“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”
Sir Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943.
And you thought you were doing yourself a favour by switching to decaf (New Scientist):
Decaffeinated coffee may have a harmful effect on the heart by increasing the levels of a specific cholesterol in the blood, researchers say. Their explanation is that caffeine-free coffee is often made from a type of bean with a higher fat content.
I’m never sure if I use the word right, but I think this could be called ironic. Of course at the end of the article someone else claims that this study was quite small and short-term and it is too soon to draw conclusions.
Bottomline seems to be that nothing is perfect, there’s usually a catch, and the best thing to do is to not use/drink/eat anything excessively! So I’ll stick to my two cups of coffee in the morning and not go back to habits from a previous job & life that involved a bit more throughout the day. 
label 8888,9998,9999;
const inpfl = ' input file: ';
mdkfil___ = 'mdco___.mdk';
alfn = 'mdconvr.Ã '; { formerly .MFO, earlier .DAT }
n_mtrls = 5; n_parms = 12; n_midsp = 2; idfirst = -3;
n_strms = 3; sndf = 13; midf = 14;
idflast = 14; {n_parms+n_midsp;sndf=parameter sound/controller; midf=param MidiChannel}
n_prgs = 32; mx_mtrs = 6; mx_puls = 256; mx_scls = 6; mx_lyrs = 10;
mouse_accel = 0.9; mouse_start_wait = 50 { ticks @ 5ms = 250ms }
<...skip lots of similar lines...>
i8p : array[1..n_strms,1..mx_puls] of integer; {attenuation bezogen}
attfac1 : array[0..maxP1,0..mx_puls] of real;
attfac2 : array[0..maxP1,0..b7] of real;
ostfnt : array[0..1,1..18] of integer; { 18 = ost_bx[n].H (q.v.) }
kdamH : array[1..24] of integer;
Go see for yourself, or avoid the headache and write readable programs!
Not entirely happy with the layout yet, so that may change in the days/weeks to come, but I’ve added support for Gravatars, a.k.a Globally Recognized Avatars.
The idea is that you can associate the email-address that you use to comment here with an image. Once it’s been approved (rated) it’ll show up on any (old and new) comments of yours.
This does not expose your email address to anyone reading along, the image is queried using an MD5 hash (checksum) of your address which is (in practical terms) impossible to reverse.
To me they involve:
And you?
visited 13 states (25%)
create your own personalized map of the USA
I landed in Atlanta in ’99 for my first visit to the US, visited some people in that area and let’s not forget I also flew to Chicago and saw some of Michigan. 
I’ve seen a bit more of Michigan since then, as well as the states between it and Kansas, partially visiting and partially roadtripping through them.
M has family on the east and west-coast so no doubt I’ll see more of that in the future. Definitely want to visit Hawaii and Alaska at some point.
Maybe this explains (New Scientist) why M is much more hooked on comics than I am:
Women get more of a buzz out of cartoons, a brain-imaging study has found, with their brains feeling more rewarded by a funny joke than those of men.
<…>
In particular, women appear to have a lower expectation that the cartoon will be funny than men. “Women appear to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it,” says Allan Reiss, one of the study’s authors, at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, US.
Ah, my fellow countrymen are at it again (Times Online):
Researchers in the Netherlands have found that the tendency to be persistently lonely is partially inherited, and not caused entirely by shyness or poor social skills.
The research, conducted by the Free University, Amsterdam, was based on data from more than 4,000 pairs of twins in the Netherlands who had been studied since 1991.
Feeling lonely tonight? Blame your parents!
You have to read this one (CNN) to believe it:
Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.
In other news, there have been an unusually high number of lightning strikes in the Dover area recently…
As of a few days ago (as far as I can tell) you can sign up for a (free) membership as you add your entry on a map:
So with the member registration stuff, we can now let people edit their shoutouts, add their mugshots if they forgot to, and edit or remove their photos.
For admins of maps with more than a few dozen entries it’ll be somewhat impractical to replace the existing users with registered member, but in the long run it’ll be well worth it.
Wired describes an interesting new approach taken by :
Riya has developed software that can automatically recognize who is in a picture and tag it with their names.
Currently in alpha testing, the software has proven sensitive enough to tell the difference between twins and recognize members of the same family. It can even read street signs for clues about a picture’s location.
I like it, but I’ll sit back and wait until there’s an open source solution I can reuse for our private collection of pictures. So far we have a fairly workable web-interface to edit names, groups, title, description, just wish I could find some time to rework the public side of things and move it off of our internet connection at home. It’s the one thing still running here, for practical reasons.
Jon Jacobs, a director of independent films who hails from Miami, FL, has purchased a virtual space station from the Swedish software company that owns and operates the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) Project Entropia. This is believed to be the largest single purchase of virtual real estate by an individual.
… Nuts!
Makes browsing your collection a bit tricky, I’d say.
Please learn, before somebody gets hurt, m’kay?
Just got an email about one of my CCs, let’s call it foobank. They proudly announce their redone website, but then while the link reference is to foobankaccount.com the text it’s linking calls it foobank.com, making me wonder if someone is trying a phishing scam on me. If I wrote software to alert about phishing, this email would certainly trigger it!
Thankfully I remembered that they announced an upgrade, so I checked that email and it’s the right domain. The irony is that when I follow the link, it redirects me back to… foobank.com!
Now also enabled is a plugin that provides (optional, checkbox is selected by default) email-notifications of follow-up comments to your comments. If you end up not liking the results or decide you don’t want to hear about follow-ups after a while, there is a subscription-manager, the link to which is included in each notification tossed your way.
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