perldiver

"At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature."

From here--worth the read. (For non-chemists:  even at room temperature, elemental fluorine is the most pathologically reactive chemical in existence.  It requires special lab gear because it will bond to virtually anything, meaning it will strip the insides off glassware / stoppers / etc.)


Update:  Out of curiosity, was reading the comments on that blog (also worth reading!) and did some googling / link following as a result.  Found this chemistry book: 409 pages, costs $4,880!  (No, that is not a typo:  ~$12 per page!)  I knew that textbooks were expensive, but good lord!

Merry Christmas all!

We have all survived the shopping, and the wrapping, and the traveling, and the worrying, and the day is finally upon us. A day to kick back in front of a fire, put our slippered feet up on the ottoman (or the coffee table, I won't tell) listen to a bit of DeBussy or Rachmaninoff in our smoking jackets, share a fine port with family and close friends while saying "Pip, pip old turtle!" in faux British accents, open our many tasteful, thoughtfully selected presents and enjoy the perfect, untrammeled layer of snow outside the window that someone else will shovel for us when we're ready to have it trammeled.

What? No one else ever has those weird "Norman Rockwell has Masterpiece Theatre's lovechild" dreams and feels compelled to write them down?


In all seriousness: a very Merry Christmas to all of my wonderful friends, near and far. You brighten my life.

A few weeks ago, kokoinai and I applied to YCombinator for "venture capital" funding of LifeThunder.  I use the quotes because YC doesn't really do VC in the traditional sense; they invest $17,000 in a 2-person startup (like us), and their value is more on the business and networking side.

It's a four stage process:

1) Apply
2) Hear back that you have been invited to demo for them
3) Hear back that you have been accepted for investment
4) Profit!

(Ok, step 4 may not *necessarily* follow....)

Today is the day that we hear whether or not we've been invited to demo.  And no, I'm not compulsively checking all three of my email accounts (since I forget which one I gave them).  I mean, after all, they're in CA and therefore 3 hours earlier than me.  It's 11am here, so they are probably just getting started with the final reading of applications.

Huh, I wonder if the email came in since I started writing this....<click>

Personally, this had me laughing so hard I cried. Hopefully, it will at least brighten everyone else's day a bit:

Tech Support Considered Unnecessary

I'm trying to sign up for Flickr, which is a Yahoo property.  Do I have a Yahoo email?  I dunno, maybe at one point, who cares?  Oh, "dstorrs" is taken?  Fine, let me see if that was more then.

Off to http://yahoo.com/.  Hm...where do I log in?

Ok, forget that.  I bet it's http://mail.yahoo.com/.  Yep.

Ok, try some of my standard "low-priority site" passwords.  Nope, none get me in.

Click "Help! I've forgotten my password and I can't get up!"

After some middling steps, they ask me for my alternate address.  In small font, generated by Javascript so that you can't cut/paste it and (in theory) a harvester won't see it, they say "Hint:  Your alternate email is ***********@e********.net"

I kid you not.  So, basically, I know that the account name that I was probing for is "dstorrs", and I know that the domain is earthlink.net.


I'm reminded of a card named "Filter" from the old Netrunner CCG  The flavor text was along the lines of "Yes, it will let you in if you got the password mostly right--but hey, at least it's free!" (*)


(*) Yes, I'm a geek and yes, the Internet knows everything.  Actually the text was "Friendly even to numerically challenged employees, it accepts transposed numerals in the access codes."  I think my version was funnier.  And the card was a zero cost [i.e., free] Code Gate.

[Update: Oh, ferfugssake, neither DW nor LJ will display the image. Fine, here's the link: http://graphjam.com/2008/06/16/song-chart-memes-god-vs-satan/ ]


My work here is done. Thank you, and good night.

Second day of daily workouts, this one slightly harder than previous.  Oddly, my abs do not yet ripple.

Quoted from this post by fallenpegasus :

One of them, when I meet them, I may feel the need to apologize for killing the power to their house by accidentally perfectly nailing the powerline to their house with a frisbee.

This made me snerk.

http://life2oons.posterous.com/15-most-strange-buildings-of-the-world

Totally awesome.  Number 12 is funniest in a po-mo sort of way, I think.

--Dks

Kevin Smith movies are very, VERY spotty in my experience.  I loved Chasing Amy, but most of his other stuff is, in my not-so-humble opinion, total crap.  Now I'm watching Clerks.  And I think I'm going to need emergency surgery to repair a gut busted through laughter.

The best part of all is that Jay has almost no lines, and almost no screen time.  (Ah, shoot.  He's on screen now.  With a bunch of lines.  GET OFF MY SCREEN YOU STUPID JACKASS.)  The good news is that Silent Bob [Kevin Smith] got a line.  When he talks, it's usually one of the funniest moments in the movie.

And now I know the meaning of that line from Chasing Amy "my best friend <bleeped> a dead guy in that bathroom!"  :> :>