As you might have guessed from my continuing absence, work has not slacked off yet. However, that’s not the only thing that’s been contributing–real life has also been hopping a bit. A short summary: Sunday night Trish and I took Sarah to a sleepover, and then went to dinner and a show. Or maybe “a gig” would be more accurate.… Read more →
Category: Storytime
Lottery
Among the artifacts were a few scribbled notes and I recognized the handwriting. Chris McLaren was a film major who worked for us in the early ’80’s, a skinny kid who wore black clothes and spiked hair and had an intense interest in Alistair Crowley, Roman Polanski, the Illuminati and role playing games. Even when you were face to face… Read more →
Friends of my youth, a last adieu!
Reading last night about the death of Philip José Farmer, it occurs to me that the authors whose stories are part of my memories of early days, and who got to make impressions on me when I was much more malleable–and thus had a greater effect on my life–are a limited resource. And one that will only run out faster… Read more →
Excuses, Excuses
And that really says all that needs to be said on the subject without risk of boring you with my job-talk, except perhaps to say that this week isn’t looking likely to be any better.. Bless the bus slogan generator for encouraging brevity in cliched posts. Before I leave though, I can’t resist one more: Read more →
Things I Have Learned Today
1) The best tool for cutting carpet is actually the “sheepsfoot” serrated blade on a Leatherman Charge xTi. No need to buy a special blade. 2) A quite good tool for getting tackstrip off the floor is actually a decent quality butterknife. The flexibility and thin edge of the blade make it easier to get the blade under the strip… Read more →
A Punishing Beverage
You know those people who only read one book at a time? I’m not one of them. At the moment I have two novels (one noir detective, one hard SF) on the go in my reading room, a collection of short stories (“M. R. James by way of Lovecraft”) in the bedroom, two books of poetry and political tract in… Read more →
I Should Enjoy This While It Lasts, Right?
Sarah’s “big” Christmas present this year was her own iPod Nano, and a little clock/radio/dock that she could use to play it in her room. We had been having a lot of fun listening to songs in the car, taking turns picking songs, and she liked both being able to pick songs, and looking at the “pictures” (i.e. the album… Read more →
A few of someone else’s photos
One of the ways that I can lose time on the Internet–one of the myriad, myriad ways–is browsing through the contents of Flickr. Sometimes I just search on strange keywords, or lyrics, or the names of perfomers, just to see what comes up, and spent way more time than I intended flicking through the results. For example, this isn’t what… Read more →
Worth 2000 Words
A recent cleaning and reorganization process resulted in our more-or-less reclaiming the upstairs family room from our daughter. Not that we’ve kicked her out of there, but we’ve removed a bunch of her stuff from the room, making it seem less exclusively hers. A consequence of this is that we had room to add a new chair. So we went… Read more →
Aside
So, which would be more fun to leave visible on your computer in a full screen, kiosk mode, browser window: Now or Henchmen’s Helper? (Sometimes I wish I was in an office, just so I could engage in these small performances.)
Aside
I found a place–or rather was referred to one–on Saturday that would happily sell me a replacement 1TB SATA2 drive for my RAID array, and at a decent price. (Yes, you can read that as “Future Shop can bite my shiny metal ass.”) The array worked perfectly, and none of my roughly 2TB of data in that array was lost due to the drive failure. I wish I could report the same level of success with Intrepid Ibex and wireless–I did finally get the wireless “working”, but it disconnects every 15 minutes or so, and I am becoming very familiar with the term “kernel panic”.
Aside
Mean Tricks To Play On Yourself #345: Install Linux on a laptop with only wireless connectivity (i.e. not just not plugged in, but nothing to plug in to), where that connectivity is provided by a Broadcom-based wireless adapter. Level 2: Once you have that working, enjoy it for a while, and then do a distribution upgrade, so that it will break and you can have that fun all over again. Level 3: Repeat with every distribution upgrade.
Language By Example, Again
As I said the last time I talked about this, several times a week I find myself saying something and I realize that while I know what it means, I don’t know why it means that. When I catch myself at this, I’m off to find out why. This morning brought two new examples. The first was “proof”. I mean… Read more →
A robot moose walks into a bar…
That’s Bullwinkle, the robot moose. No, seriously. A robot moose. Apparently the Natural Resources Department here in Nova Scotia uses him to catch people who are illegally trying to bag an endangered species. I ran into a story today–admittedly a story from a couple of years back–about this, and it just makes me laugh. It’s a short story, but pure… Read more →
Aside
I must be the worst techo-tv-phile in the world. I just watched a movie that’s been on my DVR since June of 2006. I’m not sure why it’s wrong that I kept it there for two and a half years without either watching or deleting it, but I’m sure that it is somehow. It wasn’t that good either.
