I go away for *mumble* months and return to find that the colors are all wrong and the text is ragged-left instead of ragged-right. This will not do at all. Now to summon up the gumption to modify it back to something acceptable. :/

Thank you, Language Log.

Time for another semi-annual update, I guess. I feel compelled to announce a new milestone -- we've finally caught up to the end of Fringe season 3. For something that started out feeling like an X-Files clone, it has gone in some strange goatee-verse directions with nice sfinal overtones. It has also dropped a number of loose threads along the way ( Read more... )

So delicious is gone, replaced by a "new, improved!" Delicious, which offers "stacks" which seem a lot like the link pages people add to websites. Possibly useful at some point. I have to say, I'm kind of torn about the whole transition thing. On the one hand, a lot of people found the old delicious to be useful, and the new version is arguably ( Read more... )

Hurricane Irene took her own sweet time going past this section of the coast. For all the hype, though, we got off surprisingly easy. Most of the damage around here was east of I95, especially across the bay. We didn't even lose power other than for a minute around 4 AM, which is surprising around here given the number of tree limbs that always ( Read more... )

Spambots must be getting desperate. This is the third or fourth time now that I've gotten a message about a spambot-generated comment on one of my entries. I don't use this thing much, so I have to assume that people who make entries regularly must be getting pelted with non-sentient entries about commercial opportunities and dodgy products ( Read more... )

For some reason, the spambots decided to post comments to one of my old book posts ("Evil Genius", Catherine Jinks). Not sure why they latched on to that one, but at least I got emails from LJ and the option to delete them before any one my (undoubtedly copious :P) archive readers had to see them.

I've been playing a lot more City of heroes recently, after the release of new free content for top-level characters and the beginnings of a new crafting scheme for growing after max level. This has gotten me playing my level 50 characters again, trying hard task forces and trials that weren't as popular before the new rewards. Of course that means ( Read more... )

Courtesy of Ron Araujo, pasted here for further reflection ( Read more... )

Found a decent corpus I can use to train a tagger: the Open American National Corpus, which is a free download, multi-genre, and 15 million tokens long. It includes conversations, both face-to-face and on the phone, which suits my problem much better than WSJ would. It's easy to read and nicely structured, and is already tagged. The bad news is, it ( Read more... )