• 18:36 @methodicechidna swine flu kills a more "important" demographic. Who cares about a disease that only kills babies and old people? /sarcasm #

I made the decision to switch all my client work starting point templates from XHTML over to HTML 4.01 and start delivering everything as plain old semantic HTML, minus the X.

• 18:43 "You remind me of a poem I can't remember, and a song that may never have existed, and a place I'm not sure I've ever been to" - Abe Simpson #

• 17:35 Chipotle ftw #
• 19:36 Justice is not a frivolous thing. It has little, if anything, to do with a disobedient whale. #
• 20:49 Bought a WRT54GL at Fry's and it already had dd-wrt on it. Somebody bought it, flashed it, and returned it. Do people do this for fun? #

• 12:23 Just ordered pork and chicken at Big Bob Gibson's bbq in Decatur, AL. Contemplating bottle of white bbq sauce. #
• 12:30 I dare say that the white sauce recipe I got out of Cook's Illustrated is better than the original sauce here. Still worth the visit though. #
• 12:35 ...except the slaw. I wouldn't cross the street for this slaw, much less drive to Decatur for it. #
• 14:14 Did you know you can sing (some of) Metallica's "Fade to Black" to (some of) the tune of "Dream Lover". (So I won't have to dream alone) #
• 21:34 Omfg is my back gonna hurt in the morning #

• 14:47 I'm going to start referring to "ugly code, pretty UI" situations as "Everybody Loves Raymond code". #

• 21:46 All day long with no power outages or anything from the storm that knocked half of ATL.. Then all of a sudden the cable goes out. #

• 08:17 Never expected it to be this cold. #

• 11:54 @chetman (late reply) as opposed to nova, who's a bottle-service-at-staxx kinda guy. #

• 23:52 @scottlong reversible lanes? #

• 10:49 My other scooter has a rocket launcher: tinyurl.com/2kmtan #

• 23:30 Bloggin: tinyurl.com/c7m9no #

1. It's at an .edu domain - Students usually lose their school-hosted web pages when they graduate, you know. Plus, any such link is probably at least five years old. Current college students don't bother with these kinds of pages, they just use social networking sites for everything. And what if it's not a student page but an official university page? Still probably dead, because university webmasters move shit around with no regards for concepts like "cool URLs don't change".
2. It's at an ISP's domain. AOL, Comcast, Cox, RR, etc. This means that if the person has ever changed service providers, which is likely, the link will be dead because their old account will be canceled.
   
3. It contains a tilde - Firstly, any such URL is probably also a few years old, since not nearly as many sites create URLs like this as used to. Then, there's the very nature of the thing. This indicates, in general, the web space that comes with a Unix shell account, and that the person who authored the web page is not the owner of the domain, but just a user of a multi-user system. Most such sites are either educational or ISP related (see the first two bullets in this list). And even if they're not, it probably indicates something else ephemeral, such as an employee's homepage on an employer's website.
4. Geocities. Actually, this is just as likely to turn up a page that still exists but has not been updated since about 2001. (I myself am guilty here, I have never taken down my geocities page)
5. It's from a domain that is easily recognizable as a shitty small town newspaper. These still do not get such concepts as "permalink".
6. It contains obvious implementation details, such as ending with "/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl?articleId=1234". The less the people who built the site care about hiding this kind of sauage-making, the less likely they are to care about more advanced concepts like permalinks. That URL will almost certainly break if they swicth from .NET to LAMP or vice versa. There is probably also some hierarchy of what language-or-platform-indicating-extentions (.jsp, .pl, .php, .cfm, .asp, etc) are more likely to be dead than others.
   
7. It's a god damn IP address. This really means you shouldn't click on it at all, because it's probably phishing or worse. But if you do, it'll probably be dead anyway.

• 08:58 my own contribution to the rules of the internet: no matter what the search terms, if "safe search" is OFF, the first hit *will* be NSFW. #
• 16:30 peanut butter crackers and orange fanta #
• 16:32 RT @davewiner Kids should be encouraged to take things apart. bit.ly/RNXU #