Nice and chilly last night. I may have to dig out the quilt I discarded a month or so ago if it keeps up 
Happy invoicing!
- Irish Luck - Surviving Partial Ejection from A-6 Aircraft - It’s bad when your ejector seat goes off by accident; turns out it’s even worse when you get stuck half way out of the plane at 230 knots: ”I heard a sharp bang and felt the cockpit instantly depressurize. The roar of the wind followed… Instead of meeting my [Bombardier Navigator]’s questioning glance, I saw a pair of legs at my eye level. The right side of the canopy was shattered. I followed the legs up and saw the rest of my BN's body out in the windblast.”
- 'Bizarro World' - "That's what my wife and I entered when we drove up to an arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, where she would attempt to break an official world record in the classic video game Tetris."
- The War Photo No One Would Publish - "When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldn’t run the picture." In the UK, the Observer did run it; I remember being deeply shocked by the image. (I also think they were right to run it.)
- What's the scariest thing in the world? Ask your teenage daughter - Jason Stark discovered a new approach to representing achievement and failure in the game he’s developing by talking with his family: ”Design is a series of answering questions. When you’re building on an established genre, most of those questions have already been answered before and the struggle is finding uniqueness. But when I started asking questions, even fairly basic ones, the answers kept coming back … different.”
- The cochlear switch - Josephine Dickinson on losing her hearing, then regaining some:”Although profoundly deaf, I was a ‘hearing’ musician with a distortion problem and a bias towards lower frequencies… Then on Sunday, 29 April 2012, as I was driving to a tango class over Cumbria’s Hartside Pass, my hearing aid seemed to sputter out. I could hear nothing.”
- The Ambush at Sheridan Springs: How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons - How Dungeons & Dragons became a business, and its creator lost control in a boardroom coup: ”What did Gygax see, in that moment? He saw enough shares in play that he stood to lose control of TSR, a company he had founded and transformed into a global brand. But he surely also saw something even more dear at stake: that he might lose control of Dungeons & Dragons.”
- The 72-Room Bohemian Dream House - "The building at 190 Bowery is a mystery: a graffiti-covered Gilded Age relic, with a beat-up wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been opened since La Guardia was mayor." But in fact it’s the family home of a photographer, who bought it in 1966 for $102,000. It’s now estimated to be worth anything from $30 million to $70 million. (Here it is on Google Street View.)
- Meet the anonymous app police fighting bullies and porn on Whisper, Yik Yak, and potentially Secret - "The biggest threat facing new anonymous social networks is their own users. Cyberbullying and sex could fell apps like Whisper, Yik Yak, and Secret, which is why they’re turning to a police force abroad to keep their communities safe. Here’s an inside look."
- How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century - A look at how the Visual Studio development team managed the move from Microsoft’s old waterfall process to an agile approach, a move now being made by other teams in the company: ”The waterfall process has always been regarded with suspicion. Even when first named and described in the 1970s, it was not regarded as an ideal process that organizations should aspire to. Rather, it was a description of a process that organizations used but which had a number of flaws that made it unsuitable to most development tasks.”
- 70s Sci-Fi Art - ”Art. Sci-fi art. From the 70s.” Not sure how this picture of a recent CUK meetup got in there:
Happy invoicing!
