Oops, forgot it was Monday today - that's what Christmas will do to you 
Happy invoicing, if any!
- The 1/2 Hour News Hour: American Conservatives and Their Crime Against Comedy - "I sympathize with any attempt at conservative comedy. I really do. I sympathize because liberal-leaning comedy is ubiquitous. Any given film or sitcom can be critical of the right without having to provide an explanation or even any context. The joke might be funny or it might not be, but nobody really suspects the motive... Imagine, however, the alarm-bells that would be ringing in a viewer's head if George W. Bush were mentioned in a sitcom without being in some way the butt of a joke. Or if he were portrayed--unironically--as the "decent guy dealt a lousy hand" his supporters suggest he is, while Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were slapped around like strawmen? It wouldn't fit." Phil Reed reviews a dismal attempt to present right-wing satire, and examines why it fails so completely.
- Quines (self-replicating programs) - "A 'quine' (or 'selfrep') is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a quine is not a hack that only works because the programming language has certain nice properties — it is a consequence of the general so-called “fixed-point” theorem, itself an instance of Cantor's ubiquitous diagonal argument)." DAvid Madore tells you everything you need to know on the subject.
- Stop lying on stage - "Entrepreneurs crave information about successful startups, and they should. Most of the received wisdom about business and entrepreneurship is simply wrong. Many journalists and conference organizers attempt to fill this demand by giving successful entrepreneurs the opportunity to tell their stories: in magazines, on blogs, and on stage. And yet, most of the time, those opportunities are wasted, because the protagonists tell lies." Eric Ries calls for greater honesty on the part of entrepreneurs speaking in public about their business experiences.
- The Day MAME Saved My A** - "Ask any game developer and they'll tell you that publishers are the scum of the earth. It's never a question of 'if' the publisher screws you, it's 'when'. During my 15 years as a developer I have seen publishers pull every dirty trick imaginable... This story is not about publishers, but it is about the kinds of situations that publishers create and the lengths that we developers are often forced to go to in order to clean up the messes they leave us with." Great story from the game developer trenches by Mark Feldman. (Oh, and he's right about publishers.)
- Great Reading in Computer Science - "The following is a list of great readings in computer science, with a focus on algorithms and theory topics." Dr Gabriel Robins' list of links is excellent, including links to papers, videos, books, and other collections of links.
- A real person, a lot like you - "My friend Sara has run a small online business out of her living room for 12 years. It's her whole life. She takes it very very personally... Last week, one of her clients sent her a 10-page-long scathing email, chopping her down, calling her a scam artist... Devastated, Sara turned off her computer and cried. She shut off the phones and closed up shop for the day." Derek Sivers issues a plea for people to remember that the other end of the Internet is people too.
- Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management - "Published in 1861, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management was a guide to all aspects of running a household in Victorian Britain... Its 2751 entries include tips on how to deal with servants' pay and children's health, and above all a wealth of cooking advice, instructions and recipes. It was an immediate bestseller, running to millions of copies within just a few years." Some light reading for the festive season: it might also help answer the perennial question.
- Ngrams - "Explore a corpus of 500 billion words..." Good collection of graphs of phrase-related trends graphed by Google Labs' Books Ngram Viewer.
- Teach Parents Tech - Speaking of Google: "This site was built by a few folks at Google to help keep tech support a family business." This simple form allows you to send links to tutorial videos about a variety of tasks to your parents, or anybody else to whom you find yourself providing technical support.
- When Parents Text - and speaking of parents and technology, here's a collection of text messages they've sent to their offspring: "MOM: I made a twitter! @cocktailmama"
Happy invoicing, if any!
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