So last week I answered a craigslist ad from someone wanting to buy a copy of Red Hat Linux. It took me a few days to download all the disk images (Red Hat’s servers were slow, but all the other mirror servers kept aborting midway through the transfer), but I got them on three [...]
So it turns out that the reason the neighbor’s garage caught fire was that they’d been smoking salmon in the back yard, dumped the (hot) ashes into a metal bucket, and left the bucket out and uncovered before taking their son to his soccer game. Saturday was an extremely windy day, and some embers [...]
So apparently NEC is trying to develop LCD monitors that can display billions of colors. Mental note: do not invest in NEC. Why not? Because while estimates of the number of colors the human eye can distinguish vary, the highest such estimate is a mere 7 million. Several others put [...]
Girl, 5, makes bong in class — during a “show-and-tell” session.
Here’s an, um, interesting job description from today’s newspaper ads:
Employment, Office
OFFICE. FT, start immediately. Advanced skill in MS Access a must! Strong MS Office skills req’d. FTP, SQL, Quickbooks helpful. Excellent phone skills. Ability to multitask nec. Email resume: Fred@alpacas.com
As a consequence of the aforementioned fire, our freezer now sports Excessive Meat! Yes, that’s right… not only is there *any* meat in our freezer, there’s a WHOLE LOT OF MEAT! SO MUCH MEAT! As Justin would say, “Mmmm. Meaty meat!”
(Because, see, the power is out in their house, meaning their [...]
If you’re reading this, and you live in Portland, this message is for you:
SUCKERS! (You know who you are.) You just missed some serious kicking of ass at the Portland Juggling Festival Extravaganza. This was the third year we’ve been, and the third year we’ve gotten much more than our money’s worth. [...]
Subject line of an email I just deleted:
Catch a che ating lover - Send them an E-Card
So I’d known about the IP protocol implementation that used pigeons, but now there’s a similar implementation using bongo drums.
Our neighbor’s garage caught fire about 45 minutes ago. The good news is that (a) the damage seems mostly confined to the garage and not to the living quarters and (b) nobody was home at the time. On the other hand, that means that they may come home to a scorched garage with [...]
This would also not suck as a birthday present.
It’s amazing how much more pleasant it is to use Yahoo Mail with image-loading turned off.
So apparently there’s a new MP3 player with a 20GB hard drive, support for the Ogg Vorbis (heh) music format (which, unlike MP3, is not patent-encumbered). The product page for the player points out that, among its other (somewhat underwhelming) features, you can read text files on its tiny 8-line LCD screen. Here’s [...]
Wow. Just logged back into Friendster after quite a while and was astonished to find myself connected to over 89,000 people — almost 700 in Portland alone. Now if only I wanted something to do with any of them. Bah!
[UPDATE, 60 seconds later: Of course. misanthrope.com actually exists, and is [...]
While on vacation a couple of weeks ago, we saw a sign that read:
[town name] Church of Christ (Christian)
Went to see Bubba Ho-Tep last night. It was everything I hoped it would be — but with even more body humor! There were a few small bits I could’ve done without, but there was some quality dialogue that made it all worthwhile.
And there were some funny bits in the credits, like the [...]
Did I mention the birthday coming up? In case, you know, you can’t afford that new iPod I also want… ;>
Joel’s posted a writeup of the new Fog Creek offices, which they’ve just moved into. While I can’t say I’m a huge fan of translucent acrylic walls with lime green doors and electric blue walls, everything else about the space is utterly droolworthy. The angled offices, which sound weird, actually make good sense, [...]
If you do nothing else this month,
READ THIS ARTICLE.
It’s about electronic voting and, more specifically, the electronic voting software made by Diebold (the fastest-growing voting company in the US), whose systems are (a) used in 37 states, and (b) eminently hackable.
Here’s how bad it is: The voting systems actually use Microsoft Access databases to [...]
Long day — school started today, and in addition to the classes themselves, I had to cope with long lines in both the bookstore (30 minutes to checkout; it’s like Disneyland but with weights!) and the financial aid office (when the ticket you pull is #75 and they’re Now Serving #24, you might want to [...]