Dev Blogs
[South Carolina is] the only state in the nation requiring bars to serve all hard liquor in minibottles. The minibottle's place behind the bar is even enshrined in the state's constitution. Mini-bottles are those cute little single-serving bottles you see on airplanes and in hotel refrigerators. The law was originally passed under pre...
The [U.S.] government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages. Apparently, there is already a special system to draft "health care personnel", whatever that means. Can you imagine the havoc that could be wrought by disgruntled programmers forced t...
Because everybody here speaks English. Perfectly. Sometimes they'll speak English to me even before I say anything. (My comparative silence probably gives me away as a non-native.) Other times they'll notice that I'm speaking with a bad accent and switch to English. Some humor me by speaking Swedish until I finally break down and ask (in English), ...
There's some to-do over a soldier who volunteered to serve in the army who has since changed his mind and is applying for conscientous objector status. I noticed this trend over two years ago, when people who had enlisted in the armed forces underwent a change of heart after the World Trade Center attacks: Many of the enlisted personnel ...
Some Aussie ex-pats developed a list of “You know you've been in Sweden too long when...”. My friend who is acting as my host (and who is himself a U.S. ex-pat) says that the list is astonishingly accurate, and that your reaction to it goes through several phases. For example, my friend explained points 73 and 74 to me. In S...
I didn't believe it until I saw it myself: My friend asked me to bring red and blue plastic cups to Sweden because the U.S. students really miss them. It's true. Here's why. (This needed to be explained to me because this was a part of U.S. college life I missed out on.) These cups are valuable because they are opaque. This allows you to walk down ...
Here's Yahoo's privacy policy regarding so-called web bugs (or as they call them "web beacons") - these are the little 1x1 images that web sites use to keep track of where you're going. Halfway down the page (at least as of the time I wrote this, which is not the same as the time this gets posted since I write stuff in advance...) in the s...
Sure, everybody knows about little tinyurl.com, handing out short URLs for large unwieldy ones. But nobody pays any attention to tinyurl.com's arch-nemesis: www.hugeurl.com, or as they like to call themselves, http://www.hugeurl.com/?ZWY3ZTE0NWFmOTg5ZDU2M2QxYWI3ZTNhMGJj ZjlhNGMmMTImVm0wd2QyUXlVWGxXYTJoV1YwZG9WVll3Wkc5alJsWjBUVlpP V0Zac...
Each time I see the SAS in-flight safety video, I am amused by the story they tell about each of their "characters". The safety video features four groups of travellers, a man and a young girl, a retired couple, a (very Scandinavian-looking) businesswoman, and a (vaguely Hispanic) young man. Each procedure is illustrated one of the four t...
Some people are in an uproar over IE's dropping of support for @ notation in HTTP URLs. What people fail to note is that The @ notation was never legal for HTTP URLs in the first place. If you go to RFC 1738 section 3.3 (HTTP), it explicitly states: An HTTP URL takes the form: where <host> and <port> are as described in S...