June 14th, 2008
Twitter isn’t a popular joke or what you’re having for lunch.
Twitter is the funniest thing you’ve said today. And you’re saying it (again?) online.
Do it, bitches.
Whenever I go downtown, I feel like an Ex-Con casing the joint
A police woman Ghost Rides The Whip
March 2nd, 2008November 28th, 2007
It’s easy to link to xlcd comics every day. Who hasn’t seen a T-Shirt that commands “Sudo make me a sandwich”?
But this is a good one.
Holiday Wishlist
November 27th, 2007If you’d like to brighten my Christmas, here’s an item I wouldn’t mind finding under the tree: a gold-plated MacBook Pro.
Purring
October 29th, 2007The key to getting a cat to snuggle with you is temperature.
If the cat is cold, it wants to steal your heat.
If a cat trusts you, pinch an ear (not hard, like how you’d pick up a quarter) to gauge its body temperature. Of course they’re much higher or lower than the feline’s own temp, but that’s a mechanism to radiate heat and to gauge it aside from rectal thermometers.
Therefore: make a kitty cold and it will snuggle up to you.
I first noticed this when I was nervous the night before my flight to California last January. Mind, you, I was in a poorly heated Bloomfield NJ tenement with a broken front window. I didn’t break it, and the person who did had an excuse but it did end up costing an awful lot of money.
Anyway. Cats get clingy when it’s cold and drafty. (and it was drafty earlier before I figured out how to turn on the circuit breakers to the baseboard heat! Christ what an apartment.)
I managed to get my kitten Harper to sleep under the covers — with his head on the pillow — with me all night. He was only four months old then, and just delightfully cute.
Although I didn’t sleep much, I enjoyed having him with me. And back then I thought he was a girl! And alas for the human girl on my left, Holland!
A week later when I got back home and saw Harper violating his mother, I felt very angry at Holland for allowing this sex change to happen. Eventually we realized we had never seen baby cats before and holy shit they were all dudes when we had thought they were all girls. They had pointy red penises.
But, yes, the cuddling of kittens. And it’s easier once you have them fixed.
My success is increasingly lately again as I have the windows and sometimes the back door wide open*. October in Texas is a very lovely month. 60 50 at night, perhaps up to 80 during the day but maybe not that high. The sun is still quite intense but the temperature and the wind on the balcony is lovely. I open up every window and just bathe myself in sweet smelling, cool, blowing air. It’s a delicious break from the summer of outrageous heat and nonstop air conditioning. I bet Holland’s saving a bundle on the electric bill, too. (I pay the data bills, she pays the utilities)
What I like best is if I pick up a kitty and put it on my lap, he will stay there and purr forever. I have Harper passed out on my lap right now. All they want is the warm.
*Holland doesn’t like the various insects that come via a wide-open back door, but I know the cats enjoy tracking them down, killing, and eating them. Now who’s the humanitarian!
Tobin the dog killed an enormous grashopper in the stairwell last night and upon hearing of it, Holland congratulated him like he murdered Hitler. Get it straight, sister. Cause I’m thinking of buying crickets and small rats to let loose in the apartment and the animals can hunt them for sport.
My parents have stories of their cat (named Hilary with one L, whom I knew) hunting and killing mice and hiding them in shoes. Doesn’t the next generation deserve a share?
October 26th, 2007
Having a lot of computer trouble and I didn’t even get leopard yet. Can anyone remember what problems old G5s had with SATA drives?
It’s so hot in herre
October 14th, 2007It’s been a while since I got clever.
Is anyone else able to see the Unicode character for “Snowman” in my blog title?
If it’s just me then I should really throw in the towel. I thought it was funny, though.
September 21st, 2007
I have several mice (trackballs), still cameras and audio interfaces that I plug into my keyboard. When I switch among them I feel like an old time telephone operator. I’ll just connect you, Mister Johnson.
Also the desk is wooden and really old and kind of worn.
What arrrrrrrrr ya gonna do
September 19th, 2007What will you do to celebrate National Talk Like A Pirate Day?
I don’t know what I’ll do. If I follow tradition, I will ignore it, either intentionally or unintentionally.
I first became aware of the holiday sometime in late 2003 when it was too late to celebrate it. I was excited for 2004 but the Holiday came on a Sunday and since I was training at one of the only two Apple Stores in the world that was closed on a Sunday (at that time, the only one), I was not able to exercise my rrrrrrrrrrrights with my colleagues.
The next year I was in the first day of a week-long mentoring and set-up for a new Apple Store in Pittsburgh so I didn’t think it was appropriate to talk all scurvy-like around 30 new acquaintances as we struggled to deal with a 50 foot trailer full of what goes into an Apple Store. If you disagree that it’s appropriate to greet total strangers in the dark of 6:30AM, with the knowledge of a full day of sweaty labor and mind-bending mixups, with a hearty Ahoy! then you leave a comment.
Last year I don’t remember what happened. Maybe I forgot.
Here we are again.
What will you do?
There are two kinds of hard disks: those that have failed and those that will
September 7th, 2007
This is a very fascinating interview of the two guys behind ZFS, by Robert Scoble. Try to ignore the interviewer. The subjects (Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore) are damn smart guys (and one even gets up to answer his phone partway through! Must be important!)
They fit right in with my paranoia that hard drives are disasters waiting to happen. The beauty of ZFS is it tries to abstract that. Add drives, remove drives, whatever, nonvolatile storage can be as transparent as RAM. Failures too. In fact, focus on the failures! Bitwise errors or even whole drive failures are no problem with an adequate ZFS setup. Someday … sigh … someday.
“All hell can break loose on the hardware and you still get your data out.”
They haven’t found anyone willing to implement ZFS on Windoze but on Solaris, Linux and Unices, it has an intriguing future. Mac OS X Leopard client has read-only support. I bet Apple is really excited about it for Leopard Server, to start. These guys embody the idea that presenting a complex thing simply is incredibly difficult. But it has to be done. If only because one day there are smart enough guys who get fed up with the old way and they invent the future.
ZFS will save our bacon in ten years. Quoth Bill Moore: “All hardware is inherently busted. You can’t trust a darn thing they say cause they’re liars.”
I’m sure Apple’s interested. I’m sure Microsoft is not (they’d rather do it themselves worse). Apple’s only problem is how to make this work when nearly all their machines support only one internal Hard Drive. Nevertheless, I will be astonished if new Macs sold after the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6 don’t use ZFS as their default filesystem.
So despite Sun’s various idiocies and failings, let’s root for them. In 1996, some thought they would buy Apple. Nowadays will Apple buy them? (answer: no, but let’s keep them in business)