... but wouldn't it be great to actually live in an ivory tower? You'd get a great view of your surroundings, be totally protected against orc attacks (but not against ent attacks), and you could save on electricity bills by making use of the heat differential between the top bit and the bottom bit.

I’m working with a constraints checker (called CVC3). That’s a thing that will let you check properties of numbers under constraints. Errr, so for example you can say “A is an integer. It is greater than, or equal to, 4. Also, it is less than 4. Does A equal 4?” like I just did, and have it try to give you an answer. The best thing about this sort of programming is that the answer in the above case is not “crash” or “hang” but (essentially) “you’re an idiot”, complete with a minimal proof of exactly why you’re an idiot. It makes debugging a whole lot easier. 

It’s not even hard to use. Even I can use it, and I’m an idiot (as proven).

There are good times to ask stupid questions and there are bad times to ask stupid questions. One particularly bad time to ask stupid questions is when the askee has been trying to debug some code he is not familiar with, and is already so frustrated that he is just about ready to flip his jaw around and gnaw out his own brain. This mistake is egregious if you’re the debugger and you have been making a nuisance of yourself already.

Me: quit 
GNU debugger: The program is running. Exit anyway?
Me: Yes.

(next time)

(a few times later)

Don’t let this happen to you! The magic incantation is “set confirm off”. 

How do people push up their eyeglasses? I’m a Method 3 man, myself.

It’s good to see research being done in the same vein as my important work on personality and fasteners.

• Read and save these instructions.
• Do not use the appliance for other than its intended use.
• Toasting is a combination of drying and cooking the bread; moisture levels differ between breads, which can result in varying toasting times. Experience will determine the correct settings for toasting various types of bread.
• Bread with an uneven surface (such as muffins or crumpets) will require a higher setting.
• The toasting cycle can be interrupted at any time by depressing the Stop button adjacent to the browning control knob.
• Do not place “buttered” or other such treated items in the toaster.
• When toasting raisin or other fruit breads, remove any loose fruit from the surface of the bread before placing in the toaster. Fruits stuck inside the toaster or left in the crumb tray are a common cause of toaster fires.

Farker Semiotix, in a thread about Neal Stephenson’s new book:

My grandfather was pretty much all those things, too, so he’s also really getting a kick out of these replies.

Today I learned that making a marshmallow requires aeration and gelling. For aeration you can use egg whites, or corn protein. For gelling you can use marshmallow root.

Or you can use gelatine for both purposes. :(

I just fixed a bug in ddate. I discovered that the 11th, 12th, and 13th of the season weren’t being handled properly, instead being displayed like this:

Today is Setting Orange, the 12nd day of Discord in the YOLD 3174 

How many daddy long legs spiders do you think one bathroom could acceptably contain without becoming creepy? Two? Four? Is there even a hard limit? I like spiders, and daddy long legs are my favourite type of spider, but we are not yet in the sort of relationship where I am comfortable with, to take a random example, spiders in my dressing gown. If they are cold, they should get their own dressing gowns.

I might gently nudge one away from the drain with my toe, but that’s about as compassionate as I normally get.

I was browsing through a golfing magazine today, and I was stunned — it really is all about golf. It’s not like, say, a sports magazine, which is supposed to be about sports but which is actually about tits, or, say, a computer gaming magazine, which is supposed to be about computer games but which is actually about tits.

It featured hints on how to improve your swing, the appropriate size of divot to create to escape a sand trap (it’s about the size of a danish), and a detailed analysis of four different types of golf ball, which may or may not have secretly been an ad for golf balls. 

I noticed the phrase “smart money” had been coming up frequently on Google News. Here’s what smart money has done recently:

• Identified superior mutual funds
• Moved out of the Eastern bloc
• Said it’s Obama
• Picked a portrait of Neil Finn for the Archibald prize
• Smelt a bear market

I was just poking at my carotid artery and I discovered that my carotid pulse was exactly in synch with the Finntroll song I was listening to! 

Unfortunately, this was such an exciting development that my pulse quickened, ruining the effect. 

It is easy enough to say, for example, that such and such a day was rainy in the morning but fine in the afternoon, that there was a pine tree at such and such a place, or that the name of the river at a certain place was such and such, for these things are what everybody says in their diaries, although in fact they are not even worth mentioning unless there are fresh and arresting elements in them.