Tim on July 17th, 2008

Saw a post on the Freakonomics blog about wines, and people’s abilities to tell the difference between good and bad wines. I love Levitt for his willingness to piss people off in the pursuit of truth (read the part about the scholar who stormed out of the room!) Anyways, there was a large study done, […]

Continue reading about What makes a great wine?



Tim on July 16th, 2008

This post is for those of you who follow international politics on any level.
The US has had a policy of not speaking to Iran for many years. There’s even a debate in the current presidential election around “should we talk to our enemies?”.  Well, apparently someone in the current US administration thinks so.
There’s a lot […]

Continue reading about This gives me hope.

Tim on July 15th, 2008

If you’re involved in the process of writing code on any real level, you should be a reader of Coding Horror. It’s written by a guy named Jeff Atwood, and he’s definitely got something going on between his ears.
There’s a good post from a few days ago talking about “monkey patching” which brings up […]

Continue reading about A monkey wrench in monkey patching.

Tim on July 14th, 2008

I don’t know Twitter’s mission statement, but to me it seems like it should involve enabling stream-of-consciousness communication. When I look at heavy Twitter users (especially those with iPhones), it is close to stream-of-consciousness — it seems like they’re sending every other thought to Twitter. But it’s not stream-of-consciousness for most people, there’s too much […]

Continue reading about The next Twitter.

Tim on July 9th, 2008

This Gorbachov music video is insane.  There’s some Russian history going on, and some metal, and some hot girls with Twinkies. This video is bizzare, but totally awesome.
Thanks to Corey for the link.

Continue reading about Gorbachov: The Music Video

Tim on July 2nd, 2008

If you’ve ever worked in IT, watch The Website Is Down. It’s one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while. If it’s not funny to you, you’ve never worked in IT.

Continue reading about Ever done IT?

Tim on July 2nd, 2008

I’m trying a neat workout program, called one hundred pushups. Right now I’m on week 3 of the program. It’s pretty neat so far — only needs about 5 minutes, 3 days a week. If you’ve been thinking about getting in better shape, definitely take a look at this. Literally, if all you’ve ever done […]

Continue reading about Easy exercise

Tim on July 2nd, 2008

As a follow-up to my previous post about how to create comma separated strings from arrays, here’s another array tip.
Let’s take the previous example of the Tags array. Except this time, Tags contains the IDs, which correspond to the textual string.
Tags[0] = 23
Tags[1] = 42
Tags[2] = 314
Rather than write a for-loop to look up each […]

Continue reading about Learn to Map

Tim on July 2nd, 2008

I recently realized how much of the art of programming is just lots of little tricks that you pick up along the way. I’m resolving to share these little tricks, in the hopes that others will do the same, either on their blogs or in the comments here.
Here’s one involving an array and building a […]

Continue reading about Comma, Separated, Values,

Tim on July 2nd, 2008

The confirmation that the iPhone will only be activated in AT&T stores is a sign that a definite concession that was made to get the price cut made. I enjoyed activating my phone from the comfort of my home — it was nice. So, it does reduce the user experience which they’re always going […]

Continue reading about Apple negotiates, not dictates