Pun Salad

Happy π Day, readers. Your exercise is to engage in at least one circular argument.

• I'm a coding geek, but I don't do as much algorithm stuff as I used to. (I have people for that, out there on the Internet. Who do that for free.) Still, I remembered enough to laugh out loud at xkcd's "Ineffective Sorts". Click over there on the little picture for the full-size comic, and. once you're there, don't forget to check out the mouseover.

• I'm disappointed that Google Reader is going away in a few months. It guided a lot of my web surfing. The blogroll over there on the right (no, your right) is generated via a Javascript call to the Google Reader API. Basically, the world is ending and we're all doomed as doomed can be.

  What to do? Fortunately, the Slashdot commenters at the article linked above have lots of possible ideas. A leading possibility is Tiny Tiny RSS, which looks powerful and challenging.

  Or I could go back to doing it myself, with Perl scripts and RSS parsers and cron jobs.

  But wherever and whatever I install, I guarantee that it will be less available and robust than Google Reader. Sigh.

• George F. Will writes well, and when he writes about writing well, attention should be paid. He writes about another writer who mostly writes about writing, William Zinsser.
  When asked to explain the brisk pace of his novels, Elmore Leonard said, "I leave out the parts that people skip." You will not want to skip anything in William Zinsser's short essays written for the American Scholar magazine's Web site and now collected in The Writer Who Stayed, a book that begins with him wondering why "every year student writing is a little more disheveled."

  Zounds good. Zinsser's book is going into my virtual to-be-read pile.

• Have you noticed Target's latest "Everyday Collection" ads? Funny, very tongue-in-cheek. Here's one, for which I get no compensation, but anyway:

  Not enough to make me want to shop at Target (I'm more of a Wal-Mart guy) but still.

• On the other hand, if you are interested in something for which I receive compensation, the pictures under the "Media I'm Consuming" section, and the ones that illustrate the posts on the Books and Movies pages, are Amazon links, and if you click over and buy something, I get credit.

  The Amazon links are also completely easy to block with (for example) Adblock Plus, but I promise they are simply Amazon product images, with some easily-avoidable popup magic.