ddate displays the Discordian date, like this:

$ddate
Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 24th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3174

It comes with every Linux distro I’ve ever used, but doesn’t exist for Mac. So I consulted my pineal gland and then walked clockwise around my house until my neighbours asked me politely to stop. When I got back inside I discovered that the binary had appeared in my tmp directory.

Here is a copy: ddate.gz 

Here’s the source code, which is an entertaining read.

Dentist’s receptionist: So, I’ll book you in for 2 again. You like 2?

Me: Yeah, that’s fine. I was booked in for 2:30 last time, and everyone made jokes.

Dentist’s receptionist: 2:30? Jokes?

Me: Oh, you know — tooth hurty.

Dentist’s receptionist: Oh! Ha ha ha!

Me: Yeah! I’m surprised you haven’t heard that one before.

Dentist’s receptionist: No! I’ll have to bring it up at the next meeting! That’s great. Thanks! It’s “bring a joke to the dentist’s”.

---

I think I sometimes have a strange way of talking that causes people to respond strangely. I don’t mean to and I wish I could stop, because conversations get very confusing very quickly.

Hygienist: This machine sort of works like a sandblaster.

Me: A sandblaster?

Hygienist: Yes, I probably shouldn’t say that, but it uses water, and a bit of peroxide, to remove stains.

Me: And maybe some sand.

Hygienist: Yes. And some sand.

I just got back from moving stuff into my new house. I arrived at about 12am, and half an hour later me, my new housemate, and a friend of hers (who turned up, awesomely, with pide and garlic bread) were discussing the desert “world’s end” sequence of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and whether Johnny Depp played it like he played Raoul Duke in the hotel sequence of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. And I was learning how to shake hands with the cat, who is named Velcro de Fang.

I think I’m going to like the new place. 

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Get-a-Free-Yacht/ to access my house at Bar Point (thanks Bryn)

http://www.domain.com.au/Public/PropertyDetails.aspx?adid=5172938 (thanks Catie)

“So did I miss it? Possibly,” he said of his unrealized prediction. “Or, on the other hand, did God avert it? Possibly. But whatever, it didn’t happen, so I think we can all rejoice.”

So either he was wrong, God changed her mind, or whatever. My faith in whatever has been renewed for another year…

— Farker the_cnidarian, on Pat Robertson’s failed God-inspired prediction of “very serious terrorist attacks” in 2007. Thanks to Pat I, too, have reaffirmed my belief in whatever. Happy 2008 of whatever, everybody.

Expressed on a shorter timescale, however, this equates to an average performance improvement in the industry as a whole of close to 1% per week. Thus, for a manufacturer in the competitive CPU market, a new product that is expected to take three years to develop and turns out just three or four months late is 10 to 15% slower, bulkier, or lower in capacity than the directly competing products, and is close to unsellable. 

— Wikipedia

I just learned at slate.com that when flies land on a ceiling, they touch with their front legs and then do a forward somersault.

This may be baloney.

I wish K&R hadn’t not spelt “#ifndef NDEBUG” as “#ifdef DEBUG”

We are often asked: why don’t you provide server side filtering, I thought that is what Christian ISP services do? The short answer is that we believe in individual responsibility. For to[o] long parents have allowed the television to be their surrogate parent, trusting those who promised to be responsible and police themselves. We know what the result of that has been. As a result, our Christian ISP promotes individual responsibility and parental control by providing PC-side filtering.

Angel’s share is a winemaking term for the portion (share) of a wine’s volume that is lost to evaporation. This phenomenon occurs during aging in oak barrels, typically French or American oak, or after distillation. (Wikipedia)

http://wiinintendo.net/2007/12/28/the-wii-officially-hacked/ Looks like they did it by physically connecting memory lines so they could access memory above that accessible to the GameCube, dumped it all, and found the key. Means people can now write native Wii games. I guess that Nintendo won’t be able to do anything about it without major consequences (such as all old games not working). Very exciting!

Why is it that the more gourmet the ice cream, the creamier it is? Cream doesn’t taste very nice. Eventually it just tastes like gumming on a stick of butter. I think the more gourmet the ice cream, the stronger and more interesting the flavour should be.

You rack (stretch / strain) your brain, you don’t wrack (destroy / ruin) it.