You take the biggest pool party at one of the hottest hotels in Vegas, and what do you get?

A TV show, of course.

Now, finally, Amazon.ca has launched an electronics store.  It’s about time Canada joined the future.

But that constant is no longer.  The Tuba Man (as Ed McMichael came to be known), recently died after an assault in lower Queen Anne.

I’ll miss the tunes of A&W playing in the crisp fall air.

Today, I found my answer, even though it was launched 3 months ago — Amazon Universal Wish List.  It’s a bookmarklet that you add to your quick links (or Bookmarks) bar, and it will add anything from anywhere to your Amazon.com wishlist.

But that wasn’t quite enough, mainly because I hate the bookmarks bar (I think it clutters up the precious real estate on my screen.  So I took a little time, and created a greasemonkey script that adds a button to every page that you can click on.  Of course, you can set up your own inclusion and exclusion lists so that it doesn’t show up on every page.

To use this, you’ll need firefox (2 or 3), greasemonkey, and this script.

And of course, here’s my wishlist.

in the Lappish resort of Ylläs, you can ride the gondola naked without fear of being arrested: one cabin has been converted into a sauna.

Other ski destinations around the world in this article.

The fast answer is you would use a unix/linux tool called ‘grep’, which allows you to search for a particular (regular) expression in a file.  This is a surprisingly useful tool, and combined with other similar programs, allow you to quickly search through, collate, and aggregate all sorts of information.  It usually takes a couple of minutes to look through 10s of GBs of data.

Some candidates, inevitably, would try to write a program from scratch, that essentially does the same thing as the existing tool.  This is not ideal, but if they can do it right, still acceptable (especially since you should be able to write simplified versions of these tools in a couple of hours).

Imagine my surprise then, when I read this article regarding why it could cost up to $15 million to provide copies of Alaskan state employee emails.  Here’s a choice quote:

How did the cost reach $15 million? Let’s look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer’s time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for “security” checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that’s $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.

Emphasis mine.  Obviously, the programmers that work for the state of Alaska would not have passed our phone screens.

Also worth noting is that the costs are in aggregate - which means you cannot create the process once, and automate to repeat the same process at a cheaper cost (which is what computers are really good at).

Seriously.

These days, I get by on the Stranger.  But for my cartoon fix, I always check in on xkcd three times a week.

Now, there’s been a cartoon off between Farley Katz of the New Yorker and Randall Munroe of xkcd.

I’ve always wanted to buy a warehouse, and put a bunch of containers in it to form a container community.  It looks like other people have already build container houses.

We cooked a 20 lb turkey for 24 people.  It was a lot of bird, and it was delicious.

Bonus link: everything wrapped in bacon (yes, our turkey was wrapped in bacon).

There’s been a lot of different posters made with Obama’s face on it (including some that are quickly becoming iconic).

The site colourlovers breaks down the colour themes used in some of those posters.