Last week I turned 40. On that particular day, every time I returned to my desk I would find another collection of 40 things on my desk. Things like… 40 cans of Diet Coke 40 army guys 40 cents 40 suckers (Dum Dums, specifically) 40 peanuts 40oz Malt Liquor I may have missed some, but you get the idea.

Sometimes I wonder how I end up with such an odd assortment of movies in my Netflix queue. Case in point: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. Check this, a (black and white with orchestral accompaniment) silent movie, adapted from a ballet adapted from the Bram Stoker novel. The filmaker uses all sorts of visual hoo-ha to play with the eyes: out of focus bits, tinting, odd wipes, boosted contrast, etc.

A site loaded with palindromes

If you hate (as I do) mandatory user registration for sites that don’t need your information, check out BugMeNot.com Oh, and if you’re involved with a site that enforces user registration, you must of course first register with BugMeNot. The registration form is pretty typical

Tracy says that she enjoyed Catwoman. It seems she’s pretty much alone there. One reviewer (Gregory Weinkauf of the Dallas Observer) wrote: “Much like a cat, the movie is a superfluous gob of fluff with an attitude ranging from idiotic to nasty.” He’s apparently not much of a cat person.

I turn 40 on Monday. If it’s really no big deal, why have I been wandering around saying things to myself like, “This is the last time I’ll grocery shop in my thirties?” That sound you hear is one helluva midlife crisis bearing right down on me.

For the life of me, I cannot say “Fa shizzle.” It always comes out “Fa swizzle” or “Facism” or some other forced, damn-you’re-such-a-retard variant.

Steve takes the funniest photo ever

Once in a while it would be nice to have a digital camera handy. I still have my old casio exilim, but I hate using it. Since I sold the Digital Rebel to Steve and bought all sorts of film gear, I was left without anything digital. What I wanted was something small enough to take everywhere, but not so small that it’s hard to handle. I wanted a simple point and shoot but with manual options, just in case.

Another great one from The Onion But the final straw, Supreme Court justices said, came last week, when none of the 500,000 random citizens polled were aware of the existence of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program. “I mean, come on,” Justice William Rehnquist said. “The threat of global thermonuclear war? It’s just ridiculous. There was no way we could trust such a populace to keep running things after that.

So far, Flickr rocks. It’s still officially in beta, and things change/improve almost daily. The site is a great combination of easy to use and geek-friendly. The developers are focused on all the right things. There seems to be a core set of ideals that touch on things like standards-compliance, ease of use, extensibility, accessibility and other goodies. They’ve just teamed up with FeedBurner to offer feed splicing, which is a way to patch together your Flickr photos with your weblog RSS feed.

Subversion 1.1 is close. This is good mainly because… There is now an option for a filesystem-based backend. The current BDB implementation is just too delicate, hard to compile and easy to wedge. Supposedly the problems with shared working copy permissions have been fixed. Why the FSFS is better and the release notes