I know, I know, I’m a couple days late with this, but anyway… as a former spelling bee geek (it’s been 12 years, believe it or not), I have to post this…

Belated congrats to Kavya Shivashankar, winner of the 2009 National Spelling Bee— and, for that matter, to everyone else who made it into the Bee, as that alone is a major achievement. You all definitely weren’t Laodicean about spelling, that’s for sure!

And since I forgot to post this after the 2008 bee, extremely belated congrats to Sameer Mishra for winning a great guerdon in that year’s bee.

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot! Special thanks to the Spelling Bee staff for throwing in “blancmange” as a word this year. As a fan of Monty Python’s Science Fiction Sketch, I salute you; indeed, I even suggested the word on my blog three years ago.

For those who’ve come here looking for the Forums section that used to be on my site, I’ve closed it— there wasn’t enough interest in it; the one section that did get posts (”Music in Commercials”) served the same purpose as Adtunes.com, which I also participate in; and besides, I’ve been so busy with grad school and side projects that I haven’t had much time for moderating/keeping up the forum.

I may be opening a new one in the future, but for now, I feel it’s best to close it while keeping the archives up in a read-only form for browsing. Those can be found here, for those who need it.

Sorry for anyone who was actually interested in this section of my site, but honestly, it’d grown too old and crufty and felt like the section needed a reboot anyway…

I was just checking up on Facebook, and this ad turned up on the margin:

The first thing I noticed was the badly Photoshopped hands. (MY HANDS R PASTEDE ON YAY?)

But then I looked closer. I’m not very good at recognizing faces, but having watched SNL’s Weekend Update quite a bit, I thought that the set in the background looked awfully familiar. And then I realized, hey, that does resemble Seth Meyers…

Google Image Search, and yep. That is, in fact, Seth Meyers. The un-Photoshopped original frame from Weekend Update even shows up in the search results.

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In case you’re wondering what I ended up with for Christmas:

• From my parents:
  • A 32″ flat-screen HDTV. Niiice. And yes, it does have an SVGA port to plug in my MacBook, as well as two HDMI ports.
  • Wii Fit. Yes, they actually managed to find a copy. (And wow, I’m a good bit out of shape…looks like I needed this even more than I thought!)
  • A rechargeable battery pack to go into the Wii Balance Board.
  • A new electric razor, to replace the one that often scratched my face up.
  • Some new pajamas, to replace the horribly torn-up ones that I had.
• From my sister:
  • Sonic Unleashed for Wii. (Insert “five golden rings” reference here…)

In return, I gave my dad an FM transmitter for his iPod and a copy of Jeffery Deaver’s latest book; my mom, I got a replacement for her broken pedometer, and Dad and I together split the cost of a Roomba. For my sister and brother-in-law, I got a digital photo frame. (I wish I could afford to give something the cost of an HDTV, but I’m a graduate student…)

So I was at the ATM today, wanting to withdraw $20 for a quick lunch. I went up to the ATM, inserted my card, and, as usual, saw the following screen.

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First of all, if you’re not familiar with what a garden path sentence is, go read the Wikipedia article on them.

Now that that’s out of the way… this was an actual headline in today’s issue of USA Today (though interestingly, it was reworded in the web version), of which I’ve reproduced the spacing exactly as it appeared in the paper:

Obama’s ad
buys dwarf
TV presence
of McCain

I had to read that two or three times before I realized it had nothing to do with little people starring in Obama ads.

Now that the entirety of Google’s Android phone OS has finally been released under the Apache license, I have modified the Droid Sans Mono font so as to include a more easily distinguishable zero, for the benefit of my fellow programmers. I thought it was a great-looking font for the most part, but the vague distinction between 0 and O simply wasn’t good for peering through long listings of program code.

(Despite the Ascender copyright notices contained within the font files, they are indeed now licensed under the Apache license; check out the Git repository if proof is necessary. I have left the Ascender copyright in the modified font file, in keeping with the appropriate sections of the Apache license.)

So here is the modified font, which I have named “Code Sans Mono Z”. I had originally named it “Droid Sans Mono Z”, but there were potential trademark issues with my using the Droid name, hence the change.

Code Sans Mono Z

This is why I should not be allowed to buy action figures at Anime Weekend Atlanta:

For those unfamiliar with that character, that’s Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. She’s an alien android who can communicate with the universe’s Data Entity and alter the state of the universe via rapidly spoken SQL statements. (No, seriously— this is canon. One of her image songs is even titled “SELECT”.)

So naturally, I had to have her posing in front of a MySQL administration interface.

I am truly a complete and utter geek.

I’m about to be heading off to Anime Weekend Atlanta. I won’t be bringing my computer with me, and probably won’t be getting online again at all till late Sunday afternoon. (These conventions literally do go on all day, for those who’ve never been to one.)

In the meantime, check my Twitter profile for status updates.

I was cashing in some savings bonds earlier today at a bank which shall remain unnamed, and noticed a rather serious oversight in the design of the form they used for this task.

The form was one of those where they give you a limited number of character spaces to write things; I assume it’s because their database was originally designed with certain arbitrary field lengths.

There was an 11-character limit on the ‘city’ field.

I have family in Warner Robins, GA; Milledgeville, GA; and Jacksonville, FL.

Oh, and should I mention this is a large bank that formerly had headquarters in San Francisco?