Who Is Ozzy Osbourne? Or Bloggers, Objectivists and Ozzy Fans, Oh My

I really hate the fact that livejournal does not provide visitor logs. I am very interested in my readership, but too lazy to put up some tracker pixels. Well, I have been looking at the image logs and found some very interesting things.

For instance, it appears that my photography has a very broad appeal. This “Sara Beth” blogger who used this blackout photo I took (without giving me any credit) appears to be a fan of Ayn Rand.

Sara Beth, Ayn highly disapproved of using copyrighted material without giving credit of any sort.

But then there’s “El Chupacabra” who posted this image (also with no credit to me) in the Ozzfest 2004 section over at siN’s Metal Forums with this heartwarming quote: “Each time I look at that Incubus pick, the metal is just sucked out of me. lol”
.

This could be a good photo cover for Atlas Shrugged, but instead it turns on Ozzy fans. Go figure.

In case you missed them, blackout photos are here and here.

Hmm, I think I should try to sell at leas one of my photos to a respectable publication of some sort. I wonder what it takes to do that. Hmmm, maybe I should invest in this.

Ok, It’s a Quick Meme. And I Can’t Sleep.

The way this works, you cross out authors not appearing on your bookshelf and add new ones as needed.
:: ::
G. K. Chesterton C.S. Lewis Cordwainer Smith
Terry Pratchett Tom Clancy Henry Kuttner
J.R.R. Tolkien
Kurt Vonnegut
Octavia Butler Robert Nozick John C Wright
Dorothy Sayers Milan Kundera Erich Maria Remarque
Richard Dawkins Søren Kierkegaard Cyril Kornbluth
Jaroslav Pelikan F.A. von Hayek Rudyard Kipling
Neal Stephenson Robert A. Heinlein
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Ayn Rand

Nobbin or Boffin? Scratching My Noggin.

“Microsoft MCSEs are bogus boffins, say Canadian engineers”.
I like the word “boffin”. I learned it from “Junkyard Wars” (which wacky Brits call “Scrapheap Challenge”). Heh heh. Boffin. At first I thought it was of those monsters from an old game “Digger”. But no, they were called Nobbin and Hobbin.

Kind of like Pacman ghosts are called Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.

Oh yeah, did you know that Hoser engineers are really, really cool? They even have this special iron ring which they get in a so called Kipling Ceremony or The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. I can see how they can get pissed of at the E in MCSE.

My favorite web comics Part I

I like comics. I really do. Never mind that they’ve been labeled as lowbrow entertainment. Ok, maybe the Sturgeon’s law is more severe in regards to comics (probably 99.9 percent of all of them are crap), but still…

In print I like to read comics that are more properly called “graphic novels”. Ones like Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” and Ben Katchor’s “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer”.

I also enjoy funny pages of newspapers and political cartoons. I don’t really read newspapers, but conveniently these are available on the net. I use a small program that puts most of the comics that I like on one page (available here). I am going to write a better program when I have the time. For political stuff I go here.

But my favorite comics fall into “web comics” category.

Dr. Fun – first (and probably the best) comic on the World Wide Web. Dave Farley’s edgy, random and somewhat obscure sense of humor is absolutely great! His drawing style is amazingly expressive. Sometimes you need to know certain things to appreciate the humor. You need to know who Don Knuth is to understand this or it helps if you read Henry Kuttner’s “Twonky” and know what a Handspring module is before looking at this(it’s funny even if you don’t). The jokes can sometimes be hilariously off-color.Certain themes recur frequently in Dr. Fun – squirrels, snacks, microorganisms, Mr Potatoe Head, bathrooms and Star Wars, the Amish and many, many other topics dear to my heart :)

Dr. Fun logos are amazing pieces of art.

Read the FAQ and then go here and read, read, read. Dr. Fun book is coming out soon, email Plan 9 publishing at question @plan9.org and tell them that you want it.

Esoteric Topics In Computer Programming

“Masochistic Programming”, “Non-Electronic Computers”, “Metalanguages” and “Self-Modification” are just some of the topics.

You can learn about *W Programming Language, which has no other purpose, but to annoy the user;
SMETANA language that can only modify itself, but is probably not Turing-Complete; and a tiny programming language called Brainfuck .

I blame those pesky Canadians.

Hey, alexei_, doesn’t it piss you off that self-modification is considered esoteric?