Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Happy birthday to Jerie!

I downloaded GrandPerspective on a whim, and ended up finding and deleting about 3 GB of cruft from my hard drive. There’s no Universal Binary yet, but then who’s had an Intel Mac long enough to fill it with large, forgotten files that have to be tracked down and deleted with a graphical disk usage viewer?

Wired has an interesting article on the unexpected success and The Genius of Apple’s Stores.

GeekPress linked some handy illustrated Sudoku tips this weekend. And for the truly addicted Sudoku fiend, there’s now a 3D Sudoku Cube.

I also found a zigzag sudoku solver, but the instructions were cryptic and it didn’t solve anything for me.

Sci Fi Wire has some good links to the Star Wars fanfic issue. I think if you don’t expect a lot of buyers, publishing your fanfic on Amazon isn’t all that different from charging for fanfic fanzines–something that goes on all the time in fandom. Amazon is just easier to link.

…you bake a Dalek cake.

…you try to sell your Star Wars fanfic on Amazon.

Wednesday marks the 500th anniversary of the Massacre of Lisbon, in which more than four thousand Portuguese Jews were killed over the course of three days (April 19-21, 1506). A memorial of sorts may be held in the Rossio; see Rua da Judiaria [in Portuguese] for more details.

See Wikipedia for some information about the massacre in English, or read The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.

I downloaded the latest Carbon Emacs for MacOS X, with about as little success as I had last time. I think it’s time to roll my own again…

The BBC is back with more downer news. (See You may already be a downer for the previous mad cow disease news.) Though the headline is about blood transfusions, there’s no evidence in the article that the newfound risk of subclinical mad cow disease is restricted to human-to-human transmission. Up to 90% of people who have chowed on mad cows in the past could be sleeper cases right now.

It puts my crazy British coworker in a whole new light, it does…

I don’t usually have such a backlog of interesting-sounding movies.

• V for Vendetta, already out so don’t spoil me.
• Slither, a silly creepy-crawly movie due out tomorrow.
• Lady in the Water, a mermaid story from M. Night Shyamalan, due out in July.
• Idiocracy, a pessimist’s take on the Rip Van Winkle story, from the producer of Office Space. According to Wikipedia, production is stalled because the movie is just too funny for prime-time.
• While I’m at it, I really need to see Office Space, too.