturally—except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts—and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire. (I remember the deliberate decision to appropriate one teacher’s mischievous grin and darting eyes, which I found so charming that I thought they might work for me, too.)

From Tim Page’s essay in The New Yorker about Asperger’s syndrome. #