Must be a real pain to set up the chessboard, if all the pieces look identical until they're on the board...

Saw Indy on Friday nite in Woburn, MA.

No warnings of any sort, but I remember at least twice when the sound dropped off for several seconds. No dialog was lost, but I do remember wondering how the reel got damaged this early in the run...

Finding out it was intentional and not a glitch ticks me off and makes me want a partial refund.

Normal wear-and-tear is understandable, but I shouldn't have to pay full price if they're intentionally delivering a downgraded experience.

While they deserve a certain amount of cred for remembering Ernie Kovacs, it's still too biased towards the new and popular (a large portion of the list is SNL and Monty Python).

Only one clip from the Carol Burnett? And nothing whatsoever from the Marx Brothers?

Nice try, but no cigar.

Ooh, thanks!

I've long been nostalgic for "If you had wings"

It used to be right next to Space Mountain (in WDW), had short lines, air-conditioning, and broke down often enough provide a quite relaxing break on hot Florida days...

I'm only about halfway thru the comments, but I'm disturbed by the number of people who refer to TNH as "Miss Hayden"

I'm curious. Anybody care to explain why you chose to make such assumptions about TNH's marital status.

And if you didn't know and didn't care to find out, isn't "Ms." the more appropriate honorific under the circumstances?

Thanks for the link. Fun story.

On a related theme, have you seen the webcomic Doubt Creeps In?

Heh. I spent too much time with software QA to trust in Singularity.

The old saying that "People who love sausage or respect the law should never watch them being made." Software belongs in that category as well.

[Are there any stories out there on Singularity beta-testers?]

Speaking of 300-baud-days, when I was working tech support, I took a couple calls from interpreters for the deaf.

The hearing-impaired was using a TDD to communicate with the interpreter, who was speaking on the phone with me.

Rather slow, and communicating technical concepts was difficult when the people on either end had more knowledge than the person in the middle, but we did resolve the problem.

[I much prefered it once the company instituted direct TDD support; TDD was still slow, but comparatively direct.]

I hope the searchers for this project are well-informed and good communicators to avoid these obstacles. [Librarian reference desk would be good training. :) ]

I keep waiting for MIT hackers to do something like that during the July 4th Pops concert & fireworks. A harmless prank to promote the school...

Re:the correct vs. altered images (in the upper-right corner), if the only relevant difference is supposed to be the heels, why the need to put the heel-wearing figure in such a skimpy outfit? Unnecessary for the point s/he was trying to make.

Actually, I've seen a fair bit of evidence that Google artificially inflates Wikipedia's rankings -- it often appears higher than more directly relevant results and higher than the same search on other engines.

So the better candidate for 800-lb gorilla is Google itself, which can tweak the results to favor its preferred sources.

In its defense, the (Gamila) tea stick isn't that hard to clean. Just open it and put it under the faucet and it all drains out.

(grrr... system ATE my 1st attempt at this post)

I have one of the Gamila teasticks and it's not as great as it first seems.

Besides not having much room for the tea leaves to unfurl, if you're using it in a cube there's the problem of finding a place to put your damp teastick once you've finished steeping. [I've also got a tea strainer with dripcup that works better.]

But the biggest problem is that the edges of the teastick are sharp. And sometimes, particularly when filled with damp tealeaves, it gets stuck. So, I've cut myself a few times on it -- once, it even drew blood. I sent a letter to the company, even offering some suggestions for ways to make their product safer, but never got a reply.

It's also possible to get purses made out of old books. I found an artist who makes them, plus DIY instructions on several sites.