Engineers guide to cat yodelling…
I don't particularly recommend the practice described by the following video, but it is rather funny....
The new Star Trek: a worthy successor
Irene and I went to see Star Trek today. It is her birthday (or as she says, “Birthday weekend”), so the movie was her choice. I wanted to see Star Trek, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in this “re-imagining” or “reboot” as it has been called. I left the theatre, however, feeling quite differently than I expected to.
What is an Atmos clock?
I am now the proud owner of a middling-quality Jaeger LeCoultre Atmos clock. I purchased it on eBay a few weeks ago, and it is the first thing I have actually received from my adventures there. You might reasonably ask “what the heck is an ‘Atmos’, and what’s the big deal?” In this post I’ll try to answer that question
Experimenting with a new look
No doubt you were shocked just now if you are one of my regular visitors. Yes, the site looks weird at the moment: I'm experimenting with a different WordPress theme,…
I am twittering…for now
I have had a hard time wrapping my head around the Facebook/Twitter phenomenon. Does anyone really have a thousand “friends”? Do I really care when someone, even a close friend, drinks a coffee, eats a bagel, or scratches their armpits? Not really…
And yet I have been curious. I poked around MySpace back when it was “the new thing”, and created a Facebook account (which I’ve since forgotten) when they still had only a couple million subscribers. I’ve never really touched Twitter, though- I think mostly because the short-form, incredibly “noisy” form of communication to be difficult to imagine being useful. I haven’t really changed my opinion but, as with MySpace and Facebook before, I feel I should give the latest social network “it” thing a chance. Maybe “microblogging” can live alongside my “macroblogging”?
Something for rich Pen and Paper gamers…
I remember back in the foggy vastness of the past how valuable having a decent gaming surface was when playing Dungeons and Dragons. My friend Chris and I eventually hacked…
The big question: iPhone or Blackberry
Recently I’ve started to feel the limitations of my long-term cellphone, a Motorola Razr. I’ve had it now for five years, which means it is “ancient” by cell phone standards. Yet it has served me very well for most purposes. However, a couple of years ago I started configuring various server monitors at work to send me email messages when they ran into trouble. These messages are generally too long for the SMS service provided with my Razr, and my latest round of updates has resulted in these messages becoming largely unreadable: the emails are too long and complex.
And so I begin to consider an upgrade…
CSI Cloverdale: Nutkin is down
Case Number: 20090504.23734.19
CSI ID: 4393 (Adams K)
Case open date: 2009-05-04 14 AM Pacific
Location: Geek house, Cloverdale, B.C.
Victim particulars
- Complexion: black, wearing fur coat
- Gender: indeterminate
- Size: approximately 15 cm excluding 10-12 cm tail
- Weight: less than 250 gm
- Gang membership: Sciurus carolinensis (non-native; see also 1914 Stanley Park transplantation)
- Rigor fixed
- Lividity indeterminate due to affixed fur coat
- Liver temp indeterminate due to absence of test equipment re: recent budget cutbacks
If the study is from Nemertes, it is Telco astroturf
Once again the media is full of reports of the impending collapse of the internet. Apparently we users are to blame, as we are using too much bandwidth watching movies and so forth- thus says yet another study by “respected” think tank, Nemertes Research. They tried to push this line of bull on us in 2007, again in 2008, and now in 2009. Only the dates of the “impending” collapse have changed: always a year or two in the future. But anyone who knows much of about the internet and infrastructure behind it knows this “impending doom” is a fallacy. So why is Nemertes repeating it over and over and over?
eBay…
I had never placed a bid on eBay (or listed anything for that matter) up until a couple of weeks ago. My first bid was on a mantle clock made in the 19th century. I like old-style mechanical clocks, particularly ones that are somewhat ornate, and this one appealed to me. But why did I go to eBay in the first place after years of basically ignoring the service?