COVINA, Calif. – A man dressed as Santa Claus opened fire at a Christmas Eve party in a suburban Los Angeles home that subsequently caught fire, leaving three people dead, police said.

The man arrived at the party in Covina late Wednesday and immediately opened fire with a handgun, police Lt. Pat Buchanan said.

Buchanan says three bodies were found after the fire was put out. He could not say how the fire started or how the three people died.

'Santa' opens fire at Calif. party; 3 dead - Yahoo! News

Sol Sender, who led a design team for the Obama 08 logo, was recently interviewed about the project.

Here’s a walk through the various logo options, with some of Sol’s thoughts.

Really, 08ama?

I guess there are not a lot of political years where leet speak works, considering an even number. As far as I know, 2 or 6 don't really transcribe...

Obama logo ideas that weren’t chosen | Logo Design Love

Sketches of places in Seattle, on a Google Map

Seattle Sketcher - Google Maps

I thought it was an odd picture to be asking about. Let’s face it; it’s not a very good photo. It’s blurry and washed out. I guess it’s somewhat unusual in that it was shot inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. Usually members of the public aren’t allowed inside. Myself, Andy and Paul were lucky enough to be part of the first open day since 2001. It was all thanks to an invitation from Benny, a bona fide rocket scientist at NASA—thanks again, Benny!

I never got around to responding to the emails. I figured that, whoever it was, if they really wanted to use the picture, they would notice the licence and realise that they didn’t have to ask permission.

Iron Man borrowed a photo from flickr that was more appropriate than they had realized...

Adactio: Journal—Iron Man and me

Here is a a way to define new shell buffers using the usual ‘shell’ command. The point is that I don’t want to bother of the buffer’s name. So one press f7 to go to a shell buffer (if needed the command will start a new process), further uses of f7 in this buffer will cycle through the existing shell buffers. If you want a new shell buffer press C-u f7.

EmacsWiki: Shell Mode

“It is remarkable that during the period that Fannie Mae substantially increased its exposure to credit risk its regulator made no visible effort to enforce any limits,” Raines, 59, who was ousted in 2004 and accused of accounting manipulation, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington today.

Bloomberg.com: News

Clearly, to adhere to our style rules, F.D.R. should have said “that.” This is a restrictive clause defining the “date” we’re talking about. (In fact, the Columbia World of Quotations, among other sources, renders the quote incorrectly online, substituting “that.”)

Perhaps Roosevelt thought, as many writers and speakers seem to do, that “which” sounded more elevated or powerful. Or perhaps he was influenced by British usage, which often employs “which” in restrictive clauses. In any case, we’re prepared to allow an exception here.

Simplify, Simplify - Times Topics Blog - NYTimes.com

My anger, though, doesn’t arrive when and where you’d think it would. Gliding into the radiation machine, getting a hormone shot and wearing mini-man-pads don’t set me off. It’s smaller, less expected, things, like a fellow customer being mean and rude to the server behind the counter at Starbucks, or a car busting a red light as I walk to my New York office.

That kind of behavior has always bothered me on some level. But since I learned that I have cancer, I react differently. I’ve walked the streets of New York for decades, and not thought twice about the cars that run red lights and nearly nail me and other pedestrians. It’s a fact of life in the big city, like rats on the subway tracks. I used to shrug and keep walking.

Since my diagnosis last April, though, and especially since my prostatectomy last July, it has not been so easy for me to shrug it off. Perhaps it’s because prostate cancer and its treatment have left me feeling vulnerable. Now, it’s as if a heedless speeding car pulls some small biological trigger of agitation that too quickly metastasizes into rage. Suddenly, I’m howling at the traffic. If I could, I’d turn green and bellow: “Hulk smash!!!”

Getting Angry About Prostate Cancer - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

The Son Of Sam (SoS) is my attempt at bringing the same basic design ideas from the world of web applications (and pretty much any application written after 1990) to the world of SMTP processing.

At its core SoS is just a Python based SMTP server that can receive emails, process them using handlers based on routing regex, and then relay results out again using templates. All of this is done without using alias files, m4 macros, pipes, weird protocols, or duplicate processing of the emails.

SoS just works like a flexible scripting language SMTP should operate.nullnull

ZSFA -- Son Of Sam Email Server

Other proposals include everything from persuading consumers to eat less meat to slapping a “sin tax” on pork and beef. Next year, Sweden will start labeling food products so that shoppers can look at how much emission can be attributed to serving steak compared with, say, chicken or turkey.

“Of course for the environment it’s better to eat beans than beef, but if you want to eat beef for New Year’s, you’ll know which beef is best to buy,” said Claes Johansson, chief of sustainability at the Swedish agricultural group Lantmannen.

As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions - NYTimes.com