An interesting linguistic blog I stumbled across yesterday, which other Aspies might enjoy: Literal Minded.

Typos of Doom Illustrated: some amusing illustrations of typos found in RPG manuals.

Here’s a gallery of puppies and kittens from the Land of the Rising Sun. How cute… (via Presurfer)

Some really cool optical illusions. (via del.icio.us)

I think I’ve already ranted about the inaccessibility of those CAPTCHA images that are used to distinguish humans from bots– assuming, of course, that those humans have perfect eyesight and no perceptual processing difficulties. But as Blogger founder Evan Williams discovered last month, sometimes they’re even illegible to the target audience as well.

Even when they’re not that distorted, there are some usability issues that people tend to forget about when writing CAPTCHA scripts. How, for instance, is one supposed to distinguish ‘I’ from ‘l’ from ‘1’, or ‘O’ from ‘0’, without any sort of cues as to the typeface being used? And sometimes the extra distortion only makes things worse; a ‘3’ might look like an ‘8’, or a ‘g’ like a ‘9’.

And that, of course, is assuming one actually has a reasonable enough knowledge of the Roman alphabet to identify the distorted characters at all. Otherwise, one will be in the same boat Jim O’Connell of wirefarm.com was in when a Korean site forced him to enter a CAPTCHA in the Korean alphabet…

Via this post about grocers’ signs in LiveJournal’s Mock The Stupid community, here’s a link to Peter “Pizzabagel” Szabaga’s collection of misspelled signs. Glad to see that I’m not the only one who obsesses over such things!

Those of you who are still using Internet Explorer as your primary browser should note that Microsoft has finally released a patch for the ADO security hole that was exploited by Russian hackers last week.

Mom threatens ‘Chuck E. Cheese,’ authorities say

A teenager dressed as Chuck E. Cheese was pelted with pizza and threatened with a beating Sunday by an angry parent who said the restaurant mascot wasn’t paying enough attention to her child, witnesses told Macon police.

The incident took place at the Chuck E. Cheese at 3375 Mercer University Drive, according to a police report. The 17-year-old was in costume as the pizzeria chain character – a gray cartoon-like rodent with large front teeth – when the 31-year-old Macon woman threw a piece of pizza at her, the report stated.

The woman then allegedly threatened to “whip” the girl when she changed out of the costume.

No charges have been filed in the incident.

Here’s still another article, this one from EWeek, claiming that Internet Explorer is too dangerous to keep using. Noticing a theme here lately?

Wired.com tracks down the origins of that annoying hoax about AOL, Microsoft, and Intel merging. Quite interesting: it started as a computer science student’s spoof of ‘get rich quick’ schemes.

And for the curious, here’s the history of the hoax that’s referred to in the article.

(via Fark.com)