There’s No Antonym of Authoritarian

In a conversation a while back, I needed a word to express the opposite of authoritarian. I couldn’t find one in my memory, which struck me as odd, so I later looked it up. It seems that there is no English word that describes the opposite of authoritarian; the closest thing I found, after perusing …

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A Site That Celebrates Tortured English

I’ve always been rather sensitive to spelling and grammar. Maybe a little too sensitive. Little errors in written English drive me nuts. I’ve finally found a place for other people who, like me, shudder at misplaced punctuation, “creative” spelling, abused homonyms, and atrocious grammar: Wordsplosion! “Showcasing the best of the worst of the wide world …

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The Stack Overflow Website

Stack Overflow, the programmer Q&A site that Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) and Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror) have been putting together, finally opened its public beta doors yesterday. I’d been following its development closely through their podcast, and when I came up with an obscure programming problem this morning, I decided to try …

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Multithreaded Programming

A little while back, I ran across a rant about multithreaded programming on The Register (NSFW due to strong language), which starts out with this paragraph: I don’t know about you, but every time I have to program with threads and shared resources, I want to remove my face incrementally with a salad fork. Locks, …

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The Litter Robot

(This is a follow-up to last year’s post on the cat-crap problem. As I said then, if you’re bored or offended by talk of the removal of feline waste products, don’t read this entry any further.) Our third Littersweep Ultra died a few months ago, worn out the same way as our first one. I’m …

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I love spam…

One of the (few) spam messages that survived to show up in my junk folder today: Subject: Hilarious! Could it be true? See inside. Jessica Simpson Breathes Air READ FULL STORY Um… unless Jessica Simpson is a fish, a methane-breathing alien, or dead, why would that pique my interest? Isn’t that rather like exclaiming “Amazing, …

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