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WWW, while convenient to type, is rather unwieldy when spoken (at least in English). “Double-U double-U double-U dot some site dot com” takes a while to say. It’s not like, say, AAA, which can be easily spoken as “Triple-A.” Fortunately, these days most major sites have their servers configured to return the same web with or without the www. prefix, so you sometimes hear a website described with just its domain name.

This morning I caught the end of an interview on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, and the announcer explained that the full version of the interview was available on their website, “dub dub dub dot marketplace dot org.”

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I love carving jack-o-lanterns. These days, though, I don’t have much motivation to do one unless there’s a prize involved. So when I saw that someone on Puzzle Pirates was holding a contest for piratey-themed pumpkin carving, I jumped on it. This is my rendition of the navigation puzzle from the game, and my first-ever attempt at a projector pumpkin. I think it looks okay.

the navigation puzzle has looked better

glowy stars and projected arrrrrs

The lit picture is pretty dark, but it had to be or the “Arrr!” on the wall wouldn’t show up.

Suggestions for next year, or even out-of-season carvings for this year, are being taken……

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The Wine Cube

Saw this at Target today. I suppose I shouldn’t be much of a wine purist, since I don’t drink much myself (I think we have one bottle in the apartment, and we haven’t opened it in the year+ we’ve had it)—but somehow I can’t bring myself to buy wine-in-a-box.

I mean, think about it. “You, me and a box of wine.” How appealing does that sound?

Then of course there’s the fact that the boxes are roughly the size of the Macintosh G4 Cube. And of course, that brings up thoughts of the WINE project (which allows many Windows applications to run on Linux), but of course that won’t run on a PowerPC chip…

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Christmas aisle

I dropped into Sav-on briefly today. Among other things I wanted to top off the supply of Halloween candy for Monday. Imagine my surprise to find that Halloween was crammed into half an aisle, and there were two aisles of Christmas already. (You may notice that the sign above this one doesn’t say “Seasonal” or even just “Christmas.” “Christmas” was the next aisle over. This was labeled “Christmas Lights,” presumably to avoid duplicate signs.)

Yes, the Christmas stuff is already up, and it’s still October. It’s annoying enough when malls put up decorations and start playing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving! Soon, buying holiday decorations is going to be like buying seasonal clothing. You’ll have to finish your Christmas shopping in July, or you’ll have to rely on the remaindered stuff that the stores couldn’t get rid of. And you’ll have to pre-order Independence Day fireworks in December, and hope they’re still legal to set off by the time summer rolls around.

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CNET has an article on various websites related to Lost. Among them are official sites for Oceanic Airlines and The Hanso Foundation and fan sites for Mega Lotto Jackpot and Charile’s band, Drive Shaft.

I’d seen the Drive Shaft site last year (or at least a Drive Shaft site), though it seems to have exceeded its bandwidth for this month.

The official sites don’t have much detail, but they do have easter eggs…

Update (April 2010): Four and a half years later, as the show barrels toward its conclusion, only the Drive Shaft fan site is still around. Oceanic Air now redirects to ABC’s page for the show, the Hanso Foundation isn’t responding at all, and Mega Lotto Jackpot seems to have been picked up by a domain squatter.

Update (Feb 2017): In the years since I last checked, the Drive Shaft page was also taken over by a squatter, and has since gone offline.

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The webcomic Real Life has a strange way of looking at the world. Sometimes I share it. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve seen one of these signs and deliberately misread it as a demand rather than a description. I can just imagine a group of people marching in front of some construction site, carrying orange protest signs lifted from the side of some road.

Of course, sometimes the signs don’t need to be misread to be funny.