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When I read Douglas Adams’ The Salmon of Doubt, I really liked his take on the phrase “it turns out” and have attempted to incorporate it into my lexicon.

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that…’ or the craven ‘they say that…’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

Here’s a great little blog post from jsomers.net on the usefulness of the sneaky phrase, “it turns out“.

If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what is the road to heaven paved with?

It’s currently -38°C in Lethbridge.

That’s -36°F. Only a little colder and then numbers for Celsius and Fahrenheit converge.

Oh and did I mention that’s WITHOUT the wind chill factor. Yeah, with wind chill it’s more like -47°C!

Wikipedia’s policy on spoilers:

Articles on the Internet sometimes feature a “spoiler warning” to alert readers to spoilers in the text, which they may then choose to avoid reading. Wikipedia has previously included such warnings in some articles on works of fiction. Since it is generally expected that the subjects of our articles will be covered in detail, such warnings are considered unnecessary. Therefore, Wikipedia no longer carries spoiler warnings, except for the content disclaimer and section headings (such as “Plot” or “Ending”) which imply the presence of spoilers.

It makes complete sense, but this policy change is something I would have liked to know BEFORE I read the plot summary of The Road, a novel I WAS looking forward to reading.

A seventh grade student, BridgeAnne d’Avignon, and her 80 year old grandfather traced President Obama’s ancestry back to a common relative with most of the other presidents. They’re all related to the former King of England from 1199 to 1216, John “Lackland” Plantagenet.

You may remember John “Lackland” Plantagenet, or John of England from the characterization in Disney’s Robin Hood.

Prince John and Sir Hiss as scanned from page 166 of The Illusion of Life Disney Animation by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Yes, THAT Prince John. Aha.

According to BridgeAnne, the only former US president that does not share John “Lackland” Plantagenet as an ancestor is Martin Van Buren.

Video news link.

I enjoyed reading through Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions.

Words can’t describe how I feel right now. Recently my host had a couple of catastrophic hard drive failures resulting in the loss of my wordpress database. I have a not so recent backup which I’ll use to reconstruct the site from soon. Not so sure if I have a back-up after all.

In the meantime, enjoy my google shared items or my flickr stream.

In addition to running very slowly, lately I’ve been getting some unexplained popups on my computer. They’re very strange, sometimes appearing with the Internet Explorer logo (which I don’t use except for updating windows).

Some of the popups have the Firefox logo but then have an Internet Explorer error message. Some other of the pop-ups are coming up as error 404 but that is likely because of my hosts file. (If you don’t have a modified hosts file, I highly recommend you get this one—instructions.)

I ran a scan using Hijackthis and found, what I think are, suspicious .dll files in the windows/system32 folder:

• hoyolajo.dll
• pamukuhu.dll
• subiluje.dll

I don’t know what these files do and the limited search results aren’t helping. I’m posting this here with the hope that someone else may shed some light on the situation.

Foursquare is the iPhone app that rewards social behaviour.

It’s not out yet, but according to The New York Observer, it should be available in time for SXSW.

“What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game. You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars–just experiencing things that you wouldn’t normally do.”

So, a video game that rewards being adventurous and outgoing in, you know, real life?

Kottke is calling it the new Dodgeball. One significant change I’m wondering about, will it work in Canada?

In an obvious effort to get Internet attention (apparently a successful effort), Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is on Dancing with the Stars.

Don’t miss the judges’ harsh criticism and Woz’s response:

[YouTube Link]