It’s nigh amazing how much time one can spend to get things right. One of my favorite ironies is this: computers were originally envisioned as labor-saving devices, but the more we have incorporated computers into our lives, personal and professional, the more it seems that we are scrambling to catch up to them. Which is [...]
There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it [...]
Not so random, obviously, but it offers a concise title. Herewith pith: “The giveaway of ideology is emotional hostility to skeptics.” For fans of bulletin board systems, I’m enclosing this appeal from Stephen Jones of SDF: So .. What can you do to help? We need largish SATA drives. If you have spares, email me [...]
After too many minutes hunting for a solution to the vexing issue of why mencoder, part of the excellent MPlayer movie player, wouldn’t convert a WMV file to MP3, I’ve decided to ‘give back to the community’ that has given so much (that being the open source software community). Well, here’s my solution. Your mileage [...]
This is more or less a reposting (OK, a bit more) of Steve Sailer’s review of Crazy Heart; I haven’t seen the film, or any in a long while, but the idea here is to point out that criticism is important, as also here. Now, I’ll need then to note that despite some friends’ ardor [...]
Take this from a 1975 book, that To make computer processing of languages (programming languages today and, maybe, natural languages in the future) possible, a formal theory of languages has been constructed. The primary concern of these mathematical linguistics is language syntax, since no formal means of completely specifying semantics exists. [Vladimir Zwass] Now, I [...]
Before I get into that, I’ll note that yet another hardware retailer, viz. Compucare, has closed in my area. That leaves one overpriced independent shop downtown ($50 for a pulled Intel 10/100 NIC!) whose employees don’t seem too happy about working there. That in turn leaves Best Buy, of video-game induced cacophony and diminished hardware [...]
Old hat, and the cat complains “one can’t do it all”; in other words, system administration is a bitch (he says richly). I have given up on turning my new/old router into a blog as of old, because I’ve spent far too much time on it, and I’ve got better things to do, like complain, [...]
Of course no author can really advertise the detritus of his work, but it has a good ring to it, Fragments forthcoming. And of course it is a deliberate juxtaposition, if also for humor’s sake. Soon I hope to post said fragments (heh) at, indeed, fragments. They will be nothing so compellingly grand as Die [...]
I switched from Windows to Ubuntu yesterday, largely as a result of seeing hide_evr2.sys scroll by during a virus scan, and not be detected and thus not removed. This, despite scans from ClamAV, Avira, and Symantec. Hmm, not good. As my hard drive was already partitioned, with my data not on my Windows partition, it [...]