CNN's got a video about people's confusion with Obama vs. Osama, but it doesn't seem possible to link to it. This will at least take you to a page with the "Obama, not Osama" video link for a bit. (Oddly, searching for "Obama, not Osama" does not return that video as one of the results.)

Being named "Barack Hussein Obama" is at least a bit of a problem, and the instinctive politician reaction is to try to shy away from it, but I'd suggest the best thing to do is the exact opposite. Make sure every time from now on that Barack Obama is mentioned that Hussein is front and center. By the time the nominations and the election roll around, that'll just be his name; all the jokes, stories, and problems will be a thing of the past. If he shys away from it, the issue will always be something that can be slyly brought up. If there's any time to do that, it's now, when it basically can't hurt him to speak of; what are they going to do, organize a recall election based on the premise that the voters were unaware of their chosen candidate's name?

Our household has taken on a new resident: A genius cricket.

While crickets are very good at naturally taking up positions that are hard for humans to reach, this cricket has located quite possibly the best possible position in the entire household: Deep inside our furnace, as near as I can tell. I haven't made visual contact yet so I'm not sure, but he's definitely in the furnace room.

Crickets are known for their chirp (which only male crickets can do; male wings have ridges or "teeth" that act like a "comb and file" instrument).... Crickets chirp at different rates depending both on their species and the temperature of their environment. Most species chirp at higher rates the higher the temperature is (approx. 60 chirps a minute at 13ºC in one common species; each species has its own rate). - Crickets

Honey, this one's for you:

Not a morning person? Take solace — new research suggests that "night owls" are more likely to be creative thinkers.

Scientists can't yet fully explain why evening types appear to be more creative, but they suggest it could be an adaptation to living outside of the norm....

Scientists scored each [group of Morning, Intermediate, and Evening people as they] completed activit[ies based] on originality, elaboration, fluidity and flexibility factors. Evening types aced each test based on these criteria, while morning and intermediate type people struggled to get scores over 50. - Night Owls Are More Creative, Says Study

I've been watching my weblogs (by which I mean the actual web server logs) scroll by to make sure everything's kosher and fixing up little things here and there.

It's an interesting view of your website; I'm not sure I've ever really watched a weblog for hours at a time before. One interesting point: While I'm sure my experience isn't necessarily representative, the online feed readers have really taken off. I suppose if even I've converted to Google's reader, and I tend to prefer local clients to web clients, that means something. (The only aggregator that I've been happy with on Linux is also a complete, absolute dog. 20 feeds shouldn't result in multi-second bouts of 100% CPU usage several times an hour; it was noticably degrading general performance. Parsing RSS isn't that hard.) I'd estimate two thirds of my subscribers are on online clients, and that's just the ones that I can tell; some online readers like the Earthlink's don't give reader statistics in the User-Agent.

An "unbeatable" Clinton-Obama ticket?

You know, just on general principles I don't really want our President sequence to go "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton".

And even more strongly on the same principles, I don't want to see "Bush, (Clinton,) Bush, Bush", so Jeb, unless you are a political genious please don't run.

300 million people in this country and only one family and one marriage is Presidential material?

If we're really lucky, 2008 will be Clinton vs. Bush. Won't that be fun.

I just saw a Konqueror user flash by in my logs (which I've been watching for errors), and decided to check my Javascript to see if it worked in Konqueror. I'm not surprised to find out it doesn't.

Unfortunately, I don't see any way to debug the Javascript with Konqueror. A few web pages reference starting konqueror in a console to get javascript errors output on STDOUT, but that's not working on my copy. Without any feedback, I can't fix it in any reasonable amount of time.

I've released NonMockObjects 0.2.0.

This release adds easy support for obtaining many variants of an object, which allows you to easily test that all combinations of some parameters have a certain invariant.

For instance, my Entry objects for this weblog can optionally contain a title, a link for the title, and a summary. The only constraint on that set is that a link affects a title, so you really need a title for the link to make sense, although it is permissible to have a link without a title in the database. By setting up my Entry creation function to indicate that each of those can either be None or contain a certain concrete string, I can obtain all 8 combinations of an entry with:

    for entry in data.variations_entry():

I was having a problem with one of the code paths through my RSS caching routines. This is a post to test that Google and a couple of other readers are working now.

Via Instapundit via Dr. Helen, a fascinating paper on anti-psychotic drugs and the difference between their perceived and real effects on cognitive functioning.

Also interesting is an unexamined assumption in the paper about what constitutes the "real you".

If you're reading this, I've deployed my new weblog system.

I apologize for the fact that this will probably cause your aggregator to barf and think all my old posts are new, although it shouldn't be too many.

Note there's a "below the fold" now; post continues at the "Read the rest..." link.