I hate the snow. I’ve lived in the Midwest for 9 years now and I still hate the snow. Mother Nature has been stringing me along this year with fine warm weather in January so that I couldn’t get gradually acclimated to the cold. And then she dropped a wintery-mix bomb on Kirksville (a few days after I was outside wearing shorts).

(campus photo blatantly stolen from fellow Truman blogger Bob, since I’m too much of a wuss to go out into the snow myself…)

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And I thought my CS department was bad…

“I’ve been able to graduate without writing a complete program in C++, never seeing one HTML tag, and never even looking at VB. I do have four semesters of Ada under my belt though. Yeah, that’s right. Ada.”

I totally empathize with Bob — my computer science major was very focused on theory as well. We never studied the web, but of course that was 5 or 6 years ago.

But I still don’t understand Truman‘s focus on Ada. Ada??? I can only theorize that the university hopes to turn out programmers for the military and aviation fields in St. Louis.

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“There’s something about Matt, he never matches, not even with jeans and a t-shirt.”

Patrick, my assistant director, commenting on my fashion brilliance.

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I did a photo shoot today, trying to gather new graphic elements for a redesign of matthewkingston.com, but wound up inspiring a redesign of this site instead. I’ve been wanting to reshoot my old logo for a while…

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Ernest and Bertram. Sesame Street meets The Children’s Hour (via lyd).

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Googlewhacking. A new game where you try to find a pair of words that results in only one page match on Google. Multiply the frequency of each word in Google by each other for your score.

For example, ripieno (18,300) and nucleotide (341,000) appear on only one page together (a glossary in Italian), for a score of 6,240,3000,000. And it took nearly an hour of 3 of us in my office to come up with that example!

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Why is it that straight people think they can pair any two gay men with each other and we’ll instantly hit it off and want to date? I understand that my dating prospects are virtually nil in this town, but I’m frankly embarrassed by my own behavior this weekend.

Sure, I’ve been calling this guy the MFB (“My future boyfriend”) for a few months, but it’s just a joke, right? Just something to say about the only other eligible single guy my own age I know in town, because we’re totally not each other’s type, right?

Instead, it lead to us being squished side by side at the bar, each half-sloshed, while our mutual friends kept poking us in the ribs and making lewd side-comments about how we should get it on with each other. And I played into it, making a few bold and direct comments to the other party myself.

And then we both left with our respective friends. And I’m mortally embarrassed about running into this person ever again.

Now I know why All Over the Guy got such bad reviews…

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I spent the entire weekend working on a variety of time-consuming Linux projects (including updating my TiVo webserver to 1.9.3). I’ve also finally managed to get a webcam running off of my web server.

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Your CSS Bores Me. I admit it, I’m not a particularly imaginative designer. My previous CSS-only designs were very cookie cutter (via zeldman).

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Glove lends the deaf a hand. A 17-year-old high school student has garnered international attention for developing a glove which can translate sign language into text on a small portable screen. I think it’s a really cool concept, but can’t people type faster than signing using the manual alphabet? The real benefit would come from translating ASL (American Sign Language) into text using a glove, but ASL has a very different sentence structure than spoken English. I’m afraid that thoughts would come out sounding like broken English and only reinforce in some people’s minds the inaccurate link between disability and low mental ability. Still, it’s a fascinating experiment.

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