This place kicks ass. If you live in the Atlanta area and you enjoy German beer/food, check this place out. It is totally worth the drive!

Vreny's Biergarten

mmm...the infamous CDC infectious disease trading card sets. I have finally obtained a real physical copy (not printed), so today is a happy day! Print out a set for yourself today! And don't forget to wash your hands afterwards:)

CDC-Global Health Odyssey-

Acidus had a project mentioned offhandedly on the Daily Show a few months ago but Virgil has seriously raised the bar by actually getting his picture on the Colbert report! We now have a new standard for leetness around here. If you haven't been personally denounced by Steven Colbert, you just aren't that important...

WikiScanner on the Colbert Report

Cool sushi wallet knitting kits....good gift idea for people into knitting.....hint hint;)

Maker Store from MAKE and CRAFT Magazines

The State Department has a message for White House candidates wanting to expound on sensitive diplomatic issues: Shut up...

First it was Barack Obama's talk of dialogue with dictators and invading Pakistan to kill Islamist militants, then it was Hillary Rodham Clinton refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons to that end. Now, the Democratic front-runners have been joined by radical Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, who threatened to bomb Muslim holy sites to stop terror attacks....

"To somehow suggest that an appropriate response to terrorism would be to attack sites that are holy and sacred to more than a billion people throughout the world is just absolutely crazy," he said, denouncing "any suggestion that the defense of the American homeland or the defense of American interests would ever justify attacking holy sites."

Amen....I shudder at the fact that Tom Tancredo actually got elected to Congress.

U.S. State Department cringes as presidential hopefuls muddy diplomatic waters - International Herald Tribune

Hey...just wanted to say thanks to Rattle and Decius. I personally know that they basically spent *ALL* day on Sunday (in to the wee hours of the morning) coding to fix this problem. I am very impressed at their determination to get this problem resolved before the monday morning "oh god I am at work, guess I will surf the web instead" rush hour. And thanks to Starbucks and Venti sized coffees, which I also saw had a hand in this tour-de-force.

Decius wrote:
This morning a few links popped up on MemeStreams that don't work if you click on them. You get an error message which says "I could not find the proper URL based on the OID. You may have reached this page due to an error."

We realize that this is a serious problem. Unfortunately, it is not a simple to fix and it is going to take time.

When we first started working on this project back in 2001 we were completely green at relational database design, and we made a poor decision, which was to use a feature of Postgresql called "OID" which at the time was defined as globally unique for an entire database. Unfortunately, the Postgres team later decided that this was impossible, and change the definition of OID. In newer versions of the database, which we are running due to numerous performance enhancements, OIDs aren't globally unique, or even unique to a table.

At this point, unfortunately, we had a hell of a lot of code invested in OIDs. We figured it would be a long, long time before OIDs would end up repeating in our database, and so we could wait to change all of that code. Unfortunately, today, OIDs appear to have started repeating in the blog table far in advance of when we thought this was likely, as this table only has 44,000 entries. There are about 500 references to OIDs in our code, and in order to fix this problem, we'll likely have to change them all.

This is going to require time from us, and hopefully patience from you.

RE: The OID Problem

Oh hell yes. Tickets to see Bjork at the fabulous fox theater are mine. This is huge!

One person died and 26 were injured after a steam pipe burst in midtown Manhattan Wednesday, causing a transformer to explode and sending thick plumes of steam and ash into the air near Grand Central Terminal, New York officials said.

How frightening to have been involved in this. It is sad that the one person who died had a heart attack. Probably due to the fact that they thought it was another terrorist attack. Unhappiness.

Transformer explosion rattles Manhattan - CNN.com

Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.

It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.

“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”

“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax...”

I agree whole heartedly. While I am in most respects an American one aspect of me which will always and forever be Canadian is my taste in chocolate. My two great disappointments upon moving to the United States at the age of nine were learning that your Cheerios are made with whole wheat, and learning that basically all of your candy bars suck. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I've travelled to, from France to Hong Kong, has English chocolate like Smarties and Aero Bars on the shelf. For a long time I'd thought the reason Smarties weren't available here was due to a trademark conflict with the rolled up sweettarts popular at halloween, but this doesn't explain the fact that no other English candy is available, or if, like Kitkat, it is available, the recipie has been screwed up. Something is deeply wrong with American taste buds.

I'm disappointed that this article, while finally putting the honest truth in print in the United States, fails to delve into the details of why. However, I have a hypothesis. I'm not sure when candy bars first became popular but there are only two possibilities:

1. They became popular before the revolutionary war, in which case Canada and the United States should have both inhereted the same taste in chocolate from England.
2. They became popular after the revolutionary war, in which case you'd think Canadians and Americans would have started eating chocolate manufactured in the same way, and that while English tastes might have diverged, Canadian tastes would have tracked American tastes and not English ones.

Neither occured. So, my hypothesis is that in the beginning, American and Canadian tastes in Chocolate tracked English tastes, and then this funny thing called World War II happened. During WWII Hershey got a contract with the US Army to distribute Hershey bars to American GIs. These bars were designed to have a high melting temperature so they could be handled by Army logistics easily, and be sour enough that soldiers wouldn't eat them when they weren't supposed to. Soldiers came back from the war with an endearing relationship to Hershey, and a taste for flavorless bars, and so now everyone in the country is eating the chocolate equivelent of MREs.

I have no idea if Canadian soldiers were issued chocolate during WWII, but as these flavorless candy bars were an American invention its likely that whatever they had, it was different.

The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course - New York Times

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