I've been collecting things to mention here on my blah, for a while, and now have enough to make up at least a small post. There's no real coherence to these; they're just links to things I think would be better off widely disseminated and small aphorism-style quotes.
First are three links to Cracked. For those who aren't familiar with it, Cracked used to be a paper magazine which always struck me as trying to be a Mad knockoff; relatively recently, they reinvented themselves as a purely-Web thing and have become one of the few Web sites I think the world is actually better for. They have a tendency to say truths nobody else has the freedom, the guts, and/or the perception to say, and, usually, to say them in an amusing way.
Roughly half the things I've read on Cracked are things I think were worth reading. Here are the three I thought worth reading enough to bother saving: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere_p1.html, http://www.cracked.com/blog/a-breakup-letter-to-xbox/, and http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-questions-you-need-to-ask-to-avoid-ruining-your-life/.
Two quotes about programming:
The wise programmer is told about the Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about the Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about the Tao and laughs at it.
A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell.
And one thought. I was talking with someone about some festival or other—I no longer recall whom or what festival—and the other person was complaining about PayPal freezing the festival's account; apparently the use pattern tripped one of their red flags. My reaction is, well, it sucks, but you get what you pay for. Bank on the cheap and you get el-cheapo service; bank at a bank that deliberately dodges regulatory oversight and you don't get all those protections we mostly don't notice on most banks because the banks know better than to push the boundaries routinely. So my sympathy is rather limited; my reaction is rather "...and this surprises you how?".
This brings my list of things-to-talk-about down to four items, and none of them are really small enough to drop into an omnibus post like this one; they'll get their own posts if-and-when I get around to them.