"Abandoned Places In The World" - Interesting blog on places where people used to live.

"Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know" - Nice coverage of the basics.

"Halo 3 Fails: Episode 21" - Fail Avenue.

"Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Lockpicking & Physical Security" - Things are not as secure as you may have thought they were.

"keep being awesome!" - The T-Rex seals the deal.

"Tattoos" - The "locations" map seems spot-on to me.

"MagLev Toy Train ENGLISH VERSION" - And you thought toy trains weren't cool ...

"She’s Just Not That Into You...*Especially* You Access Guy" - I think Access developers are now offended.

"LINQ: Any() vs. Count()" - Nice - I had no idea Any() was there."

"Hunting the Elusive ‘tail’ Opcode in F#" - It's kind of like a safari, except geekier.

"Silverlight 3 on XBox 360" - Oh NICE!

"Buzz Aldrin Raps with Snoop Dog About Apollo 11" - This is truly surreal.

"Stellarium's Light Pollution Feature" - Sad to see how light pollution sucks the adventure out of simply looking up and seeing the immense universe for what it is.

"Do PDB Files Affect Performance?" - Always generate PDBs - I have to keep this in mind.

This is about the most bad-ass vid I've ever seen:

They rock! :) And the kid doing a solo kicks Steve Perry's ass.

One "criticism" I sometimes hear about atheists/agnostics/etc. is that they're not charitable. I really don't know what kind of weight there is behind such a statement, but I have to admit that I'm not as "charitable" as I could be. Sure, Liz and I will put our old clothes and furniture in the car and make a random run to Goodwill, but there's other things I could do as well. Part of the issue I find is the subversive religious aspects to some charitable organizations to be very annoying (e.g. a homeless shelter that forces (or at least strongly encourages) attendees to go to services and believe in their religion).

Recently I heard of the Foundation Beyond Belief. This sounds like this might be the thing I'm looking for. I'm going to keep a watch on this and hopefully I can contribute to it in whatever ways I can. If you have a similar view that I have, you may want to look into this as well. There's not a lot going on with it right now, but I think it's got a chance to make positive impacts in the world.

"Pex - Documentation" - Lots of information on Pex - I may use these assets soon.

"A new and improved ASP.NET MVC T4 template" - I haven't done anything yet with ASP.NET MVC, but I'll keep this one in mind.

"More Test Driven Development With Javascript: JsTestDriver" - TDD in any language is always a good thing.

"45 Lessons Life Taught Me" - I like most of these - you can probably easily guess which ones I don't :).

"10 Creative Rubik's Cubes" - The Pentamix is a monster.

"What Happens During a Last Second Shuttle Launch Abort" - Shutting down the engines at the last second, literally.

"What is Foundation Beyond Belief?" - I'm really thinking about contributing to this.

"Functional Programming Battles GOTOzilla" - Sad to say, but recently I found in a C# code base a method that has eight GOTOs in it.

"Neil Peart Drum Jam - Part 1" - I think I actually saw Neil smile when he was playing.

"Biking down the World's Most Dangerous Road" - There's adventure, and then there's abso-frakkin-lutely no way.

"Zero Punctuation: The Second Annual E3 Hype Massacre" - Zero blazes through the E3 hype.

"Exploring memory models" - Anything by Joe is pretty much required reading IMO.

"Pornographic Plants Of The Day (NSFW-ish)" - The childish part of me will always exist :).

"Bathsheba and Bulatov" - I need to get one of those.

"Focus, focus, focus" - I really like this idea. 1 day of intense training, rather than 5 days where it just ... drags ... on.

"Paint.NET v3.5 – Better font handling, and performance. Again." - More goodness is coming in Paint.NET.

"We get email... strike that, we get cut n' paste" - In religous/philosophical discussions, it's usually been said already.

"10 Breathtaking Viewing Platforms around the World" - I'd love to visit all of them.

"Zero Punctuation: inFamous" - I think he liked the game this time.

"The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection" - I remember reading "SSL and TLS" years ago. This a nice condensed version of that.

"New Security Model: Moving to a Better Sandbox" - More information on security in .NET 4.0.

"Christ’s Sake" - It's (probably) not what you think.

"CircuitBreaker Pattern in Grails" - Interesting, I've never thought about using circuit breakers in code before.

"Maybe it's time for Plan B." - Being a TA in grad school, I heard similar stories. Students, you're not fooling anyone.

"What does the optimize switch do?" - Just in case you were curious what the C# compiler does when you set the "optimize" flag.

If you're interested in software architecture, you may be interested in a new group that's starting up next Tuesday (June 16th). You can get more information from the web site - the group is also on Twitter.

I'm personally not involved in the group myself at the moment just because I have too many other things occupying my time. However, I think this should be a good user group for architects to attends.

"Interpreting the facts the Creationist way…" - When a creationist opens their mouth, you know that they're either lying or pushing product.

"Zero Punctuation: Bionic Commando" - Zero muses on the wonders of the bionic armed wonder.

"Top 10 Halo 3 Exterminations HD" - Major pwnage.

"Halo 3 Fails: Top 10 Of Season 2" - A season of failage.

"Retrying Operations" - I'd really like to see this done by specifying the exception(s) you'd like to catch, rather than defaulting to Exception. This would require dynamically generating the call, but the pattern is consistent and using DynamicMethod to do this wouldn't be too hard.

"NET 4.0 -- System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ConditionalWeakTable" - A quick overview of a specialized dictionary.

"Taming the Pex beast: Well-behaved enums, multi-dimensional arrays and booleans" and "Specifying Inversion of Control through Contracts for Interfaces" - Pex is one of the coolest tools to come out of Microsoft - I love it.

"Better Unit Tests with Test.Assert() for NUnit/VSTT/SUTF" - It's subtle, but I like this approach.

"Parallel Stacks – Tasks view" and "Parallel Stacks – Method view" - More concurrency goodness for VS2010 - these posts are all about the stacks.

"Using Prototypical Objects to Implement Shared Behavior in Object Oriented Systems" and "Pluggable Type Systems" - 2 nice papers on OO and types.

If you can stomach someone spewing crap from their mouth, listen to the debate found on this blog post. It's so sad to think that Hovind's father (who is now in prison for not paying taxes...he must not have read that "render unto Ceaser" passage) poisoned his son's mind such that he's continuing to spread such trash.

Just one example - Hovind calls dinosaurs "dragons". I. Kid. You. Not.

I'd like to be diplomatic, but there's no other word for YECs (young earth creationists) other than "stupid". To state that the earth is 6000 years old is equivalent to saying the earth is flat. It's just wrong.

Full disclosure: I used to be a YEC nearly 20 years ago. It's embarassing to admit it, but it's the truth. Thankfully I got that nonsensical view out of my head.