The End, perhaps

As you may (or may not) know, Snappy Patter is where I tend to post brief items and links, because I wanted to keep that sort of thing separate from the longer posts I used to write for Sloganeering.Org. Unfortunately, that function is not necessary any longer, since I’ve decided to stop posting at Sloganeering.

I will continue to do short posts (amongst various other lengths) at the new site. But does that spell the end for Snappy Patter? Well, maybe—but who knows? I’ve come to rely on this site as a venue to explore more experimental paths. Perhaps I’ll be back here again, one day, doing something different. I don’t know.

I just don’t.

But who will they cast as “It”?

A Wrinkle in Time movie? It might happen! I don’t know how to feel about that.

Your boss is sensitive, vindictive

... so you may find this useful: Things you should never say to your boss. Interestingly enough, they leave off some important key phrases to avoid, like: “I can’t come in today,” or, “Fuck you, turkey.”

A web event of note

It should be mentioned that the first match of The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books has been posted. I’m a great fan. It’s like getting a sneaky peek through the windows of a rich person’s house!

This is ripe for parody

From Threat Level:

The next time someone tries to “friend” you on Facebook, it may turn out to be an undercover fed looking to examine your private messages and photos, or surveil your friends and family. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained an internal Justice Department document that describes what law enforcement is doing on social networking sites.

The 33-page document shows that law enforcement agents from local police to the FBI and Secret Service have been logging on to MySpace and other sites undercover to communicate with suspects, read private postings and view photos and videos that are restricted to a user’s friends, according to the Associated Press.

It pays to know who your friends are. Or, I don’t know—maybe don’t leave so much information about your life just lying around on the hard drives of companies that don’t give two shits about you, yeah?

Well of course they did

From Slashdot:

"This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization.”

I can’t say I’m surprised.

It’s beta. It doesn’t have to work all the time

“Hi everyone,
Thanks for reporting this. Unfortunately, this is a known issue that has been plaguing us for some time. The problem occurs when you've created, deleted, and recreated a very large number of tags. We've been trying for some time to find a fix that'll work for the majority of users without impacting performance but so far we don't have a concrete ETA for having the problem solved. I apologize for the inconvenience and we'll continue to search for a satisfactory workaround in the meantime. Thanks for your vigilant bug reporting and for your patience.”

The answer is Bloglines.

How dare you question the intelligence of the market

From the Consumerist:

This is also why you're fat. A graph of inflation-adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows how the prices of different food and beverages has changed over the past three decades. The price of crap food over the past 30 years has dropped. At the same time, the food you used to try to hide in your glass of milk has gotten steadily more expensive.

Obviously Coke is better for you than oranges—we’re all rational actors, aren’t we?

Time enough for fandom

The Grand Unified Timeline? Brilliant.

[Via Chaos Theory]