Tag: hyperbolic prose

  • Prancer

    Prancer

    The internet is full of link rot. Things that you point to for their brilliance submerge out of view years later, lost to the sands of time. The wayback machine may be your only salvation but it’s like looking for lost scraps of paper in the attic. For this reason, I have copy/pasted this bit […]

  • Full Disclosure

    Diving into the minutiae of documents sometimes uncovers wonderful details and flashes of humanity. Mutual Fund disclosure statements are the usual dry blah-de-dah boilerplates but The Wall Street Journal Moneybeat column digs out this chestnut from the go-go dotcom days before the crash. Plain Language Risk Disclosure First of all, stock prices are volatile. Well, […]

  • The probabilistic guarantees of a web browser

    The probabilistic guarantees of a web browser

    We’ve all been there. Something goes all sideways in our browser and we’re stuck with a spinning throbber as the fan kicks into overdrive. Tempted to see what might be going on, we roll up our sleeves and pop the virtual hood and our world goes from rainbows and unicorns into a stinky mess of […]

  • Matt, meet Andy

    I love hyperbolic prose. Especially when it’s used to sell something. Better yet when it’s pitching you or something you do. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is hiring and Matthew Doig penned what is perhaps the all-time best Want Ad ever. It reads more like a call to arms than a job spec. We want to add some […]

  • Best Code Comment Ever

    Comments left by developers in the dead of the night are inside jokes left for others. Little winks of comic relief left for others that will be parsing through the sub-routines trying to wrangle software to get things working. Usually code comments are short but this one left by a frustrated programmer of a Photoshop […]

  • Friendster Andy

    There’s a profile of a guy on Friendster making the rounds with the most over-the-top About Me section that it’s worth posting in its entirety: I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice with my bare hands. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them […]