Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face: Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, is proposing mandatory universal military service. According to him, this is supposed to make Congress *less* likely to authorize military action.
WTF? Over the long term, one effect of such a change would be to [...]
The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, or ELF for short. Oh, my.
Brent Spiner apparently released a CD after the 4th season of Star Trek: TNG. It’s called — are you ready for this? — “Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back.”
(Because, see, his character on Star Trek had yellow eyes, and Frank Sinatra was known as Old Blue Eyes, and this is evidently a form of humor.)
So I spent about 45 minutes this afternoon poking around on two iBooks (one of each size) to see if I could figure out how to do some pretty basic things — learn how to use the Dock, configure TCP/IP settings, control windows, poke around in the Unix shell, and so forth.
In retrospect, I’m surprised [...]
We’re such suckers. My sweetie ran across this cross-marketed cheese, to which we both apparently had the same reaction.
It occurred to me, as I was going through the pile of accumulated mail and sorting things into piles (respond, read, shred, recycle), that it’s been years — years! — since I actually looked at the mailed copy of my checking account statement.
In the last year, my brother got engaged and married, and he and my sister-in-law bought a car and a house. Even more significantly, there was a 3-year-old in the bargain. Kyah is now 4, and *much* more talkative than when we’d seen her before.
After they picked us up at the airport on [...]
A few weeks ago, I put together a quickie little application in Visual Basic for my dad. It helps him run one specific statistical test on a set of data, then create a line chart from that test. All told, I’d say it took me about 50 hours. At the same time [...]
Yup. My dad gave me a videoconferencing camera for Xmas. Doesn’t come with decent webcam software, though, so don’t expect to catch me picking my nose just yet.
We just got back from our Xmas trip. Our itinerary calls for us to be in the air for another 35 minutes. Fortunately, we got to the airport with *plenty* of time to spare. After kvetching to me about how we never need to get to the Sacramento airport as early as [...]
Spam is bad enough, but can’t the subject lines at least be grammatically correct? It pains.
It hardly seems necessary to point out that this is a naughty link, although there is no nudity on the page: The Porn Clown Posse. Yup. Naughty clowns. This one’s for you, Justin!
I recently helped one of my sweetie’s colleagues put up a website so she could cash in on her creative urges. The web design is circa 1997, but the content is what matters. I present to you… Northwest CritterBugs! Ain’t they cute? Wouldn’t they look good hanging from your rear-view mirror?
I’m quite glad not to be out in The World today… it’s *windy* out there!
Oh, and Elcomsoft has been found not guilty of violating the criminal provisions of the DMCA. Woohoo!
(For those of you without longish geek memories, Elcomsoft is the company that Dmitry Sklyarov work(s?ed?) for, developing software that got him arrested when he came to the USA to give a presentation at a hacker convention.)
Interesting story: IBM is developing modular cubes containing hard drives with network connections on all six faces of the cube. Looks like the idea is that they can be stacked in the corner of a server room, automatically self-configure, and present the entire stack of cubes as a single (very large) logical drive [...]
Wow. Todays “This Modern World” comic is funnier than they usually are (which is pretty funny). Ouchie!
From the “odd things overheard at work” department… she said, “master PATIENT index,” not, um, “masturbation index.” Riiiight.
Movie theater admission with special passes: $0
Pizza, tea and lemonade at the theater: $11
Fees payable to the towing company for parking in the Chopstick Express (closed on Sunday) parking lot: $213
Rental car from carsharing company to get from the theater to the towing company’s lot: $18.75
Cost of registering chopstickexpress.com with 1 [...]
We went out to sushi (yum!). We over-ordered, despite my sweetie’s best attempts otherwise (oog!). In departing from the usual all-sushi program in favor of chirashi (think unassembled sushi without the seaweed), I confirmed that I don’t like tamago (the egg stuff), and discovered that I actually do like ikura (salmon eggs) — [...]