Bounded in a Nutshell

The presidential election should be treated as a game of Hex, using the map of the lower 48 as the board. The one problem with this is that the player seeking the north/south connection has an advantage over the east/west player.

The caption for a photo in the Toronto Star:

Jim Flaherty got into a political hissing match with Ontario

Isn't that usually abbreviated as "p'issing match"?

I miss the word "failure". It was a fixture in the vernacular of my youth, by which I mean the social circles that I moved in as an undergraduate; the full phrase took the form "failure to X", sometimes followed by "penalty card". (The formula comes from a particularly aggravating card game that was designed to appeal specifically to geek of a certain stripe. Even today, I can not tell you its name… not because I don't know it, but because to do so would land me with three penalty cards in quick succession, and who can afford to carry around all those extra cards these days?)

Today, of course, the use of "failure" is becoming deprecated as "FAIL" is taking on extra duties as a noun. While I appreciate the broader punning potential of the shorter word – I'm fond of "failboat", for instance – I miss the comparative prolixity of the original.

There's a guy from the phone company in my basement right now, installing the various folderol necessary for my incipient transition to fibre-optics-based service ("FiOS", to use the brand name). It feels a little weird, because it's really quite rare for there to be anyone else in my house; I think the last time I had a visitor was six months ago. It's also weird because of the random drilling and hammering noises that keep phasing in and out, of course.

In other news, I've got my new machine; pursuant to my earlier musings, I'm indeed going with the three-box solution of a desktop, a laptop, and an iPod Touch, though the latter has yet to arrive. So far, I'm liking the desktop a lot; I'd forgotten what having adequate amounts of RAM really means.

Oh, and I've been experimenting with Twitter, which is more fun than I'd anticipated. The username there's "doc_hatter" if you feel like following my exploits there. I've started working on another couple of web-based projects, but it might be a while before those come to fruition.