I had a funny dream last night. I dreamt that somebody came up with a symbol that would cause you to die if you looked at it. I’m not sure exactly what the symbol was, but it was an 8 by 8 grid of single-digit numbers and a few lines. (Matrix mathematicians beware!) The funny thing is this: Nobody believed it when told. They’d demand to see it, snatch it out of the person’s hands, and as they are collapsing to the ground loudly declare, “See, I told you so.

For work, I had to install Internet Explorer 7.0 beta 3 to track down some issues we've been having with it. I won't try to review it, because as soon as I squash the problems I'm rolling back my VMWare image to before the install; until IE 7 is the dominant browser I need to keep that around. All I want to do is point at and gently mock the new IE 7 logo.

For at least the last six months, I have been fighting two warts on my foot. (Don't worry, no pictures will be in this post.) I have spent at least $100 on various treatments over that time period, probably more, and basically, they have had no effect. I could knock the warts back, but leaving them alone for three or four days returned them to full strength. My wife finally reminded me of how much we had spent and announced that I should seek a doctor.

For a long time now, I've believed that either the Democrats make major changes, and oust their most radical elements, or they are dead. For the last few months, I've been betting on the latter. The scenario I've thought most likely has been a calving of the Republican party into two parties along indeterminate (and at the level I'm thinking about, basically irrelevant) lines, but how's this for an alternate scenario, brought on by the article Democrats would be weaker without Lieberman by Marc Danzinger, which I will quote: And when Lieberman is sitting in his Senate office next year, do you think the Democratic Party will be stronger or weaker for his departure?

Chizumatic says (likely permalink): The future belongs to Robert Rodriguez, who is the only director I've ever heard of who argued for a lower budget for one of his films than the Hollywood studio wanted to give him. Rodriguez believes that tight money brings out the best in a production crew, and his track record backs that up. See also Serenity, the Firefly movie. I'm the kind of person who enjoys listening to director commentaries, and as I recall the commentary is full of "

After one too many people describing my website with various synonyms of "ugly", I've taken another swing at un-uglifying it. I think it's progress, but I'm not sure I'm out of "ugly" yet. Sigh. Years ago, I set myself a rule that I would create a good website design (not "great", just "good") that used neither black nor white. I'm beginning to think that for someone as graphically talented as I (in one word: "

It looks like they're trying for another "Summer of the Shark!" journalistic feeding frenzy again. They haven't really been able to push a Summer of the Shark through since 9/11, for obvious reasons. Don't you think these journalists would wake up one day and ask themselves, "Is this what I went to journalism school for? So I could try to jam yet another Summer of the Shark down the public's throat?

There have been some accusations made lately about "domain swiping". "Domain swiping" refers to the following sequence of events: You go to a Domain Name Registrar to check to see if your desired domain name is available. They say it is. You go away to think about whether you really want it. You come back in two or three days and check again, only to find out it's been taken and now if you can get it at all, you'll need to pay inflated prices.

I've come to realize that this isn't a "blog" in any meaningful sense. I just don't update it enough. It's more a website that happens to have an RSS feed if you care. So as blogs go, this site is fairly poorly linked. Nevertheless, I periodically check Technorati, just in case. I'm sometimes surprised. But at least as of this writing, the top three hits are clearly spam blogs. What I find most odd is how they pluck postings not from my current feed, but from the distant past.

I've long believed that unless the Democrats really change something, they are likely to be marginalized, while the Republicans will split in two, with the two pieces dividing the remnants of the Democrats in some way until the natural near-50/50 equilibrium of our system is restored. Something's going to trigger that, but I don't think immigration is going to be it. If an issue doesn't come close to splitting the party 50/50, then the Republicans will just follow the issue.