Comedian Demetri Martin

Below is funny 15 minute segment by Demetri Martin (no relation).  He reminds me of a cross between Steven Wright, the late Mitch Hedberg, and Jack Handy.  The video portion was created by some other guy, who put some pictures to Demetri's audio. It's mostly the audio that's funny, but some of the pictures help, too.

(Props to Bryan for forwarding this to me)

Longmont bike map

Did I mention that I've recently moved to Longmont, CO (near Boulder)? Anyway, I was getting frustrated that I couldn't find any online bike maps that cover Longmont. I quickly found the official City of Longmont Maps page — although they talk about bike maps, none are available online from the city website.

Updated Aug 12: In the comments, Pete points to BicycleLongmont.org which contains a 2008 front (pdf) side of the map. You'll still need to use the Wayback Machine for the cached back-side (see below) which includes helpful info, like which parks have drinking fountains and restrooms.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I found a Feb 2007 cached version of the City of Longmont page, which had links for bike maps as of 2006. Even better, the Wayback Machine actually cached both these PDFs:

City of Longmont Bicycle Map 2006, front (pdf) and back (pdf)

As for other Boulder-area bike maps, the ones I like the best are the 2006 Highway 36 West corridor map (pdf), from the Bicycle or Walk section at 36commutingSolutions.org site, and the maps at the City of Boulder's bike section.

Nasty Chinese Restaurant

While driving through Port Angeles on our Olympic loop day-trip, we did a double-take as we passed this restaurant:

CIMG2121

The restaurant's name is actually Dynasty Chinese Restaurant. And it's not just this one angle. There were so many signs along this street, that many of views were equally nasty.

We are not the first to notice the unfortunate street signs in front of this restaurant. Robert Lee, hantonmckenzie, Richard Friedman, and Greefus Groink all have similar pictures.

C++ joining Java to get closures

Herb Sutter writes on C++ closures, which have been accepted as part of the next C++0x standard.  This means C++ is joining Java in supporting closures.  My first introduction to closures was Javascript, and I think it will be great for the other mainstream languages to support them.  Of course, it will probably be a few years until closures are widely used, as was the case for C++ and Java templates/generics.

If you are interested in more details, be sure to read the comments at the end of Herb's blog post — there's some good examples and discussion.

Killed by his own golf club

Crazy, but true:

In 1994, 16-year-old Jeremy Brenno of Gloversville, New York, was killed when he struck a bench with a golf club, and the shaft broke, bounced back at him, and pierced his heart. Brenno had missed a shot on the sixth hole at the Kingsboro Golf Club and looked to vent his frustration by giving the nearby bench a good whack in retaliation. The fatal club was a No. 3 wood.

Snopes.com specializes in debunking urban legends, so if they say it's true, then it probably is. The article also talks about 3 other known killed-by-own-club fatalities (in 1951, 2005, and 2005), but they are not quite as dramatic as poor Jeremy.