So I was at the ATM today, wanting to withdraw $20 for a quick lunch. I went up to the ATM, inserted my card, and, as usual, saw the following screen.

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First of all, if you’re not familiar with what a garden path sentence is, go read the Wikipedia article on them.

Now that that’s out of the way… this was an actual headline in today’s issue of USA Today (though interestingly, it was reworded in the web version), of which I’ve reproduced the spacing exactly as it appeared in the paper:

Obama’s ad
buys dwarf
TV presence
of McCain

I had to read that two or three times before I realized it had nothing to do with little people starring in Obama ads.

Now that the entirety of Google’s Android phone OS has finally been released under the Apache license, I have modified the Droid Sans Mono font so as to include a more easily distinguishable zero, for the benefit of my fellow programmers. I thought it was a great-looking font for the most part, but the vague distinction between 0 and O simply wasn’t good for peering through long listings of program code.

(Despite the Ascender copyright notices contained within the font files, they are indeed now licensed under the Apache license; check out the Git repository if proof is necessary. I have left the Ascender copyright in the modified font file, in keeping with the appropriate sections of the Apache license.)

So here is the modified font, which I have named “Code Sans Mono Z”. I had originally named it “Droid Sans Mono Z”, but there were potential trademark issues with my using the Droid name, hence the change.

Code Sans Mono Z

This is why I should not be allowed to buy action figures at Anime Weekend Atlanta:

For those unfamiliar with that character, that’s Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. She’s an alien android who can communicate with the universe’s Data Entity and alter the state of the universe via rapidly spoken SQL statements. (No, seriously— this is canon. One of her image songs is even titled “SELECT”.)

So naturally, I had to have her posing in front of a MySQL administration interface.

I am truly a complete and utter geek.

I’m about to be heading off to Anime Weekend Atlanta. I won’t be bringing my computer with me, and probably won’t be getting online again at all till late Sunday afternoon. (These conventions literally do go on all day, for those who’ve never been to one.)

In the meantime, check my Twitter profile for status updates.

I was cashing in some savings bonds earlier today at a bank which shall remain unnamed, and noticed a rather serious oversight in the design of the form they used for this task.

The form was one of those where they give you a limited number of character spaces to write things; I assume it’s because their database was originally designed with certain arbitrary field lengths.

There was an 11-character limit on the ‘city’ field.

I have family in Warner Robins, GA; Milledgeville, GA; and Jacksonville, FL.

Oh, and should I mention this is a large bank that formerly had headquarters in San Francisco?

Any readers using Twitter? I just joined it because, hey, I’m bored. :-p

If anyone actually wants to follow me, it’s the same username I use everywhere else.

The latest phishing attempt sent to my UGA account has the following as one of the lines that’s supposed to be filled out:

“Country or TerUGAory : .. …….”

Why do I have the feeling this scam was originally intended for students at the Rochester Institute of Technology?

I just got what may be the most inept phishing e-mail I’ve ever seen. And I’m going to quote it below just to show how absolutely mind-bogglingly bad it is.

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I just discovered the music video for Justice’s song “DVNO”, and it’s… a typographical feast, which I recommend to anyone who’s a typography geek.

But what’s particularly great is that pretty much everything in the video was inspired by TV and movie studio logos of the past. And as an Aspie who used to obsess over these sorts of TV-logo bumpers… this is fun trying to guess the inspirations.

Here’s what I’ve got so far…

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