I made a souffle last night. It was fun and exciting and went better than I expected:

I also made some bananas foster, which were delightfully good. Sadly, I don’t have a photo of the flaming saute pan.

I’m a bit of a no-mouse-freak (at least at heart – it’s hard to kick that rodent habit). At work I use Linux along with a Window Manager called wmii that tries to make use of the mouse unnecessary. It works great for terminals and emacs but the big thorn in my side is Firefox. Until today. Press the ' key and you can search for a link containing the text you enter. It’s pure magic.

Why do “money” and “monkey” differ by only one letter?

Conrad is asleep and comfortable.

AJ comes along and starts to clean Conrad.

Licking turns to biting…

And biting turns to fighting.

Apologies are issued.

An awkward silence ensues.

The wrongdoer goes her separate way.

The wronged picks back up from where he was so rudely interrupted.

Some of the changes made and repairs performed on my ‘RS:

• Replaced faulty turn signal relay and miswired headlight relay.
• Replaced “high output” headlight with stock wattage bulb.
• Replaced aftermarked bar-backs with stock handlebar risers.
• Rebuilt the Marzocchi rear shocks.

Mark Hoofnagle (two posts in a row link to the same blog, weird) has an interesting answer to the question “Which parts of the human body could you design better?” His discussion of the female reproductive system brings up points I had never even thought to think of (if that makes any sense):

… pregnancy in humans results in a fetus sitting on the bladder and colon for several months …

Warning: there are scientific diagrams of human naughty bits in the article.

Mark Hoofnagle on why Denialists (Intelligent Design proponents, Homeopaths, Holocaust Deniers, etc.) should not be debated.

Academia and science are critically dependent on debate, this is true, but the prerequisite for having the debate is having people who are honestly interested in pursuing the truth and operate using the same rules of evidence and proof. It’s not about censoring dissent, which the cranks insist is the issue in their eternal pursuit of persecution. It’s about having standards for evidence and discussion. This is why these debates, when confined to a courtroom, often fair so disastrously for the denialists. In the presence of standards that exist before evidence can be introduced, they are left with nothing.

If, like me, you work in the software world, you will like the following from Joel Spolsky’s article on software engineering and schedules at Inc.com:

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.

It was bound to happen sooner or later:

rain, chaotic male elven Wizard</p>

<pre><code>                          4    5 5
                           ---------
                           |.......| 5
                          5|.......|                  ------
                           |..@@...|                  |....
                         2 |.......|                 --..---------
                        |  |...%...|  |          -  --.%.|.......|
                        |. ----%---- .|          %---)`..|.......|
                        |......@435...|      %  $  -)$..%-%`._...|
                        ---....A....---      !    ---%...|.......|
                          -----`-----       %    -- --...|.......|
                              %$           --|----   --..---------
                            4         ------)  |      |...
                                5    |       [ |      -----
                              $      -   -------
                                   --    |
                           ----%----   ---
                                       |
                          -------------

Rain the Necromancer St:18 Dx:23 Co:16 In:24 Wi:24 Ch:15 Chaotic Astral Plane $:0 HP:243(243) Pw:69(375) AC:-40 Xp:24/40029787 T:89333

You can read all the gory details, if you want.

(Geech, this time was legitimate)

PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula (one of the Science Blogs, check them out) is very entertaining:

People who think that merely believing in Jesus grants them redemption must also think that believing in evolution is a magic charm that grants them exemption from criticism of any nonsense they might hold. It doesn’t work that way. There is no get-out-of-criticism-free card.