Calendars met on the Metonic cycle, in which the lunar and solar calendars meet every 19 years.

OK, today’s title has got to be easier. Anybody “game”? BTW, if you have a suggestion for an upcoming number, just send me an e-mail. Nothing like a little UGC (Unreimbursed Grist for Chip). Include your URL, and I’ll give you credit with a link.

I can’t help thinking of a certain blue dress whenever I hear the domain name blogspot.com. Now Randy says that they’re shooting their subscribers in the RSS.

The Big Apple bans trans fats; restaurants have 18 months to comply (thanks, Armchair Anarchist). I wonder what kind of face Ronald McDonald can paint on that? Ba da ba ba ba..Not lovin’ it.

Not saying much so far, are they?

The Twelve Days of Nerdmas. It’s even singable. “Five Golden Wiis!”

Rogers Cadenhead has a simple, easy hack to block content from undesirable domains like ad.doubleclick.net, microsoft.com, etc.

Kiltak forwards a Wired report on robot bartenders. I can think of more useful applications, like how about for instance the designated driver?

A must-read for UI design (thanks, Assaf). Keep it simple until the user needs more complexity. But provide easy ways to progress.

Thanks for adding me to your blogroll, Jürgen. Uber cool. Subscribed.

Interval misnamed by an oft mispronounced astronomer: Edmund Halley, whose last name is often mispronounced HAY-lee, named the Saros (an interval between similar eclipses that is approximately 18 years) after an ancient Babylonian term. While the Babylonians knew about the Saros cycle, they used the word “Saros” to refer to a slightly less frequent interval of 3600 years. Halley was tripped up by a Byzantine lexicon from the 10th century that suffered from the same confusion.

CNET offers a eulogy on James Kim. So does Chris Pirillo, who worked with him at TechTV.

Justin James begins to see the light in the Ruby.

From Assaf, who includes some link-love in the package, comes Steve McConnell’s list of classic mistakes in project management. No matter how many times you’ve been around the block or had your neck across one, you’ll find something to make you say “Ah” — and a lot more that elicits a “Damn right”.

Shelley reminds us to remember. Remember the fallen and honor our troops — you’re not required to support the policies of the current administration in order to do so.

Shel discovers how a newborn child begins the world anew.

Doug Karr has a SIO about KML support in Google Maps. Oh, that’s Software Induced Orgasm.

TDavid feels singled out by Akismet. Trackback here, dude, and we’ll see. Me, I’d like to see an easier way to whitelist people in Akismet than having them register as users. Maybe I’m missing something?

jregent links to my tag cloud widget for WordPress. Thanks, jregent! But, um, where do you use it? AFAIK Windows Live Spaces can’t host WordPress widgets.

Jürgen Leopold uses it on Hurijon – Aus den Tiefen des Webs (“From the depths of the webs”): gathered videos and photos, many humorous.

Yesterday’s title, “years of resentment”: When the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 and the terms were announced, my great-grandfather said, “That’s no peace treaty. Some of them young German boys will want revenge for this in a few years.” Seventeen years later in 1933, Hitler gutted the Weimar Republic and began perhaps the most vengeful regime ever.

Nobody guessed. Maybe today’s will be a little easier. Or not. Remember, the answer is 18.

How many of your friends and associates pass Word documents around in emails? Well that’s too many (thanks, Kiltak). Think, people: PDF, RTF, or WTF!

Next time your kids complain about studying math that they’ll never use in “real life”, show them this (thanks, Randy). Followed by this and this.

A manifesto for the independent entrepreneur. (thanks, Hugh) In my case, s/Johnny Cash/Dave Brubeck/. Not sure whether my boss is an idiot, either.

Alfred Korzybski: “There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.”

An unhappy ending. Kim managed to walk seven miles through the snow in the quest to save his family, after days of enduring the cold and lack of food. Ironically, if he had stayed with them, they would have all survived. Rest in Peace.

CORRECTION: removed the anachronistic radio in the explanation for yesterday’s title.

Okay, that title has got to throw somebody for a loop. If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen me get progressively more obscure/cute/stupid in my choice of numeric references. Why? I wanted each “Chipping the web” post to have a unique title, but I didn’t just want to append a number. So I used different languages’ names for numbers, different numeric representations, and various things that refer to a number. In yesterday’s title, “sulfur” is the element with the atomic number 16. I’m counting, in my own weird way. Can anyone make out how the title of today’s post is “17″?

On with today’s links:

Looking for another heart-warming Christmas story? Look elsewhere. Phil Factor relates how a supplier took him for a ride on Santa’s SLA.

Vaspers the Grate gives us the Google home page in various exotic languages, including Klingon, Elmer Fudd, Hacker, Icelandic, Esperanto, Latin, and (OMG!) French.

Vaspers also laments bloggers who have dropped out of the blogosphere without so much as a goodbye. “What can we do as bloggers, when our bloggy friends disappear? Call the police?” Along with a number of other commenters, I’m starting to worry about Yvonne Tran. Yo, Yvonne — just a “leave me alone I’m too busy to blog” would be fine.

University of Bath researchers stumbled upon a new method of storing hydrogen that may make hydrogen-powered cars feasible. Seems fitting that a possible cure for our petroleum plague comes from Bath in the form of the “water-begetter” (thanks, Armchair Anarchist)

Joel, unable to find a silver bullet with which to shoot his legos, denies the existence of both. Despite the mixed metaphor, though, he’s right. Instead of trying to dumb down the process of programming, we need to smart up the programmers.

Happy Repeal Day, everyone! (Thanks again for the pointer, Shelley ). Yes, 73 years ago today, state conventions affirmed the pointlessness of restricting individual liberties in an attempt to protect people from themselves. Now if we could only get governments to extend that principle and remove remaining nanny laws. A toast: Libertas inaestimabilis res est .

Your online life becomes even more virtual, as opposed to virtuous. (via Bloggers Blog)

Hugh plans to keep his wings intact. Ties in with this discussion.

Into the promised land. This would be absolutely awesome. (Thanks, Armchair Anarchist).

Randy’s strategy for eliminating telemarketers: make them regret the call. Reminds me of one time I was visited by Mormons when I was in the middle of writing my senior paper in Biblical Literature. I had a lot of fun sharing my thoughts on the trustworthiness of Joseph Smith’s translation services. Now if only we could devise a similar strategy for spam.

Newly subscribed: Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke. Just the premise in the title made me LOL, and the execution does not disappoint. Found in Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading.

Now that it’s December and snow is on the ground (still), I’d like to relate a true Christmas story (with apologies to my achristmasist readers) from when I was child that helped to shape the person that I am today.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house my sister and I were running around uncontrollably. We were five and six, respectively (I think), though we were anything but respectful of my parent’s wishes that we go to bed immediately. We wanted to stay up and see Santa Claus, despite my mother’s warnings that Santa wouldn’t come if we weren’t asleep.

My father tried to ignore all of our noise while attempting to watch TV. The smoke from his Salem Menthols encircled his head like a wreath, while he sipped his Seagram’s 7 and grumbled not the least bit a jolly old elf. He would be up all night assembling the items Santa brought — longer still if the Santa fan club’s demonstration were not broken up soon.

“Santa Claus! Santa Claus! We want to see Santa Claus!”

Suddenly Dad jumped up and exclaimed, “Santa Claus? Ain’t no fat fukker gonna break into MY house in the middle of the night!” He grabbed his .303 British army rifle, which like every gun in the house was always loaded, threw open the front door, and marched out onto the snow-covered front porch. “Click-click” went the bolt. A few seconds passed in silence as he surveyed the skies through the sights.

BWAM!

He returned through the door, a manic gleam in his eyes, and through the clenched teeth of his grin he breathed, “Got ‘im!” Then he returned the rifle to its place, and calmly resumed his seat, his smoke, and his liquor.

Despite my general cluelessness about most things, I was well acquainted with my Dad’s penchant for theatrics. Besides, I had already begun to have my doubts about the feasibility of the whole Santa gig. So I found this display almost, but not quite, amusing.

My sister, however, was crushed. “Daddy shot Santa! Daddy shot Santa!” She wailed through her tears.

My mother did her best to comfort us and assure us that Daddy did not, in fact, assassinate Saint Nick. And in the morning, the presents were all there as on every other Christmas.

But the event had more clearly called the question into my mind, and my nascent rationalism took it from there. Dad may not have shot Santa, but he put a bullet in my belief.

Randy‘s State of the Splogosphere, Part IV: “Comment spam is completely out of control”. Agreed. It took more than five months for Akismet to catch my first 10,000 spam comments, but now it has captured another 10,000 in just over a month. Comment spammers can be a lot more sneaky, because unlike email spam, they don’t care if you click on the links. The links are just designed to acquire Google juice.

Assaf offers a maxim for keeping code maintainable: When re-reading, fix where you hesitate.

Doug Karr wants us all to be nice to each other here in the social networking cattle yard. He even provides a “Social Networking Official Bastard” graphic that you can award to offenders.

Music: should it be illegal, or granted its freedom?

Shelley says that Microsoft does not want us to use IE. She points out that Microsoft doesn’t get anything from Internet Explorer. Not revenue, and certainly not a good reputation. Shelley thinks they’re trying to toss people overboard by holding onto their incompatibilities and adding draconian security measures. I think they’re just apathetic, and doing the minimum to save face.

Also from Shelley: “Every spec should be written like it was going to be read by VB developers.” Hmm, let me try one:

See Dick and Jane play tag.
See Dick forget his namespace prefix.
See Jane throw an exception.
Run, Dick, run!

Rebecca Blood and Shelley Batts excerpt news articles that show just how close to the fascist cliff we tread in these dark times. And Shelley, do you really need an answer to your question at the end of this post?

Among Nick Carr’s 2007 predictions, I find number 6 the most likely. Although Rogers Cadenhead thinks Winer’s re-entry will be in a “new” vessel of his own design.

Did I mention that I love TailRank? TDavid thinks its name sounds like a booty ballot. Me, I get associations with other meanings of the word “rank”, but that link-lovin’ sure don’t stink.

A new approach to automated language translation from Meaningful Machines (thanks, Kiltak). Rather than employing a statistical comparison of parallel text, the “decoder” uses a “flood” of all possible dictionary translations combined into overlapping phrases, and then counts occurrences of each phrase within a massive body of text from the target language. Sounds promising, even though it’s a poster child for Wirth’s Law.

Yesterday I pointed out some simulators for “old” computers. Well, them was spring chickens compared to the 2000+ year-old Antikythera Mechanism, the workings of which researchers have finally reconstructed (thanks, Chris).

Yesterday I also mentioned that Randy has been busy. Today he unveiled a new feature on R|Mail that I had requested: the ability to gather feed profiles for a filtered set of domains. I only asked for this feature four days ago, and now it’s released. Talk about agile. That’s the great thing about a service where the owner has his hands right in the code. “Small is the new big” and all that. Thanks, Randy!

Randy also ignited my interest in this site. I generally distrust pharmaceutical companies, but this is a pretty bright gesture from Bristol-Myers Squibb. Go over and light a candle for the National AIDS Fund. Then go get on Randy’s blogroll. I’m not as generous as Randy with my blogroll, but if you leave a comment here saying you lit the candle, I will link to you. The National AIDS Fund is not a governmental agency, so its possible they may actually get something done. They’ve leveraged $134 Million for the cause since 1998.

Has anyone seen James Kim?

Shelley weathers the storm: “blown transformers … unnerving sound all night –- like big bugs getting caught in even bigger bug zappers”

Talk about dejargonating, how’s this for simple explanation? (thanks, Assaf)