I get 'em all for free: this is one I pay for out of my own pocket.

I bought a dartboard a month ago to give me something to fidget with while thinking. Rather than struggle with cricket or any "real" dart game, I've been training myself with a game I call "golf." I go around the numbers in the board, and if I hit the target …

Recently, I've seen a huge jump in "Undeliverable mail" messages coming through my mail server. I've double-checked that I'm not relaying and checked a couple return path IPs, so I know that it's just jerks spoofing the "Reply-To" header, but it makes me sick to have my domains in any …

::: {.Section1} [Apparently, the “code navigation bar” in VS2005 is a performance drain. I never rely on it, so I’ll be implementing this change on my own system. Via Steve Pietrek ]{style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri; color:#1F497D"} :::

In the dot-com days, my work led to three, count 'em, three patent applications. In all cases, I'd signed over the IP rights to the company. Both companies went bankrupt before the patents went through, leaving me to understand that the IP is now the property of creditors, who were …

Microsoft is running a contest called "Made in Express" that will pay out \$10,000 to the best application written in Microsoft's entry-level version of Visual Studio. The proposals chosen as finalists are, to put it kindly, ambitious: an AI psychotherapist (assuming that the person doesn't just cut-and-paste Eliza); an …

"Vista has a beautiful face but poor bone structure. She's lovely now, but I'm worried about how she'll age."

That's too vivid to slip into a column that uses another metaphor throughout. Darn it.

Does anyone know Patrick Logan's email (patricklogan.blogspot.com)? If so, can you forward a note to him that I want to reference this post in a column and need his title.

::: {.Section1} The first issue of SIGEVOlution, the newsletter of SIGEVO, the ACM Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, is now available for you to download. Via http://feeds.feedburner.com/illigal?m=493

Obviously, if you’re interested in the subject matter, it’s a good read. It …