Dear Dr. Ryuta Kawashima,

Maybe in Brain Age 3 you could incorporate a technique to stimulate my prefrontal cortex in a way such that while playing your game I would not again miss my bus stop by a mile and a half.

The result of love without discipline is indistinguishable from that of hatred.

With a canvas like that why not go for the Mahābhārata?

/

And while we’re in the neighborhood, you can stop saying “double-u, double-u, double-u, dot” in front of all your websites. They all work without it except for five or six in the whole world which justly deserve to lose the traffic for having webmasters about as bright as you.

I don’t think there’s a man, woman, or child in America who doesn’t know how much I support the gay community. Which is why I’m proud to say I’m glad Senator Craig is gonna skate on his attempted Grand Stall Tryst charge. No longer a felony in most states.

In fact, I’m so much in favor of gay rights that I won’t rest until it becomes safe for a homosexual senator to drive right off a bridge into a pond where his younger companion in the passenger seat drowns. Only then will we have true equality.

What? Are you fucking kidding me? Am I the only person in the world who gets religious symbolism and omens? Of course it’s Pope John Paul II signaling from the grave. I believe the message he’s trying to send is, “Pack for hot weather.”

I can learn 50 keyboard shortcuts in a couple hours. Enough to use most of what’s behind any given application. I can forget them in a day too. Because of this I can play Medal of Honor for two weeks straight and then pick up Syphon Filter 2 and readjust to the different controller layout by the time I’m taking out the two snipers in the snow.

Right now, on some mail server far, far away is lodged an unread email I sent. It will sit there until the morning when it is POP’d or IMAP’d down. Right now it just sits there. I’m the only one in the world who knows what it says; who knows why my blood pressure—never varying in the ten years I’ve been checking it—is forty-five mmHg over systolic and twenty-three mmHg over diastolic.

I looked at my alias file from Amazon.com a couple years back for a piece. Of the several hundred commands my fingers could run through in two minutes flat I only remember two. One was “F6.” It was the shortcut key for sending an email via Emacs. It was so easy to press. Before you’d thought things through. Before you realized you shouldn’t be pissed-off. Before you remembered to spell check it. Before you considered the implications of a response. So easy to press. So impossible to retrieve that email.

I post this now to muddy the waters. Yes it is October 14 but only I know what time it is. Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I wrote a nice little JavaScript kilometer/mile converter awhile back. I tried to be pretty explicit in the code to do everything step by step and all in JS. 31 lines of code. Not too bad for a calculator and shorter than if we didn’t use ternary logic.

I have been using jQuery a little for quite awhile now. I wish I had time to use it more. Every single time I revisit it I learn something new and see it is even better than I remembered. I rewrote the converter with it as an experiment. 9 or 10 lines of JS now.

The new code

<script id="kilo_mile" type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
// Remember! The jQuery lib must be loaded already for this to run.
$('<form><fieldset><legend>kilometer/mile converter</legend>' +
  '<input id="kilo" type="text"/>' +
  '<input id="mile" type="text"/>' +
  '</fieldset></form>').insertAfter("#kilo_mile");
$("#kilo, #mile").keyup(function(evt) {
         var update = evt.target.id == "mile" ? "#kilo" : "#mile";
     var conversion = evt.target.id == "mile" ? 1.609 : 0.6214;
            var val = new Number( $(evt.target).val() * conversion );
        $(update).val( isNaN(val) ? "Numbers only!" : val );
                        });
//]]></script>

The demo