I eat pretzels like Darwin would have. It's a constant survival of the fittest competition. I select two pretzels, eat whichever is most flawed, select another, re-test, and just keep going from there. At the end I've got the best pretzel of the whole bag left, which I then eat.

Admittedly it's not an actual test of the pretzels' fitness to survive -- the pretzels with inferior qualities aren't dying off due to failure to feed themselves and attract mates. Really it's just their ability to conform to my invented notion of the master pretzel, but if you go around saying you eat pretzels like Hitler people back away slowly.

On Tuesday some friends and I were talking about how we immaturely approached alcohol back in the dorms, and I was thinking it would be fun to take out a full (or half) page ad in the student paper, The Minnesota Daily, like this:

WE LIVED IN THE DORMS. WE DRANK.

WE COULDN'T HOLD OUR LIQUOR.

Thank you, Resident Hall Facilities Staff, for your

service above and beyond the call of duty. We're sorry.

I code for a hobby and a profession, but usually it's only the hobby stuff I can release here. However I'm happy to say and proud to announce that Onion Networks, my employer, has okay-ed the release of AntFlow, a tool I largely wrote.

AntFlow adds hot folder triggers and workflow functionality to the ever popular Ant build tool. It's a great fit and a right good bit of code, so check it out at http://antflow.onionnetworks.com/ .

My Halloween costume this year came out pretty well. I went as Alex from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange during his brainwashing. I made the head piece from scrap metal, some syringes, galvanized steel wire, rubber tubing, and a lot of rivets. The actual actor was temporarily blinded during the filming of that scene, but I went less hard-core on the eye restraints and the only after effects I've got are some bruising and puffiness. All in all better than I was hoping for. See the attached image for a photo. Thanks to the Kromhout clan for the photo.

I've decided to run a dead pool this year. You can sign up at http://sarinity.com/deadpool/ by guessing 10 famous persons who you think might die during the next calendar year. The younger they are the more points you get, and the highest point total wins. Remember, it's not any more morbid than fantasy football is athletic.

I'm again going against the 'only things that I create' policy for this mailing list, but unless you count lactic acid nothing was creating during my running of the twin cities marathon yesterday, yet I'm posting about it just the same. I beat my target time by a good 15 minutes though was still certainly in the tail-end of the pack zone. I hope to never run so much again so long as I live.

I wanted a way to quickly append text to Moin Moin wikis. I wrote a Perl script to do just that. It relies on the email address suffix features available in most modern MTAs to get the page name.

Once the procmail recipe included in the accompanying procmail.rc file is in place for the user 'wiki' email sent to wiki-TextHere@somewhere.com will be appended to the TextHere wiki page.

I cheaped out on the formatting and just put the text inside literal/pre blocksblocks. The subject line and from header are retained and displayed.

My all time favorite board game is called Diplomacy. It's got the tactical simplicity of chess mixed with the social aspects of poker. It's been popular in quite a few white houses -- reportedly the Kennedys played ferociously.

Unfortunately, it can be a difficult game to learn. Not because the rules are complex -- they're not, but only because there aren't a lot of good presentations of the rules. Oral descriptions quickly devolve into edge cases and exceptions, the printed rules look like they were written by lawyers, and just looking at the game board gives one the totally wrong impression that Diplomacy is like Risk or the hateful Axis and Allies.

It's not much of a creation, but I recently made a T-shirt that says, "I BUY LIQUOR FOR MINORS" in nice white on black lettering. I've worn it out a few times including to the Minnesota State Fair, mostly just to gauge responses to the sentiment. It seems the average parent furrows their brow, the average teenager looks intrigued, and the average bartender will still sell me two beers. I didn't actually have a single youth ask me to buy liquor for them, and all the people who actually told me they liked the shirt were in their 20s or 30s. Completely not the responses I expected.

As mentioned previously I'm a tool of the media machine and am thus now playing poker. I don't like online play so I host local events here at the house. We're getting more and more people and I wanted something nicer on which to play than folding card tables. Louis Duhon, a friend, and I drew up some plans, bought a lot of materials, moved the cars out of his garage, and spent four days working on a "one day project".