This company will custom make you a diamond from the remains of a loved one. Kind of perverse in a way, but cool if you think about it. But perverse again if you keep thinking about it…

Thanks to Chris for the link.

Yet another article about why you should meditate. This one speaks specifically to the IQ angle, which is of particular interest to me. I need every last point in my profession.

Edit: Many thanks to William for writing this after reading my post.

Do people who work in coffee and ice cream shops grow to hate how their main product smells? I was in a coffee shop the other day and I was suddenly struck by this unspeakable notion.

My main idea was simple — given the fact that coffee and ice cream are two of the most unique and favorable smells in the world, is it a good idea for someone to ruin this for life by associating their presence with negativity, i.e. work?

I’d argue that it’s not worth it. If being around coffee or ice cream for 8 hours a day is going to make me hate these amazing things, I’d rather just not do it. Not to be course, but I feel the same way about gynecology.

The bottom line is simple: don’t ruin something special by dealing with it casually in a work environment. You’re not doing the thing a disservice — you’re doing yourself one.

I just registered grepsecurity.com. The name was just too cool to pass over, and the security related resource I want to get going soon will bear that name. Stay tuned, and stuff.

So I realized it was quite tedious to make a change to my footer for my “static” content (/study, /writing, etc.) and then reproduce that change across all of my pages.

Turns out, this is what PHP includes are for. So, as of now, all of my “static” pages are actually PHP pages so that includes can be called for the footer and Google Analytics portions of each page.

As you’d expect, those are the parts of the site that don’t change, but even if they were to it’d be very simple to just edit the footer.php or googleanalytics.php pages — at which point the change would be implemented in every page with the include.

Cool stuff.

Now this is a cool project — mapping the functionality of multiple types of *nix. If you’re a *nix geek, this site is a must.

Link: A Sysadmin’s Unixersal Translator (Rosetta Stone)

Anyone else seeing problems with the service? I haven’t received any report data for like four days now…

I fired off an email to them, so we’ll see what they come back with. The only change I’ve made that I know of is changing my XHTML doctype from Transitional to Strict, but I don’t see how that’s going to matter.

Well, Paul Graham has done it again. Stop what you’re doing and go read this essay. Here’s a quote I liked a lot:

“The test of whether people love what they do is whether they’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it– even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?”

Link: How To Do What You Love

Many people are familiar with the concept of a mnemonic [nəˈmɑnɪk] — a memory device that uses a phrase based on the first letter of words in a series. Well, for those that deal with TCP/IP a lot, I thought it might be helpful to have a mnemonic for the TCP flags as well…

Link: How to Remember and Use TCP Flags

So I finally did it — I’ve moved the main page (the one you’re on) over to the new layout. It should look pretty much the same, but this version is tableless XHTML 1.0 Strict, and the header/navigation portion isn’t all borked up anymore.

It’s not all done, of course (it never is), but I’m at least to the point where I can relax for a bit. Oh, and yes, I do know my logo looks gimpy in IE. It’s all greyed out and such. I figure I shouldn’t be in any rush to fix it, though. That’s the punishment for using IE.

Link: Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer