Let's try posting these before facing the rigours of the A14, just for a change 
Happy invoicing!
- Christian Gingras - The Man Who Fixed Robotron, Part 2: Who wrote the patch?, Part 3: The Results of Learning Robotron Development - Gingras learned 6809 assembly language with the primary aim of disassembling the ROMs of Williams' Robotron:2084 arcade cabinet. He ended up developing fixes for several bugs, and being invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to Williams' headquarters in Chicago to meet the creators of the game. "It took me 8 months to study these 512 pages of code. Every night where I was working as security guard, between two building inspection time, I would unroll the stack of paper and draw lines with color ink to represent the branch instructions with arrow, or to find every places that call a specific function or read/write a specific port, etc... I decided to continue the study of Robotron, while looking also at Joust and Stargate to compare the common features and difference."
- Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem - "The good news for women-loving chanteuses like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley is that blues music in the 1920s was so far under the radar of mainstream America, female blues singers could get away with occasionally expressing their unconventional desires. That said, they all felt obligated to produce song after song about loving and losing men." Interesting examination of the influence of lesbianism on African American musical culture.
- How I Discovered Gender Discrimination - "It was the late ’90s and I was at an interesting phase of my career. For the first time in my life I possessed relevant qualifications, experience and could also show a successful track record in my chosen career path... Then the rejection letters trickled in. I could take rejection, it goes hand in hand with business, but after the first few months I was frankly confused... My first name is Kim. Technically its gender neutral but my experience showed that most people’s default setting in the absence of any other clues is to assume Kim is a women’s name. And nothing else on my CV identified me as male." Kim O'Grady's blog post has gone viral over the past week; he's posted an epilogue discussing his experience.
- Why Microsoft’s reorganization is a bad idea - "Steve Ballmer restructured Microsoft yesterday as a functional organization. The immensity of this change can not be understated, nor can the risks. Ultimately, I believe the reorganization will paralyze the company and hasten its decline." Ben Thompson explains why he thinks Ballmer has seriously screwed up.
- Early Calculator: The Sad Story of an Inventor at Buchenwald - "Curt Herzstark's fate seemed to be sealed in 1943 when the Nazis sent him to Buchenwald concentration camp. But then Herzstark, the son of a Jewish industrialist, received the unexpected opportunity to become an Aryan. 'Look, Herzstark,' one of the camp commandants said to him, 'we know that you are working on a calculating machine. We will permit you to make drawings. If the thing is worth its salt, we'll give it to the Führer after the final victory. He'll certainly make you an Aryan for that.'" How the first (mechanical) pocket calculator was created by a half-Jewish engineer in a Nazi concentration camp.
- The heroic absurdity of Dan Brown - Clive James is unimpressed by Dan Brown's latest novel. Well, any of his novels, really: "Once again, that is, he makes you want to turn the pages even though every page you turn demonstrates abundantly his complete lack of talent as a writer... (If Dan Brown’s all-time bestseller had been about the Duke of Edinburgh, it would have been called The Of Edinburgh Code.)"
- 11 Offbeat Commemorative Plaques - "A quick glance at a shiny metal plaque can often serve as shorthand for “Something important happened here.” But if you step closer, the events such plaques commemorate are often far from simple. From presidential kisses to witchcraft to events that may or may not have actually even occurred, plaques are rich and often underestimated sources of history that’s weird, funny, or just plain creepy."
- How ****ed Are The Tubes? - One of those where I had to put the domain through a URL shortener to get past the naughty words filter
Handy single-purpose site that lets Londoners know - well, what it says; a very brief summary of whatever TfL's Tube Status API has to say right now.
- Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes - Malcolm Gladwell thinks certain ingrained cultural attitudes make some pilots - specifically, Korean pilots - more likely to crash their planes. The Korean, from the site Ask a Korean, is unimpressed: "...the record is clear that Gladwell sometimes finds himself speaking and writing about topics that are out of his depth, leading to head-scratchingly elementary mistakes. The most notable is Gladwell's gaffe with "igon value," illustrated in a book review by Steven Pinker... when it comes to Gladwell's explanation of Korean culture, I can confidently say that he is dead wrong. In fact, Gladwell's treatment of Korean culture is so far off the mark, that his "igon value" error appears trivial in comparison."
- The Worst Room - "A blog about trying to find affordable housing in New York City." Not easy, it appears:
Upper West Side, Manhattan. $850.00
"mezzanine above the living room"
"its about 3 feet tall so you can’t stand up"
"you wont have a door but the loft is somehow private"
Happy invoicing!
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