It is obvious, from the police sketch, that the ‘burglar’ is in fact one of Whitley Streiber’s ‘greys’…
KSDK NewsChannel 5 – Burglar Attacks Woman In Kirkwood
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Some tools work better than others.
A few years back I coded a website called HyperDictionary. It went through several life cycles of re-writes, moving from SQL database driven perl script to Dict client mod_perl module; bugt all the incarnations did basically the same thing: fetch dictionary definitions and then turn every word in the definition into a link to the definition for that word. I did it as an experiment while learning regex and mod_perl, but it ‘escaped’ into the wild thanks to web crawlers and became quite popular. The experiment ended when I needed to make a mortgage payment and I sold the site.
Not too long ago I was playing with the preg_ functions in PHP, and I decided to try to recreate the functionality of HyperDictionary with PHP. Now, I haven’t seen the HyperDictionary code in years, as deleting my local copies was part of the sales terms. I do remember the mod_perl module being fairly long and complex, even if I don’t remember how many lines of code it was. The trial version that I wacked together in PHP is essentially four lines of code. That’s a hell of an improvement over the original, though I am sure it will grow a little once I add search capability and word-of-the-day tracking. Still, the right tool can make a hell of a difference:
-Chris
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Too much knowledge is a bad thing…
So, Mel and I are riding to work on BART this morning, and we are talking about the wedding arrangements. Mel cutely asks “Why isn’t my dress here yet?” Being too smart for my own good, I teasingly say “At this very minute they are boiling alive the silkworms that made your silk, and they will turn that your dress soon. If you listen very carefully, with your inner ear, you can hear their screams.” She looked at me with a mildly horrified and puzzled look. So, I had to take it a step further and explain just how silk is produced, and why silkworms are unique in that they don’t fuse their cocoon thread on each spin which makes their cocoons ‘unwindable’, and that the silk moth eats its way out of the cocoon when it matures so they boil the cocoons to kill the caterpillars. She looked thoughtful, and then said she may never be able to wear silk again. If I had just kept my mouth shut Mel wouldn’t have decided not to wear silk lingerie anymore. Stupid brain.
-Chris
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