There are always three speeches...

What is a lexadecimal? It's a color whose hexidecimal number forms an English word.  For example, this background color is feeble (#feeb1e).

I sometimes think this detached beer belly is how my wife sees me.

Forbes' article Leadership Is Not An Entitlement Program has one interesting quote: "When leadership is perceived as little more than a title granting access to a platform for personal gain, rather than a privilege resulting in an opportunity to serve, we'll continue to find ourselves in a crisis of leadership."

Happy 20th birthday Vim! If you need a text editor (not a word processor) you should be using Vim. (You Emacs freaks know who you are.) Why Vim? Multi-doc interface, modal editing, multiple clipboards, macros, search, extensible, portable.

For all my programming friends, especially recent or soon-to-be graduates, READ THIS: Don't Call Yourself a Programmer and Other Career Advice. "Hopefully it will provide value over what your career center isn't telling you."

Scratch - a programming language for kids.

There are so many reasons to love this story. First, what's not to love about beef jerky? Second, add a little buzz by creating caffeinated beef jerky. Third, develop it in Natick, MA for the army. Fourth, zapplesauce?

Must-watch video of the week: Pythagasaurus - "He knows all 8 numbers."

We apparently have only scratched the surface of the true value of Twitter, at least according to this blog post. The more I use Twitter (2,074 tweets and counting), the more I like it. The article's points are:

1. Identity: Twitter's asymmetric follower model (I can follow you but you don't have to follow me) makes your Twitter handle a more convenient identity than your email or Facebook or LinkedIn.
2. Object Communications: "When machines can talk to other machines you will have a truly powerful internet."
3. Predictive Data: Twitter streams should be monitored to gain real-time competitive advantage.
4. Augmented Data: Combining the Twitter stream (see #3) with meta data to draw further conclusions.

I just added the upcoming (29 Nov release date) album Winter Garden by Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, and Robin Guthrie to my Amazon wish list.

Are you really into typography? Do you know what kern means? Then by all means play the kerning game, Kern Type, where you earn points for properly adjusting the spacing between letters in a word.

Know yer punctuation: the percontation point and other obscure marks.

Cupcake ipsum dolor. Sit amet icing jelly beans cotton candy chupa chups tiramisu donut. Caramels croissant bear claw lemon drops jujubes cheesecake. Danish candy candy toffee sugar plum cheesecake. Jelly-o danish icing biscuit fruitcake lemon drops tiramisu caramels brownie. Biscuit marshmallow danish danish tart donut lollipop. Lollipop oat cake bonbon icing jelly beans gummies. Toffee biscuit tiramisu sugar plum tootsie roll chocolate bar jelly beans. This paragraph brought to you by Cupcake Ipsum.

Beer. In. Space. Vostok 4 Pines Stout. Brewed by an aeronautical engineer nonetheless. Good thing someone's already invented a zero-g drinking cup, as reported here on 22 Oct 2011. Now some beer maven is going to start asking about what kind of head your beer will have in zero-g.

I overuse the term "aviation pr0n" but if anything qualifies it's this photo of shock waves around a Blue Angels' F-18 doing a low high-speed pass over water. Absolutely kick ass.

A two-part article (part 1, part 2) on the Ares defense technology blog describes a reunion of former employees from Area 51 and their work on the A-12 and other classified projects. A 1-hour video of a presentation on Archangel: The CIA's Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft is now on my short-list of videos to watch.

Google has everything, it seems, including easter eggs.

Leave it to the professionals: monkeys. source

Vaccinate your children. From Scientific American, "one quarter [of parents] held the mistaken belief that vaccines can cause autism in healthy children, and more than one in 10 had refused at least one recommended vaccine. This sad state of affairs exists because parents have been persistently and insidiously misled by information in the press and on the Internet and because the health care system has not effectively communicated the counterarguments, which are powerful."

How many ways are there to hear your IP address read to you? You can have Glenn, an apparent Village People wannabe, groan your IP. And as reported here a while back, you can have a sexy girl moan your IP.

Science shares her secrets: fingernails on a chalkboard (do kids even know what a chalkboard is?) sound horrible because of components in the 2-4 kHz range, the same range as a human voice, which for obvious reasons, our ear amplifies. 

asapiophobe: a person who hates or fears the lack of intelligence in others.  You know who you are.

Alphabetimals - for kids and immature bloggers

Play with the solar system. But Sticky Thing is better.

...the one your practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave. ~Dale Carnegie