items of interest to me and, possibly, to you.

This video is pretty great. You can stop watching once the human comes back on camera.

“And weirdest of all, sometimes he’ll click ‘like’ when I accept a friend request from someone he couldn’t possibly know. Why the hell would anyone do that?”

“An eruption could “come at any time,” Lowenstern admitted. But would it be a super eruption? Probably not. And even if it were, the damage wouldn’t be the inferno you might be expecting. Instead of fleeing from hell on Earth, you’d just be slogging through lots and lots of ash cleanup.”

“I use a crazed procmail script to filter all messages to /dev/null and to send an entertaining bounce message to folks saying that my email is dead and that if they want to get in touch with me, they’ll have to resend their message when I return. I usually write a snarky message about how if it’s really important, you can call my mom. Few folks ever call my mom, although some have. You don’t have to be a UNIX geek to kill your email. You can do it in most programs by using the filter tools available and sending things to the trash. It won’t delete things as permanently as my method, but it will work. I typically turn on my death trap message 24 hours before I leave for vacation without actually deleting the message, knowing that folks who waited till the last minute will panic when they see the message and call me.”

I’d love to be important enough to get away with this at work and not return to 6,000 e-mails! Maybe someday…

“I like to think there’s a White Walker school somewhere with an instructor just shaking his head, and telling his students, “Guys, I want to emphasize again that we are very, very vulnerable to dragonglass. You never know who’s going to have it, okay? You have to be so careful. Take Paul as an example. He was so close to capturing a baby, but he had to show off and leave the fat one alive. Next thing you know? Dragonglass. HEY! Quiet in the back! Is anyone even listening?? deep sigh This is why we keep losing to the humans, guys.”

“You probably couldn’t have predicated all that in 1999, though. Below is a series of quotes from the press releases about the two Yahoo acquisitions, GeoCities and Tumblr — one from 1999, the other from this morning. See if you can guess which quote comes from the GeoCities acquisition announcement and which comes from the Tumblr.”

“Before an IPO of Facebook’s size, research analysts and large investors play a massive multi-billion-dollar game of “Telephone,” because analysts at underwriting firms are banned from publishing or emailing research about a new public company until 40 days after the IPO. The rule is designed to protect retail investors from taking analysts’ notoriously bullish research too seriously. But it has an unintended side effect: Research analysts can pass on exclusive, last-minute information to institutional clients without a paper trail.”