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I’ve seen a few nice-looking representations of clocks around, but when I saw Gumuz’s word clock I though I could make some improvements to it. Here’s a couple of the changes:

• Rewrote using MooTools (only because I know it better, I’m currently developing in it, and it gave me a chance to play with Google’s JS API)
• Rewrote some of the JavaScript logic to be a bit tidier
• Replaced the letters with dots for an arguably prettier output
• Reordered the hours in the HTML so that “twelve o’clock” wouldn’t be missing the space (I had to combine two and one for this)
• Highlighted the a in half for quarter-past and quarter-to, as per mattatwhoosh’s suggestion

The result is tested in IE (5.5–8), Safari, Chrome and Firefox. I hit a slight issue in IE6− (what a surprise) whereby it interprets a.sec.lit as a.lit (example); I got around it by making sec an ID rather than a class (yes, I know it’s dirty).

Have a look for yourself.

Today, after reading over 3000 posts on FML over the the past 6 months, I realised that MLIA is actually more enjoyable than schadenfreude. MLIG is too boring, though. MLIA

This is why we need Grammar Nazis:

Today, I was flirting via text with a coworker. Things started getting heated, and I wanted to send her a sexy picture. I asked if she had any suggestions. She said, “Your nuts!” She meant, “YOU’RE nuts.” I sent her a photo of my junk. I offended a co-worker with incriminating evidence. FML

blizzard_of_77 on FMyLife

Ahh, grammar…

1. That Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is a goon;
2. that his early stuff is, if anything, funnier than his paid stuff for The Escapist;
3. that I there will always be something on the Internet that I haven’t seen, and that someone will think I have been living under a rock to have missed it.

Makefile:

me:
	@true
a:
	@true
sandwich.:
	@[ -w /etc/shadow ] && echo "Okay." || echo "What? Make it yourself."

Shell:

$ make me a sandwich.
What? Make it yourself.

$ sudo make me a sandwich.
Okay.

From CLI-Apps. See also xkcd.

Supposedly 2% of all pound coins are counterfeit. But how do you know when you have a fake? I heard the news item and had a quick look at the pound coins in my pocket, and couldn’t see anything. I thought that maybe it wasn’t all that easy to spot. But then I saw one my Mum had:



There are a few noticeable differences:

• The lettering and images are faded
• The images have less fine detail
• They may not pass the “spin test” (although mine did) — the obverse image is not in the same orientation as the reverse image
• The lettering on the side is incomplete or off-centre
• The side inscription and obverse or reverse image may not match the supposed year of print (although, again, this one did)
• The material of the coin may feel different — this one felt less dense than the real one; gold paint may also flake off
• A vending machine will probably not accept it

There are other things that you can do beyond just looking at it, such as weighing it on some very accurate scales, or testing the resistivity.

One thing that doesn’t prove it’s fake, however, is the orientation of the lettering on the side. All my pound coins (except the fake) have the obverse facing upwards when reading the lettering, but I’ve seen other coins where it’s the other way around. There’s a three-part post over at Blogalism that goes into more detail, and in one of the comments explains that the coins fall from the face-stamping machine into the edge-inscription machine, giving it a 50% chance of appearing either way up. More information is available on the old WBCC page.

Radovan Karadžić, the recently captured war criminal, was doing a good job disguising himself as Noel Sharkey:


Er, I can’t remember which is which now.

The walls have spoken. In the last week or so, Facebook has introduced a new feature called Lexicon (learn more), which allows you to enter a number of search terms and see how popular those terms are on people’s walls. The graph of “party tonight” when compared with “hangover” is quite predictable, especially around Hallowe’en and New Year’s:



The graph I found interesting, however, compared “work” and “play”: it seems much more people are talking about the former! Or maybe it’s just that they’re complaining about it?

Or maybe it’s because people who go out and have fun actually go do it rather than sitting on Facebook talking about it, whereas people at work just sit on Facebook and complain…

After spending too much time looking at images on imagechan, I was reminded of a perfect photo opportunity from childhood, sitting just in my garage:



Maybe I should be doing some work.

At our last day at work before Christmas — oh yeah, I got a job by the way — we decided to have a go at some comics after seeing some crazy comics
at Pandyland.

The rules? A maximum of 4 panels, and use some base imaging software. That’s it! Here are the efforts:





Yes, I’m aware mine bears more than a little similarity to Cyanide and Happiness, but that’s because I have very little imagination and graphics skills…