So does this work?
funniest thing I spied today…
Today’s laugh was spotted on slashdot
Three drinks for the Burger Kings under the sky,
Seven burgers for the Dwarves who are stoned,
Ninety million consumers doomed to buy,
One cut for the Dark Lord, the franchise he owns.
In the land of Mordor where the Whoppers lie.
Onion ring to rule them all, onion ring to dine them,
Onion ring to bring them all and in the deep-fryer bind them
In the land of Mordor where the Whoppers lie.
Sometimes the simplest solution works best
My ibook’s cd drive has broken twice in the last week. The drive simply didn’t work – stick a disc into it and nothing happened, whether I am used OS 9 or OS X. The first time it broke I called Apple and they spent maybe 30-40 minutes on the phone with me zapping the pram and resetting the power manager and so on. It worked after we reset the power manager so I figured ‘problem solved.’ But 24 hours later the same thing happened and I spent an hour repeatedly trying all the tricks the Apple support person had taught me to no avail. I was bummed. For the past 4-5 days, no cd drive, and I have been dreading having to turn it in to Apple. Then inspiration struck and I pulled the equivalent of a ‘Fonzie’ and took a screwdriver to the drive, forcing the armature the laser is mounted on to move up and down its tracks. Ta da, problem solved. Of course now I have a known problem with the drive (it sticks) that I can’t prove to the Apple folks, so I can’t decide whether I should hope for it to happen soon so I can get it fixed under warranty, or simply hope for it to never happen again.
Ever wanted to know what scientology is all about?
Ever wondered what that much derided ‘church’ of scientology business is all about? At the risk of invoking their wrath I’ll post a link to an L.A. Times piece by a reporter who gained access to scientology documents a judge temporarily made available to the public. Now you know why scientology is much derided. Xenu…thetans….my ass, what a crock of shit. Think of this the next time John Travolta is interviewed and tries to come across as erudite.
old man winter makes his presence known
So…am I happy about it? I guess I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love lounging around the house in my sweats taking it easy, watching football, playing zoomies, etc etc. When the weather’s nasty I can do this guilt free, so in that respect yesterday was a great day. On the other hand, I had to shovel the driveway for the first time this year. With only 2-3 inches on the ground it was easy as pie, but I couldn’t help ruminating on how soon enough it will be 10 inches or 2 feet or whatever. Becky is convinced I got my double hernia shoveling all the snow last year, so the thirty minutes or so it took me to shovel the driveway were spent mulling this over. On balance, I could do without the snow. Old man winter, I hope you get an intimate introduction to ms global warming this year 😉
one major os update later, it still works
Yet another in a long line of tests, this one intended to see if the update from redhat 7.1 to 7.2 works. It seems to have gone well.
An irony about myself
I saw myself from two irreconcilable angles in this quote:
[an individual, I’m paraphrasing here], in order to say anything significant, is “forced to generalize.” The true measure of a theory is not that it accounts for all the relevant facts but that it accounts for those facts “better than any other theory.” Without abstraction and simplification there can be no understanding, Huntington maintained. Those who concentrate on the imperfections of a theory, without coming up with a better alternative, are helping no one.
On the one hand I’m incapable of precision when I try and describe things. I can never remember dates, sizes, places, names, anything specific. On the other hand I feel I’m quite good at synthesizing meaning from a complex mess of data and expressing a well constructed opinion about it. So on the one hand the first half of the quote seems to apply directly to me (and I do agree with Huntington’s supposition). On the other, my former coworkers used to hate the fact that I was a deconstructionist – they would come to me with business plans or new product lines and I would rip them to shreds in short order. Yet when asked to come up with better alternatives, I was usually unable to. So which one is me? The deconstructionist or the able synthesizer of ideas? Here lies the irony because in the end I think it’s both.
PAR files and usenet
To paraphrase Azimov, a ‘significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
The germans have just created magic. I spend a significant amount of time tooling around usenet grabbing music, software, books and more off of the binary newsgroups. One of the most frustrating aspects of this is the missing parts. You see, when files are posted they’re broken into chunks. An audiobook for example might consist of 50 pieces. Despite subscribing to what is probably the best commercial usenet provider, I run into the problem of missing pieces on an almost daily basis. You can’t actually use the material you’re downloading until you have all the pieces. Roy and I spend a lot of time trading missing pieces back and forth and hunting them down. Now some awesome programmers in Germany have invented a new file format that allows you to recreate from scratch the missing pieces, without ever having the actual pieces themselves. On the surface it seems like magic. Of course in the end it boils down to sophisticated math I guess, but damn is it cool. No more usenet ‘needle in a haystack’ file hunts for me 😉
netscape 4 sucks
This weekend my littlest sister went looking for my xmas list and couldn’t find it on my site. Thinking she was dense, I tried to walk her through it on the phone and it soon became clear that her browser wasn’t rendering the site correctly. She was using netscape 4 on a mac and the .css positioning wasn’t rendering correctly. This sucks. Netscape 4 suckage is not news to me, I do this stuff for a living after all, but I’m not using anything radical in my css and the site validates for .css and html. So wtf am I to do. The answer is soon I will have a redirect script in place to deal. I’m not going to spend time trying to accomodate a 3 year old bug ridden browser, very sorry but that’s the long and short of it.
LED lights for computer cases
If like me you have a home office full of computer equipment, including servers that are on 24×7, you might find these devices useful. Think ‘nightlight.’ The glowire stuff is pretty cool too.
