The Perfect Recess

It's possible Obama just doesn't care all that much about the NLRB.

Prancis Bookmarks

Mark your territory!

No Accounting For Taste

I played a game demo on the recommendation of Braid creator Jonathon Blow, and I had to go back to his blog post to make sure I hadn't missed some ironic meta-type joke. It's just time-wasting busy-work like sudoku, not interesting in the least...but I suppose that's how many people feel about crosswords. Or reading!

Harper's Puzzle Update

I've still been working through the old Harper's puzzles. I've gotten up to, but haven't yet printed out the puzzle for, my birth month of June 1979. I had to skip one or two because their pages weren't scanned as part of the online archives,¹ so that's around forty puzzles in a little over four months.

They've been a pretty good mix of difficulties: though the easiest ones feel considerably easier than contemporary puzzles ever seem to get, there have been a couple that have taken me a while to crack.

¹ Extra frustrating, because those must be the ones that are so fun that somebody just had to rip the thing out of the Official Harper's Archive Copy before it could be scanned. Ah well.

Some Notes on Data Binding Windows Forms

Two things I discovered, submitted into the e-ther for the benefit of future googlers.

1. If you want to drive the state of some radio buttons from a presentation model (or "view model"), put each of them in its own panel. In WPF you have to assign them each a different group name, but the principle is the same: you're disabling the automatic radio button logic so you can handle it in your model (i.e., it is up to you to enforce exclusivity).
2. If you have a data-bound list box and you want to be able to change the selection in your presentation model and have it reflected in the control (and why not!), you have to bind "SelectedIndex" rather than "SelectedValue". Once I figured this out I could understand why—if you bind to a path or have "ValueMember" set then different list items can have the same value so setting is ambiguous—but it wasn't obvious what was going wrong at first so I thought I'd put it out there.

Bad Financial Reform Worse Than No Financial Reform

I agree with Brad on financial regulation. It's a problem that the majority of Democratic politicians really don't see these economic issues as anything other than political balancing acts: don't piss off Wall Street or taxpayers or union members too much and the rest will work itself out.

This contingent does not understand what went wrong in the first place, because the financial crisis was a direct refutation of their world view. And by all appearances they are sticking to their guns: save the banks, calm everyone down, and the rest will work itself out. Ergo, they are unlikely to do anything to prevent further crises.

Video Game Industry Self-Parody Watch

A magazine for women gamers is running a makeup tutorial. Like how to get the look of some character from a video game? Amazing.

I would call it a tonedeaf misread of the magazine's target audience, but clicking through, it seems the "magazine for women gamers" is actually just PR for a "gamer model" agency. I.e., the actual target audience is the dudes who hire "booth babes." Hilarious, in any case.

Real Talk

Yglesias on why the US will never risk experimenting with democracy. Oops, I meant China, why China won't risk democracy.

"Ramming It Through"

The GOP of yore would never have dreamed of running against Democrats for "ramming their agenda through" over Republican objections. "Vote for us because the other guys are too strong" is the kind of pitch I expect from Democrats. But one can hope!