Speaker For The Diodes - April 1st, 2008

05:34 am - QotD

"I just got a bunch of forms from my employer on how to apply for AD&D insurance coverage. Naturally, I thought - are we talking about resurrection spells? Will they send a team to recover my equipment from the dungeon for me too? Can I expense my hired goons, or claim mileage for my dragon if I'm riding it on official Evil Overlord business?" -- jojomojo, 2008-03-07 (thanks to marnanel for pointing it out)

(Expansion of the acronym in context is in the original entry, unless you feel it's more fun not knowing.)

06:24 am - A Reminder About Updating To The New Standard

Since so much communication on the Internet is done in languages other than English, and Unicode is all over the place, and even English-speakers who grew up in ASCII are getting used to embedding accented characters in loanwords and proper nouns ...

... and given that we do still occasionally need some trivial encryption to prevent accidental premature viewing of spoilers or punchlines without actually keeping anything secret ...

ROT-13 has been replaced by ROT-98304. If you have ROT-13 macros defined in your newsreader or mail program, don't forget to update them to the new standard.

05:07 pm - (ouch) Maybe (ouch) more (ouch) than (ouch) you (ouch) wanted (ouch) to (ouch) know (ouch)

There are certain days on which I am especially grateful to have an oversize bladder and slow kidneys.

My right knee and left ankle hurt very, very badly, and there are stairs between me and the bathroom. I can see how this could be a much bigger problem than it is.

Though how to reconcile my slow urine production with my annoyingly rapid elimination of useful drugs remains a mystery to me.