Richard Newman » holygoat.co.uk

Fri 04 Nov 2005

Fireworks, holidays, and Unicode jokes

It's bloody difficult to have an early-evening nap when people keep setting off fireworks. It's almost like it's Bonfire Night or something.

In other news — the Shure E2c headphones aren't bad, a little muddy, but fairly good noise insulation; work is coming on like pulling teeth; and… New Year in Beaulieu. Hmm, that might be fun! ☺

Oh, and the Unicode joke:

A grade school teacher was asking his pupils what their parents did for a living.
"Tim, you be first. What does your mother do?"
Tim stood up and proudly said, "She's a doctor."
"That's wonderful. How about you, Amy?"
Amy shyly stood up, scuffed her feet and said, "My father is a mailman."
"Thank you, Amy" said the teacher. "What does your parent do, Billy?"
Billy proudly stood up and announced, "My daddy plays piano in a whorehouse."
The teacher was shocked and went to Billy's house and rang the bell. Billy's father answered the door. The teacher explained what his son had said and demanded an explanation.
Billy's dad said, "I'm actually an internationalization engineer specializing in collation and normalization with multibyte and 16-bit Unicode called UTF-8 and UTF-16. How can I explain a thing like that to a seven-year-old?"

From here.

Posted at 2005-11-04 13:12:43 by Richard • Link to Fireworks, holiday…
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Mechanical Turk

How awesome! Amazon Mechanical Turk bills itself as “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” — complete simple tasks that people do better than computers, and they pay you for it.

Close to having enough money to buy a CD? Write a few product descriptions for Amazon themselves, and they'll give you 75¢ for each one. It's not difficult, either:

You may copy the product description from the manufacturer's website.

This reminds me of a short story I read once, about a man and a woman competing as micro-researchers, hunting down information for money….

Posted at 2005-11-04 04:08:07 by Richard • Link to Mechanical Turk
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Man's best friend

From the inimitable gin and tacos:

We'll keep track, and if the word comes down that you will be killed for defending your master's right to purchase and eat the burrito he heated up in a 7-11 microwave at 2:30am, we'll create an email writing campaign to save you. God bless.

Posted at 2005-11-04 01:34:10 by Richard • Link to Man's best friend
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