I sometimes think about what I would have done with the $5,000 Jeff Atwood gave away to the ScrewTurn Wiki project if he had given it to me instead. Here was what they had to say about using the money.

The grant money is still untouched. It's not easy to use it. Website hosting fees are fully covered by ads and donations, and there are no other direct expenses to cover. I thought it would be cool to launch a small contest with prizes for the best plugins and/or themes, but that is not easy because of some laws we have here in Italy that render the handling of a contest quite complex.

What would you suggest?

A part of me wonders if it wouldn’t have turned out similarly for me.

But days like this make me realize that I would spend that money to go to Portland and attend the Emerging Languages Conference. I also had the experience of creating my own logos for MetaSharp which I would have happily paid an artist to make for me instead (which I think turned out pretty well despite my not being an artist).

Here it is, btw.

Anyway, in addition to sounding really interesting the people of the emerging languages conference apparently have a great sense of humor as well. Here is one of my new favorite quotes taken from the newly created google group:

That's the beauty of functional programming -- you can almost say
anything and make it sound good.  For example, I fully plan to support
higher-order gouda.

- Fogus

I tried to tweet this but Fogus irreverently failed contain his wit to less that 140 characters. Also… check out coffee script, very cool.

Things are a little slow today and I was tired of not having some type of plug-in for looking up the definition of words while reading so I decided to cook up my own real quick.

Give it a shot:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/eeepadhockifhkeglihhapjdhkcpcfal

PS: You might have to install a beta version of chrome first.

It’s pretty basic, you just select some text in the browser and a little book icon shows up in the address bar. If you click it, it will open a new tab for you at dictionary.com with the selected text already searched for. Nice and simple.

While it didn’t take long to do it, I have to admit doing the whole thing in javascript was a less than savory experience. I think I’m spoiled by my static languages.

Here are some pictures of me from the recent zombie pub crawl:

This was before the application of blood but you can see the dangling severed arm complete with protruding bones.

Here we are on the bus on the way towards the crawl. Brittney has a golf ball stuck in her chest, it looks a little infected as well. By the time we got to the crawl this bus was totally full of zombies. The regular passengers were freaking out a little.

Good times.

For a more complete photo gallery of past crawls check out my flickr feed: