i’m not typically a fan of the more hard-lit oriented stuff from the new york review of books. frankly, i find a lot of their hard-lit a bit on the tedious and pretentious side of things. unfortunately, with the ny review of books, i have this tendency to simply tune some of that out for the stuff that is more immediately interesting. i wonder how much fun stuff i might have missed because it had

this article about ambrose bierce hardly falls in the hard-lit domain and to that end, i enjoyed it immensely. if you’ve enjoyed the devil’s dictionary in any form, i’m pretty sure the read is worth your time.

if for no other reason than to check out snarky little nuggets like this …

Mr. Parton says Mrs. Stowe has lived a life of heroic virtue. With her face, a life of virtue is no very difficult matter. When Nature conferred upon her her peculiar charms, we imagine the operation might have been called, “Chastity made easy.”

this little gem has been sitting in my reading queue for a little while. it’s an interesting variant of the, “what would you do if you found someone’s wallet?” scenario. with everything sitting on your smart phone, you wonder why more folks don’t lean on the built in protections to secure their data.

obviously, the punch line to the story is the notion that we simply can’t trust other people not to root around in our found personal stuff. if this holds true to folks at an individual level, what’s to stop those who have access to far vaster realms of personal info and who watches these orgs?

when little dude gets older, i’m going to pedantically remind him of all sorts of inane shit. i plan on bringing it up at the most inopportune times just to bug the hell out of him.

dude, remember on 11-may, 2012 at your carnival there someone in an deciduous tree costume handing out educational stuff at your carnival? no? i do. it took me like 20 emails and 4 phone calls to make that happen.

the 20 emails and 4 phone calls part will be an amplification by at least an order of magnitude just to be more annoying.

here’s a slick little tip that i discovered on a mailing list today. the OSX resolver is more flexible than i initially gave it credit for. in lieu of running dnsmasq or something along those lines if you want to have selective resolution of DNS for different domains or use alternate name servers you can override this behavior within the /etc/resolver directory by providing per domain resolve.conf files.

doubly useful if you want to probe to a destination when you’re allegedly offline due to being placed behind a less than cluefully deployed walled garden.