A German student “mooned” a group of Hell’s Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer, police have said. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10333211

It doesn’t matter how much you make up when writing fiction, the real world will come up with something odder.

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Louis Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Albert Einstein.” ~H. Jackson Brown

With Openbox on Ubuntu 10.04 I kept having an issue where VMWare would randomly destroy my key mappings and stop my ctrl and alt keys from working correctly, the only solution seemed to be restarting openbox or X, and in the middle of work that’s not an option. So here’s a command to reset your keyboard with the least amount of disruption:

setxkbmap us -print | xkbcomp - $DISPLAY

A much better solution than restarting X. Took me ages to find this, so hopefully this helps someone. I’d still like to find a fix instead of a workaround.

The anecdotal benefits of esoteric languages are a selection
effect. Here is a common scenario. Lots of really smart
programmers think they are too good to waste their talents doing mere
application programming. But they also love esoteric languages that show
off how smart they are. So you can get them to do application
programming by letting them use their beloved smarty-pants languages.
Presto, amazing results. But the ubermensch aren’t about to stoop to
maintenance programming. Once the fun development is done, they are
gone. When you bring in professional programmers to take care of things,
they are dumbfounded by the towering monument to mental masturbation.
The system gets thrown out and rewritten in a normal programming
language using normal techniques that normal people understand. The
super programmers blame it on the stupidity of the new hires, further
confirming their sense of superiority.

http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=392

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family.
Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars,
compact disc players and electrical tin openers…
choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning.
Choose sitting on that couch watching mindnumbing,
spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home,
nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future. Choose Life …

For only R1800 each, I took my dad and I out on the ultimate ride in a 1963 Huey helicopter from V&W Waterfront to Blaauwberg for some batshit combat simulation flying. Best birthday presents ever!

Take off at high speed.

Surfing extremely close to the waves. Think I saw some surfers duck.

Crazy backflips and stomach turning fun.

Cruising extremely close to the ground along a dirt road.

Doing a backflip over a hill at high speed.

I’m running Openbox with Gnome on Linux, and windows demanding attention show in
the taskbar with a yellow highlight, usually Skype IMs or something.
I’ve created the following bash script that I bind to a hotkey win-j, and pressing it changes to the correct desktop, raises the window, and focuses it. Huge time saver!

for id in `wmctrl -l | cut -d " " -f 1`; do
    xprop -id $id | grep "_NET_WM_STATE_DEMANDS_ATTENTION" 2>&1 > /dev/null
    if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
        wmctrl -i -a $id
        exit 0
    fi
done
exit 1

Requirements: Wmctrl (sudo apt-get install wmctrl)

“The Daily Mail has a story about a study looking into women’s preference for men. More specifically, about how women say they want one kind of man, but really want another. From the article: ‘Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons. Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women. A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. A hairy chest was voted third, followed by a man who loves to read or cries at a soppy film.’”

[via Slashdot]

Terrifying. Six beers and a shaky camera hand and you’ve got bigfoot.