Tim Danner

Beta releases of software aren’t expected to be perfect, but to be effective at gathering feedback, at least a basic amount of functionality has to work – otherwise no one will use it for long enough to find the undiscovered problems. Microsoft is currently preparing Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. This is a bit more important than their usual service packs because it will most likely be the only client OS release between now and Longhorn, which is probably at least 2 years away. So the beta of XP SP2 needs to be good. For example, Deer Hunter 4 needs to work.

A bunch of very ugly cars. Note that there are multiple pages – you might miss the tiny “Next” link near the top. (Via Autoblog.)

Today, the G8 summit ended. Mostly, they talked about the same thing everybody who hasn’t been talking about Ronald Reagan has been talking about, which is Iraq. For contrast, here’s what [SatireWire claims that] they talked about at a previous summit.

At the townhouse complex where we live, they have repainted the signs indicating visitor parking. One suspects that English may not be the painters’ first language.

Amazon.com lets you make lists of stuff they sell, which is a useful little site feature. This way you can find other music/books/etc that appeal to the same sorts of people. Amazon tries to do this automatically using their recommendation engine, but I find the “Listmania” stuff more useful, or at least more interesting.

One list, The Top 25 Weirdest Items You Can Purchase Through Amazon!, is interesting, but not useful. Via Boing Boing.

A sneak preview of the new Visual Basic.NET context menu in Visual Studio 2005 (not confirmed). Very silly. Via Chris Sells.

Why do squirrels run out in front of cars? Hazing.

“Does the Tree of Delicious Nuts Exist?” ScarySquirrel.com knows.

There are many lists of programming languages on the web, but this one has some hilarious quotes, such as:

Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.

A mathematician attempts to determine whether girls are evil.

Via Ray Slakinski, author of Nucleus, a specialized tool for watching an RSS feed with links to .torrents and downloading files that match keywords. In other words, it lets you build a collection of TV show episodes with basically zero work.

If you were wondering whether Armageddon was a good movie, or perhaps you were inclinded to see it but wanted to make sure it was scientifically accurate, you should check Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics first. (Thanks, Dave)

Apparently at Microsoft, the meeting request notifications come pretty fast. Korby Parnell, a developer, just deletes most of them. But one escaped deletion through a special suffix added to the subject line.

How to Make Friends By Telephone is a pamphlet that was distributed before the telephone was as ubiquitous as it now is.

How to burn/melt/demolish things with a 1 m² Fresnel lens and a mass of incandescent gas.

There are world records that everyone expects, like Tallest Man or Biggest Ball of String. Then there are things like this.

Chris Sells points us to a segment on NPR’s Day to Day show which provides a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the theme song to Friends (“I’ll Be There For You”, by The Rembrandts) with some eye-opening factoids about the value of their apartments, quantity of hookup partners, etc. Pretty funny stuff.

Not sure quite what to make of this. Jim Henley points to Apocamon, a manga (comic) in Flash about the Book of Revelation. I always though that a sheep with seven eyes and seven horns would look pretty weird – this confirms it.

It zooms in kind of like those Powers of Ten posters, only it never seems to make any progress, and the dude has a really bad hairdo.

What could be cooler than a spiky belt with a classic Nintendo controller for a buckle?

Read and enjoy the story of Shrek – not the computer generated ogre, the runaway sheep that managed to grow six years worth of fleece (60 pounds!) only to have it shorn off in 20 minutes by the world champion sheep shearer.

BoingBoing notices that the list of titles available on the British Airways frequent flier sign up page is enormous! The “kicks United’s ass” part is a reference to an earlier BoingBoing post about the titles on United’s sign up page, which, while long, are not nearly as impressive as British Airways’s.