The Dark Balloon

A weblog by Hao Lian.
A journey into the soft of night.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.

§
Bites from a larger cake, (

  • Wired magazine kisses and makes up with Wired News right after I post a comment on Slashdot about distinguishing between Wired News’s and Wired’s credibility.
  • How is Reddit better than Digg? Reddit users ask “Why is this on the front page” at an alarmingly sane frequency—close to never.
  • There’s something intrinsically hilarious in Calvin using the word Weltanschauung in his artist’s statement.
  • Things that sound cooler than they actually are: industrial rock. Thanks to Donkey Kong Country, the word industrial will always remind me of dimly lit, claustrophobic bridges.
  • Donkey Kong Country (one) had the most eclectic level designs. From jungles (first world) to Greco-Roman white stone architecture (second world) to pirate ships (end boss) to mines (above). As an SNES game, the level designs remain cool today.
  • Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain DVDs came out on Tuesday (2006-07-24).
  • MSBuild files are the poorly documented. The only documentation (i.e., list of useful Properties) are the two XML Schemas that come with .NET … whose only mention I found on the MSBuild MSDN weblog. And even that’s incomplete: cursory examination shows that properties like IntermediateOutputPath and OutDir are missing.
  • Whee; people are making Neil Gaiman’s Stardust into a film. Excellent book.
  • Fun things to do #128: Reading all the compiler warnings on MSDN.
  • Calvin and Hobbes
[(2006 August 5) .]

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